Military Policy Quotes

#1. The best military policy is to attack strategies; the next to attack alliances; the next to attack soldiers.

Sun Tzu

#2. Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

Eric Alterman

#3. Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.

Phil Klay

#4. I am not a supporter of Israel's military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist.

James Lasdun

#5. Adiation ... the biggest lobby ... in the world. It's involved in university research ... industries ... the whole medical profession.., the whole military establishment, and the economic and military policy of the country depends on people being willing to handle radio-active materials.

Rosalie Bertell

#6. The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.

John McCain

#7. There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

Phil Klay

#8. Well, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is back - not for gays in the military. It's President Obama's new policy for questions about Libya. Don't ask, don't tell.

Jay Leno

#9. If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#10. We're going to make sure, regardless of disagreements we have on policy, that our military and intelligence cooperation to keep the Israeli people safe continues and that cooperation also helps the American people stay safe.

Barack Obama

#11. If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Fareed Zakaria

#12. Putting together a counter- terrorism policy, it's very easy to look at law enforcement or defense, military action or stopping the money flows or whatever, but the really difficult part is integrating all aspects of the policy, and I think she put a lot of emphasis on that.

Lee H. Hamilton

#13. I will seek out the best advice, and I will create a strategy and I will persuade the American people what the role of America should be. I've laid out a policy of rebuilding our military.

Jeb Bush

#14. Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.

Michael Parenti

#15. A certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#16. When you are serving volunteer professional military, you take an oath to the Constitution, not to a policy or a president and you swear to obey the lawful orders of the democratically elected government. And so at the end of the day you could table your personal political views and do your job.

Nathaniel Fick

#17. White House and State Department foreign-policy experts are overwhelmingly directed towards military and diplomatic issues, not development issues.

Jeffrey Sachs

#18. I'm not a policy and a strategy guy. I'm - you know, the military basically supports what the president wants, the decisions that he makes.

Michael Mullen

#19. That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.

Janis Karpinski

#20. Well, we've got a major effort under way to try to educate everybody, to let them know we have a zero tolerance policy where sexual assault is involved.

Dick Cheney

#21. Our economic strength at home is key to our diplomatic and military strength abroad. We should be investing far more in education as well as our technological and economic development so that we have the resources to support our foreign policy.

Ruben Gallego

#22. Moltke closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy - and once settled it cannot be altered.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#23. American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Charles Stanley

#24. One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.

Phil Klay

#25. When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Rick Perlstein

#26. Without any coherent international blueprint the White House has bombed its way around the globe, while dropping troops far and wide for ill-defined peacemaking duties. This policy has gutted the American military which now must be rebuilt.

Tom DeLay

#27. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy.

Aaron McGruder

#28. Even as U.S. policy in recent decades has become progressively militarized, so too has the Vietnam-induced gap separating the U.S. military from American society persisted and perhaps even widened.47

Andrew J. Bacevich

#29. Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles.

Ralph Raico

#30. I support allowing homosexuals to serve openly in our military and eliminating the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.

Ed Case

#31. I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Robert Kagan

#32. I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.

John McCain

#33. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

Henry Kissinger

#34. In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

Phil Klay

#35. In war, the policy of least exertion always risks being paid for dearly.

Charles De Gaulle

#36. In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.

Bob Woodward

#37. If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code

Woodrow Wilson

#38. In recent years, academics, policy-makers, and experts have raised the question of the applicability of peacetime environmental law in times of armed conflict.

Widad Akreyi

#39. Using the 'military decision-making process' is extremely valuable when making policy decisions.

Joe Heck

#40. While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy - in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#41. We Communists have got to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs ... (soon) we will be in a position to return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper-hand ...

Leonid Brezhnev

#42. President Obama says he wants to put an end to the policy, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' Yeah, in the military. This is not to be confused with George Bush's policy, 'Don't Know, Don't Care.' That's a whole different deal.

David Letterman

#43. Deterrence is still fundamentally about influencing an actor's decisions. It is about a solid policy foundation. It is about credible capabilities. It is about what the U.S. and our allies as a whole can bring to bear in both a military and a nonmilitary sense.

C. Robert Kehler

#44. We need a smaller and elite military, as [Donald]Rumsfeld said - and also a smaller and elite foreign policy.

Ron Paul

#45. One of the characteristics of New Labour - and Miliband is irredeemably of that species - is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British foreign policy, namely military intervention.

Martin Jacques

#46. We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.

Theodore C. Sorensen

#47. If everyone loves you, maybe you don't need so many tanks.

Craig Nelson

#48. The people see that Wall Street is running our economic policy, that big oil is running our energy policy and the military industrial complex is determining our foreign policy ...

Alan Grayson

#49. Millions of citizens are deeply disturbed that the military-industrial complex too often shapes national policy, but they do not want to be considered unpatriotic.

Martin Luther King Jr.