Quotes About Military

They said smart bombs would do the job, but they didn't either, contrary to what CNN and the Discovery channel tout on their specials.

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top. Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, We must love one another or die. Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction.

Yeah, what's new, a typical case of brass myopia, nothing personal, never a reason for an officer to pay attention to an enlisted joe unless he wants his ass licked or is experiencing some Zulu impulse to ram a spear through your chest.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

Sean," Mattis finally said, "I've killed people for a living. If you call me again, I'm going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?

We need to know if the commander in chief is fully with us or not," Mattis said. "We can't fight a half-assed war anymore." In order for the military to succeed, Mattis needed Trump to be all-in on the strategy. "I'm tired of hearing that we have to do this or that to protect our homeland or to ensure our national security," Trump said.

But how many more deaths?" Trump asked. "How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?

Media coverage of Milley's letter was scant, but Vox reported it was a "remarkable statement" and "it looks as though America's top military officials won't tolerate another thing: the attempted overthrow of American democracy by force.

An executive order signed in 1981 by President Reagan stated, "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." But government lawyers had concluded that a military strike on a leader's command-and-control headquarters during hostilities would not violate the assassination ban.

We should just declare victory, end the wars and bring our troops home.

Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August

But China has gone too far in the South China Sea with the island building." For years, the Chinese had been building military bases on the islands. They had vastly expanded their footprint by dumping sand and muck dredged from the ocean on top of the rock and reef formations, building man-made islands in order to set up more bases with an alarming array of military installations in the highly valuable international trade passage that threatened the U.S. Navy's Pacific domination.

Mattis was a student of historian Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August about the outbreak of World War I. "He's obsessed with August 1914," one official said, "and the idea that you take actions, military actions, that are seen as prudent planning, and the unintended consequences are you can't get off the war train." A momentum to war builds, "and you just can't stop it.

Chivalry combined military, religious, and social concepts into a unified way of life.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?

We pour more money into national defense than anybody else; our defense budgets, in fact, are bigger than those in the next eleven countries combined

Civilians had a tendency to fetishize military dead without ever considering how and why they died.

Does the military even have a position between going all out and casualty? Dr. Sloan wondered-her thoughts apparently having been following the same paths. Yes, ma'am. We in the Corps refer to that position as being in the Navy.

We can think of few things more tangible than a stool to the head, Staff Sergeant.

Why are there never eighty soldiers around when you need them?

He took a couple of steps. "I clink," he said. "It's undignified." "Everybody clinks. It's what soldiers do.

Stalin had no "master plan" for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression.

He had come to loathe these Air Force men with their commitment to building more and more bombs for the purpose of killing more and more millions of people. To his mind, they were so dangerous, so morally obtuse, that he almost welcomed them as political enemies. A few weeks later, Finletter and his people told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that it was an open question "whether [Oppenheimer] was a subversive.