Quotes About Warfare

To ISIS and others: We will defeat you.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

Adequate defense has been the catchword of every militarist for centuries.

The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.

Let's have a conversation about how we destroy ISIS.

I don't have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally - I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people.

The Cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catching them like fish in a river. I mean here that over the past two days, we managed to shoot down 196 missiles before they hit their target.

The successful pilots succeeded because they did not open fire until they were close to the target.

No, the United States does not target civilians.

In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target.

We have learned that precision munitions go precisely where they're targeted to go. We've learned that the introduction of human beings in the equation, who can cause the precision munitions to go precisely where they should go, pays a huge dividend.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.

Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.

Israel never targets civilians deliberately, period.

There is not a shortage of assets in northern Syria but a shortage of targets.

Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.

After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.

A soldier in the 5th Division wrote home, "They say cleanliness is next to Godliness. I say it's next to impossible.… If I am killed and go to hell it can't be any worse than infantry combat.

In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according

Thomas Paine, who had a shrewd eye for military matters, was closer to the mark in a public letter to Admiral Howe published in early 1777. "In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with," Paine observed. "In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.

His animating principle, as the official history explained, was "that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything." By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of sixty listed German cities had been "virtually destroyed," at a rate of more than two each month, with a dwindling number awaiting evisceration.

In a phone call one evening the corps commander grew incensed when Ward mentioned his good fortune in losing no officers in combat that day. "Goddammit, Ward, that's not fortunate. That's bad for the morale of the enlisted men," Patton snapped. "I want you to get more officers killed.