Military Air Power Quotes & Sayings

Offense is the essence of air power. — Henry H. Arnold

Air power is the most difficult of military force to measure or even express in precise terms. — Winston Churchill

There isn't any air power in the world that can take care of the problem of sectarian divisions. — Bob Menendez

Air power and military are meant to fight the enemy and not your own citizens ... How do you differentiate a Maoist? ... It will create a civil war-like situation. — Kishore Chandra Deo

Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces. — Merrill McPeak

it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it. — Robert D. Kaplan

As the Libyan engagement has shown, "Western" air power can be a most appropriate and useful instrument in the context of so-called asymmetric conflicts. Yet it succeeded (and even then only after six months) only because NATO nations decided to arm the insurgents and sent in special forces to teach the untrained rebels how to become a skilled military force that could exploit favorable air situations on the ground. — John Andreas Olsen

For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank. — Winston Churchill

According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.62 It's a response to boots and tanks on the ground - never to bombs dropped from the air. It's a response to contamination of the sacred homeland. — Jonathan Haidt

Eisenhower's speech contained an unsubtle dig at Rockefeller, in the guise of a dig at Kennedy: "Just as the Biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who ... continually mouth the allegations that America has become a second-rate military power." He was proceeded at the podium by his black special assistant E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown in with the President on Air Force One. "One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave," radio and TV audiences heard. "Tonight I stand before you as a trusted assistant to the President of the United" - and then the networks cut away for fear of offending their Southern affiliates. — Rick Perlstein

If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good. — Curtis LeMay

Air power can either paralyze the enemy's military action or compel him to devote to the defense of his bases and communications a share of his straitened resources far greater that what we need in the attack. — Winston Churchill

The first and absolute requirement of strategic air power in this war was control of the air in order to carry out sustained operations without prohibitive losses. — Carl Andrew Spaatz

Air power alone does not guarantee America's security, but I believe it best exploits the nation's greatest asset - our technical skill. — Hoyt Vandenberg

Air superiority is the ultimate expression of military power. — Winston Churchill

Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy's economic and moral centres without having first to achieve 'the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield'. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means - hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Air power may either end war or end civilization. — Winston Churchill

It is not possible ... to concentrate enough military planes with military loads over a modern city to destroy that city. — John Thomason

On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,-a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. — Daniel Webster

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side that employs air power as it should be employed. — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet