Quotes & Sayings About Military Operations

Largely because of a shortage of ammunition, the United States would be entirely unable to undertake major military operations for at least a year. — David E. Kaiser

CHAPTER II SPACE MISSION AREAS "Weather, intelligence, communications, precision [sic]-navigation-and timing ... are all capabilities we have brought to the fight from the space domain and are relied upon in virtually any and every military operation. " Mr. Michael B. Donley Secretary of the Air Force November 2010 1. Introduction US military space operations are composed of the following mission areas: space situational awareness, space force enhancement, space support, space control, and space force application. This chapter summarizes the role of each mission area and how they — Anonymous

In fact, this figure [five million "murdered" Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations.
(...)
Wiesenthal's aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims - even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal's five million.

--The Eichmann Trial, page 8 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible. — Stonewall Jackson

Military operations cannot be tidy or free of friction - particularly in a coalition whose contributing nations see the campaign through national prisms. — Mike Jackson

The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn't plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks. — Stan Goff

we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The — Edgar H Schein

But Canada remains a crucial partner in this global war on terrorism, and we are grateful for that. Canadian naval vessels, aircraft and military personnel continue anti-terrorist operations in the Persian Gulf. — Paul Cellucci

Military operations alone cannot defeat an insurgency because only economic development and political action can address most sources of disaffection. If military operations are not conducted consistent with political objectives or occur without economic development, they are certain to alienate the population further, reduce the amount of intelligence available to [...] security forces, and strengthen rather than weaken the enemy. — H.R. McMaster

The authorization I propose would provide the flexibility to conduct ground combat operations in other more limited circumstances, such as rescue operations involving U.S. or coalition personnel or the use of special operations forces to take military action against ISIL leadership, it would also authorize the use of U.S. forces in situations where ground combat operations are not expected or intended, such as intelligence collection and sharing, missions to enable kinetic strikes or the provision of operational planning and other forms of advice and assistance to partner forces. — Barack Obama

The nature of encounter operations required of the commanders limitless initiative and constant readiness to take the responsibility for military actions. — Georgy Zhukov

By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot - without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We'd gotten used to it.
By 2001, the ability of a president to start and wage military operations without (or even in spite of) Congress was established precedent. — Rachel Maddow

But what has happened during the last year and a half has forced all reasonably farsighted men to understand that we are living in a new world. We have let our navy deteriorate to a degree both shameful and alarming. We have shown by our own conduct when the Hague Conventions were violated that all such treaties are utterly worthless, as offering even the smallest safeguard against aggression. Above all, the immense efficiency, the utter ruthlessness, and the gigantic scale of the present military operations show that we need military preparedness on a scale never hitherto — Theodore Roosevelt

According to a former drone operator for the military's Joint Special Operations Command, the National Security Agency often identifies targets for drone strikes based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies - an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Rather than confirming a target's identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using. — Jeremy Scahill

I'm just very wary that once you start military operations in any country, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome is. — Abdallah II Of Jordan

In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, last of its kind) with a "conservative estimate" that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States alone. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year. The samples come from routine medical procedures, tests, operations, clinical trials, and research donations. They sit in lab freezers, on shelves, or in industrial vats of liquid nitrogen. They're stored at military facilities, the FBI, and the National Institutes of Health. — Rebecca Skloot

Well, the reports are correct that we're conducting very robust military operations on the Afghan side of the border in areas where we think al-Qaida is operating and Taliban remnants are. — John Abizaid

In Japan, no one could dictate effectively to either army or navy. To an extraordinary degree, the two services - each with its own air force - pursued independent war policies, though the soldiers wielded much greater clout. The foremost characteristic of the army general staff, and especially of its dominant operations department, the First Bureau, was absolute indifference to the diplomatic or economic consequences of any military action. Mamoru — Max Hastings

The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda]. — Jonathan Glover

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military. — Barack Obama

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence
on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. — John F. Kennedy

Even military ministers have no more than a certain amount of control. It is customary that they have the right and the power to participate, from a political and military point of view, in the planning of actual operations. — Hideki Tojo

Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution's protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The — Tim Weiner

Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like "jarheads," the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey "puddle jumpers." But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time. — Douglas Brinkley

If I had undertaken the practical direction of military operations, and anything went amiss, I feared that my conscience would torture me, as guilty of the fall of my country, as I had not been familiar with military tactics. — Lajos Kossuth

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction." The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. "The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest. — Erik Larson

Nevertheless, I do know that we are part of a danger zone, we have military operations in Afghanistan and we're training the Iraqi police force. The terrorists also have us in their sights. — Otto Schily

Before the First World War, in many places military officers who had not taken part directly in operations became liable one way or another under the jurisprudence and military law of their own countries. But the question of prosecuting the political authorities--the people who ran the country--had not yet been considered. Calls during the war to hold the Ottoman political elite and the German kaiser personally responsible for the Armenian massacres and to prosecute them on those grounds heralded a turning point. From that point on, personal responsibility and prosecution--even of those in the political sphere--became one of the most important principles of international law. — Taner Akcam

