Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total… because it may well involve the whole world.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

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.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

War – An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.

The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth. We’ll adapt, we’ll train, we’ll advise, we’ll mentor, and we’ll fight, and we’ll fight well.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

A siege is an act of war.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in ‚Red Storm Rising‘.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

Life is warfare.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

Drones are just another weapon, and they turn out to be a very effective weapon that puts no American troops at risk, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use them against identified enemy targets.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

If we turn our backs of the Scythians who have provoked us, how shamefully shall we march against the revolted Bactrians; but if we pass Tanais and make the Scythians feel, by dear experience, that we are invincible, not in Asia only, it is not to be doubted but that Europe itself, as well as Asia, will come within the bounds of our conquests.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

Some of the generals are saying, ‚We’re making progress. We are clearing an area.‘ But you really don’t defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

The battle of Austerlitz is the grandest of all I have fought.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

An army marches on its stomach.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

We should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state… when you go to war, it can’t be a half-step.

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.