Quotes About Warfare

nom de guerre

By way of deception, thou shalt do war. —Motto of the Mossad

Submarines were treated as rattlesnakes by anyone who sighted them.

If any government was so foolhardy as to launch a first strike, it would create the only thing worse than an army of the living dead: a mutant, radioactive army of the living dead.

Describing a Navy SEAL- I have no idea what 'unconventional warfare' really means, but i'm pretty sure i was on my way to meet a man who could kill me in 7 different ways with a flip-flop.

Carl von Clausewitz warned that "it is to no purpose, it is even against one's better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.

Ernst Junger agreed that the defender had no moral right to surrender in these circumstances: "the defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces' distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill." During

General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an M1 Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.

The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

after 60 days and nights of constant combat, 98 percent of all soldiers became psychiatric casualties.

learned in World War II that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier.

The military and the politicians have been the same people for all but the most recent part of human history, and we know that the victor writes the history books.

Gunpowder's superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield.

Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.

The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.

when soldiers were left to their own devices, the vast majority of them, on all sides, could not kill.

by and large too many good soldiers get shot, and too few politicians.

As we pulled out of Zacatecas, the air was thick with the odors of smoldering ash, bloody dust, putrefying flesh. The rich ripe smells of triumph.

True combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed. —Asahi Shimbun newspaper, quoted in Japan at War: An Oral History

As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human

ESCORT CARRIERS HAD MANY nicknames, only a few tinged with anything resembling affection: jeep carriers, Woolworth flattops, Kaiser coffins, one-torpedo ships. Wags in the fleet deadpanned that the acronym CVE stood for the escort carrier's three most salient characteristics: combustible, vulnerable, expendable. That most everyone seemed to get the joke—laughing in that grim, nervous way—was probably the surest sign that it was rooted in truth.

As Herman Wouk wrote in War and Remembrance, 'The vision of Sprague's three destroyers--the Johnston, the Hoel, and the Hermann--charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita's battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don't have superiority. Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder it.

Desde el momento en el que el primero de nuestros antepasados convirtió un palo en una lanza, las consecuencias de los conflictos a lo largo de la historia han sido impuestas por la tecnologia.

This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group.