Military Failure Quotes

#1. The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics.

Stan Goff

#2. What we've also got to think about is the limitations of military power. Maybe it's time to focus on the economic issues, and most of all the political issues, because the political failure in Iraq right now is almost worse than the military failure. And the two are intertwined.

Paul Rieckhoff

#3. Military debriefs have a similar purpose. We can all fail but we all need to learn from failure. We need to manage the size of the risk, and we need to give people the environment to succeed without being constrained by fear of failure.

Damian McKinney

#4. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.

William, Saroyan

#5. The essential factor of military success is speed, that is taking advantage of others' unpreparedness or lack of foresight, their failure to catch up, going by routes they do not expect, attacking where they are not on guard. This you cannot accomplish with hesitation.

Sun Tzu

#6. a technique called "failure mode and effect analysis" (FMEA), a precursor to the premortem that has been used for decades in the military and government.

Chip Heath

#7. Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

Rudy Giuliani

#8. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

Barack Obama

#9. Being an American is more than a birthright. It is something we must prove worthy everyday, failure to do so insults those who have sacrificed all on our behalf.

Mark W. Boyer

#10. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform ad they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack. . . . This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.

Rosa Brooks

#11. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.

Yitzhak Rabin

#12. It is not the critic who counts

Theodore Roosevelt

#13. Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them.

Stan Goff

#14. In this atmosphere of doubt why was the extreme risk approved? Partly because exasperation at the failure of all her efforts at intimidation had led to an all-or-nothing state of mind and a helpless yielding like Bethmann's by the civilians to the military.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#15. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history ... On every level - moral, strategic, military and economic - Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

Tomas Young

#16. War may represent the failure of diplomacy, but even the best diplomats operate on credit. Sooner or later someone who's less reasonable than you are is going to call you, and if your military can't cover your I.O.U.s, you lose.

David Weber

#17. 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

#18. The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Colin Powell