Jim returned from his journey in 1979 and wrote a confidential paper for his superiors. The first line read, "The U.S. army doesn't really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful." A disclaimer at the bottom read, "[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now." This was Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. — Jon Ronson

Oil is also essential for military operations. No other substance, no other raw material, is so vital for the prosecution of warfare, than petroleum. And the United States being the world's only global power, is totally dependent on petroleum. — Michael Klare

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird ... — Jasper Fforde

There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate. — Ernest Hemingway,

Nothing matures a military force quicker than actual military operations. — Duncan Hunter

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies. — Susan Sontag

Out of my desire to complete Iraq's independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete. — Muqtada Al Sadr

The general verdict among the German generals I interrogated in 1945 was that Field-Marshal von Manstein had proved the ablest commander in their Army, and the man they had most desired to become its Commander-in-Chief. It is very clear that he had a superb sense of operational possibilities and equal mastery in the conduct of operations, together with a greater grasp of the potentialities of mechanized forces than any other commander who had not been trained in the tank arm. In sum, he had military genius. — Erich Von Manstein

The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair. — Mercy Otis Warren

OK, so $1 trillion is what it costs to run the federal government for one year. So this money's going to run through September of 2016. Half of the trillion dollars goes to defense spending and the Pentagon. The other half goes to domestic spending - everything from prisons to parks. So there's also about 74 billion in there that goes to the military operations that we have ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. — Susan Davis

You must all be aware that modern war is not a mere matter of military operations. It involves the whole strength and all the resources of the nation. Not only soldiers, but also all citizens without exception, take part. — Chiang Kai-shek

The war was declared over - the end of major combat operations - in May 2003. Release procedures got under way immediately; reducing the population from 8,000 to just over 300, of course, requires fewer military police soldiers. — Janis Karpinski

I knew how many MPs I had assigned to the brigade, how many military prison operations I would be running, but we needed to evaluate how many criminal prison operations we could support. — Janis Karpinski

The Air Force is pulling nine cargo aircraft from military operations to support President Obama's stepped-up visits to campaign events. Good, now he can carry his entire ego with him on the trail. — Fred Thompson

The blurring of the line between policy and strategy] encouraged soldiers to make the preposterous claim that policy should be subservient to their conduct of operations, and (especially in democratic countries) it drew the statesman on to overstep the definite border of his sphere and interfere with his military employees in the actual use of their tools. — B.H. Liddell Hart

(God) gives the weak a weapon for self-defense that the strong, despite his military and nuclear arsenals, can do nothing against. There are clerics who condemn this and even say that these are suicide operations that are not allowed in Islam. — Yusuf Al-Qaradawi

(1) a sound mass base, (2) a sound Party organization, (3) a fairly strong Red Army, (4) terrain favourable to military operations, and (5) economic resources sufficient for sustenance. — Mao Zedong

The United States military is now evolving geometrically as it gains experience from near-constant fighting and grafts new technology daily. Indeed, it seems to be doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling its lethality every few years. And the result is that we are outdistancing not merely the capabilities of our enemies but our allies as well - many of whom who have not fought in decades - at such a dizzying pace that our sheer destructive power makes it hard to work with others in joint operations. — Victor Davis Hanson

There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished. — Janis Karpinski

The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy. — Vladimir Lenin

The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. — Paul Yingling

The administration has a disturbing pattern of behavior when it comes to budgeting not only for the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for military requirements not directly related to these conflicts. — Russ Feingold

The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada's military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so. — Alex Morrison

Modern warfare is by no means merely a matter of military operations. Economic affairs stand together with them in the first rank of the factors of importance. — Chiang Kai-shek

It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis. — Scott Ritter

Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called "a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military's elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. — Nick Turse

The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment. — Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

On the existence and threat of modern-day secret societies: We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence . . . building a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. - JOHN F. KENNEDY, FROM A SPEECH GIVEN AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL ON APRIL 27, 1961 — James Rollins

When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operations, it is sound military strategy to take the flight to the enemy. — Timothy McVeigh

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

Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq. There's no question that the leader of the military operations of the U.S. called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al Qaeda. — Maurice Hinchey

All descriptions of how near certainty is to be achieved are based primarily on emerging technologies. A Global Information Grid of "persistent surveillance" will gather information and share that information in a networked "collaborative information environment." Automated systems will fuse that intelligence and make possible "virtual collaboration among geographically dispersed" analysts who will generate intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge. Some even assume that this "robust intelligence" will deliver not only a clear appreciation for the current situation, but also generate "predictive intelligence" that will allow US forces to "anticipate the unexpected." Despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy. — H.R. McMaster