Quotes About Warfare

Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.

It has always been clear that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic humanitarian consequences.

Assad's suspected chemical weapons attack shows he is willing to go to barbaric lengths to hold onto power.

I was head of the Cold Weather Warfare unit within the Special Boat Service. My job was to do extreme climbs, learn about new technology, and create new ideas on how to operate in those conditions.

Imagine if these computer geeks who are running baseball now were allowed to run a war? They'd be telling our soldiers: 'That's enough. You've fired too many bullets from your rifle this week!'

The battalion, the whole battalion was affected by the two killed just within a week of being there, and I think that that pulled everybody up to make them realise that this was a very serious business.

To describe 'Mutually Assured Destruction' as an 'insurance policy' would be comical if it wasn't such an appalling concept.

Further, a defensive policy involves the loss of the initiative, with all the consequent disadvantages to the defender.

The biggest problem was the politicians knew nothing about fighting a war.

When the Americans advance, we harass and retreat, fire from new positions and then retreat again. If the attacking force is too big, we call for support.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy's aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

I don't think, post 9/11, we're going to wait for real obvious things like Country A attacking Country B - because Country A doesn't attack Country B any more.

We damaged all the big guns we could, and carried away the powder and the lead.

Balk the enemy's power; force him to reveal himself.

I didn't want to spend my life contributing to the development of more atomic weaponry.

Anyone that goes to battle goes to battle knowing the mindset and tactics of their enemies.

The Islamic State is using medieval tactics.

Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.

For myself, I believed that that 13th of March should see a fight to the finish, cost what it might! for if Bloemfontein was to be taken, it would only be over our dead bodies.

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

It's true that since 9/11, the application of conventional military rules of engagement has gotten a bit foggy. The Taliban were not an 'enemy state,' but the Canadian Forces conducted its operations in Afghanistan as though the rules of war applied anyway.

Never short of guns and guerrillas, Afghanistan has proven fertile ground for a host of insurgent groups in addition to the Taliban.

Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.