Secretary Of Defense Quotes & Sayings

On August 1, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA's request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved. The — Tim Weiner

One of the most startling phenomena I ever witnessed occured in the South after the Arab- israelei Six-day war. I doubt if the world has ever seen such a rapid ceasefire in anti-semetism. I heard one Southern man after another say in tones that i can only describe as gleeful: 'by dern, those Jew boys sure can fight!' One man seriously recommended that Congress pass a special act making Moshe Dayan an American citizen so that he could become Secretary of Defense. He had obviously found a new hero;'as he put it 'That one-eyed bastid would wipe out anybody offin the map whut gave us any trouble. — Florence King

As a former secretary of defense, I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had. — Dick Cheney

During my time as CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, Hillary was a strong supporter of our efforts to protect our homeland, decimate al-Qaeda, and bring Osama bin Laden to justice. — Leon Panetta

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results. — Thomas Sowell

During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success - until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly. — Melvin Laird

You do not export democracy through the Defense Department or the Defense Secretary. You do it through trade agreements, through the Department of Commerce and favorable agreements with our friends and neighbors across the globe. — Stephen F. Lynch

Secretary of Defense once said, "You go to the zombie apocalypse with the tech you have not the tech you want." Of course Donald Rumsfeld didn't say exactly that, but the meaning is similar. — Perry Kivolowitz

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child's ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette's defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR. — Sarah Vowell

TV's Tony Snow becomes the White House press secretary. How will he make the difficult transition from Fox News reporter to Republican apologist? ... Mr. President, it is time to hire the folks who've never let you down. Limbaugh at Health and Human Services. Hannity at State. Then give Rummy the Medal of Freedom and install Bill O'Reilly as secretary of defense. Only problem, you might find yourself invading Vermont. And I'll replace Chertoff at Homeland Security. The man's done nothing to control the bear population. — Stephen Colbert

I had learned many years ago in private business never to take responsibility without adequate authority; and the new Secretary of Defense, as budgets were sharply cut, quickly found that out. — Stuart Symington

Clearly the Secretary of Defense, my boss, would like nothing better than to get Osama bin Laden and to get ... to ensure the complete defeat of al-Qaida, because we know that al-Qaida is planning operations against the United States even as we speak here. — John Abizaid

Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary. — Victor Davis Hanson

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years. — Charlie Savage

According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted.
Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians. — Oliver Stone

Some international relations scholars would posit that interest in zombies is an indirect attempt to get a cognitive grip on what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the "unknown knowns" in international security. Perhaps, however, there also exists a genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave and feasting upon the entrails of the living. — Daniel Drezner

I did not grope the wife of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter or the daughter of Sen. Christopher Coons. I don't put drugs in drinks or give drinks to underage females. And all those photos about me inappropriately touching girls, they are blown-up. — Joe Biden

The Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral. His task is to exercise civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country. — Donald Rumsfeld

The challenge is to maintain a high-level, broad perspective, understand enough details to make sensible and executable decisions, and then delegate responsibility for implementation. "Microknowledge" must not become micromanagement, but it sure helps keep people on their toes when they know that the secretary knows what the hell he's talking about. If the secretary of defense doesn't — Robert M. Gates

And we will win the war, and there will be costs. But the military folks understand that, and so do I, and so does the Secretary of Defense. — George W. Bush

I read in the press, and therefore it must be true, that no secretary of defense had ever been quoted as arguing for a bigger budget for State. — Robert M. Gates

In fact, in 2002, the Secretary of Defense authorized such support on a reimbursable basis to organizations formerly components of the Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury and currently components of the Department of Homeland Security. — Solomon Ortiz

I got to be White House chief of staff, ten years of congressman, secretary of defense, vice-president. If you're a political junkie like I obviously am - that was - every one of those was just a tremendous experience. I'm very comfortable with what I did and why I did it and how I did it. And I'll let others judge whether they liked it or not. — Dick Cheney

Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense the nation has ever had. — Dick Cheney

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. — Peter H. Diamandis

Eighty percent of the problems that beset unification immediately disappeared when the President signed the bill increasing the authority and the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense. — Louis A. Johnson

There are now reports that President Obama will name Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to be the next secretary of defense. Apparently this is part of America's new defense strategy to bore our enemies to death. — Jay Leno

I think what Secretary Ash Carter is seeing, and I'm glad he is, is that we got to get NATO back working for the common defense. We've got to do more to support our partners in NATO, and we have to send a very clear message to Putin that this kind of belligerence, that this kind of testing of boundaries will have to be responded to. The best way to do that is to put more armor in, put more money from the Europeans in so they're actually contributing more to their own defense. — Hillary Clinton

had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an "order" to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, in his book It Worked for Me, writes, "In my thirty-five years of service, I don't ever recall telling anyone, 'That's an order.' And now that I think about it, I don't think I ever heard anyone else say it." Obama's "order," at Biden's urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order — Robert M. Gates

My job is to give the president and secretary of defense military advice before they know they need it. — John W. Vessey Jr.

National Review once opined, many years ago, that, every year, the Nobel peace prize should go to the U.S. secretary of defense: The American military is the number-one guarantor of peace in the world. But maybe something like a Nobel freedom prize would be a more appropriate award for Reagan than a peace prize. — Jay Nordlinger

Democrats are committed to mapping a new direction in Iraq, and we will work with the President and the new Defense Secretary to ensure that the will of the American people guides our future actions. — Jim Clyburn

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for "going to zero." The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn't heard the leaders of any other nuclear country - Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan - signal the same intent. — Robert M. Gates

You know, one thing I've learned over 40 years is that when you have jobs in Washington, you do it day by day and that's what I'm doing as secretary of defense. — Leon Panetta

We all know why [the generals] are so critical of the defense secretary. They're being defensive because they weren't able to implement his brilliant plan [on screen: Operation 'Greet Us As Liberators']. It was so simple: Go in with 100,000 troops, topple the regime, everybody loves us, and we leave by Easter 2003. These ex-military men have their right to their opinions, that's fine. They just shouldn't voice them during a war [on screen: 'Loose Lips Sink Approval Ratings'] — Stephen Colbert

The stunning part was that one time Neil McElroy the Secretary of Defense who was the father of one of our classmates spoke and basically at commencement, he told us all that our job after graduation was to get married and have interesting sons ... and we all found that hard to believe. — Madeleine Albright

I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. — Robert M. Gates

I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday, — Harry Reid

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said any assumption that the US would not use force against North Korea would be a mistake. Such bellicosity frightens liberals. The left's reaction to nutty despots is: he might hit me, so I'll be nice. Rumsfeld's idea is: He'll hit me? Maybe I'll hit him. The beauty of that approach cannot be denied. — Ann Coulter

For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war?
Secretary Robert Gates — Bob Woodward

Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about. — Henry A. Kissinger

New Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that he is open to letting transgender people serve in the military. He said there's no reason to prevent people from being generals just because of their privates. — Jimmy Fallon

Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks. — Mark Riebling

I was the principal negotiator for the Department of Defense, when I was secretary of the Navy, on the issue of Toshiba technology concerns with American submarines. — Jim Webb