Quotes About Warfare

Force Protection of the kind usually employed by American forces is highly disadvantageous in Fourth Generation war, because it seeks security by isolating the troops from the surrounding population.

This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level.

The sun's o'ercast with blood: fair day, adieu!Which is the side that I must go withal?I am with both: each army hath a hand;And in their rage, I having hold of both,They whirl asunder and dismember me.

O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts;Possess them not with fear; take from them nowThe sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbersPluck their hearts from them.

Or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?

Tut, tut, good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better.

Grow like savages—as soldiers will,That nothing do but meditate on blood.

Hector is dead; there is no more to say.

Armed at points exactly, cap-a-pe.

I know the disciplines of wars.

William Shakespeare

How can you sleep through this? How can you even think of sleeping? And yet, sleep deprivation will drive you mad in the end: the flares in the sky, the symphony of explosions, the roar of mortars, the whir of drones...all this chaos will beat you, if you let it. ~Atef Abu The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire (2015)

a language is just a dialect with an army,

General Polk, who was dignified and corpulent, walked back slowly, not wishing to appear too hurried or cautious in the presence of the men, and was struck across the breast by an unexploded shell, which killed him instantly.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

War is at its best barbarism.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

My aim then was, to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.

For the German fighter pilot, there was no magic number of sorties or hours, the completion of which guaranteed a return home. He was already home, and in the skies over the Reich he faced an opponent who enjoyed overwhelming superiority. If he survived the first missions and his skills reached those of his opponents, he would fly until fatigue and strain led to a mistake that was more often than not fatal.

In the east in the summer of 1942, the Germans embarked on a strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union by conquering the Caucasus and large portions of southern Russia. The resources available for such wide-ranging aims were completely inadequate.

You might fight your enemy—that had respect in it. You might even kill him—respect again. But to do what the wasicu did: afflict your enemy with disease, pen him up, starve him, and then rescue his body on the condition that he surrender his spirit

The soft underbelly of the Axis.