Quotes About The U.s. Military

#1. What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things - especially when it comes to the U.S. military in Africa.

Nick Turse

#2. It's the founding ideals that the flag draped over my father's coffin stand for.
Truth: His father was buried in Kenya, never served in the U.S. military. Which flag draped his father's coffin? And what ideals does the flag that draped his father's coffin in Kenya stand for?

Barack Obama

#3. Our waterboarding program is based on the U.S. military training program ... tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen were waterboarded pursuant to this program to prepare them for the possibility of being captured someday so that they would know what it felt like.

Jose Rodriguez

#4. What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

Walter Karp

#5. The United States Central Command of the Armed Forces has asked Geraldo Rivera to leave Iraq. It should also be noted that the only three other people that the U.S. military has asked to leave Iraq are Saddam Hussein and his two sons.

Jon Stewart

#6. The culture of the U.S. military is such that human enhancement is accepted as a goal, taking people beyond the norm. There are so many resources going into that kind of research.

Jessa Gamble

#7. 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

#8. It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

Ted Cruz

#9. Who could not be moved by the sight of that poor, demoralized rabble, outwitted, outflanked, outmanoeuvered by the U.S. military? Yet, given time, I think the press will bounce back.

James Baker

#10. Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.

Michael Klare

#11. If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response.

John O. Brennan

#12. The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

Noam Chomsky

#13. Speaker John Boehner complained that Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military into combat in Libya without clearly defining the mission to the American people and Congress. See, apparently, you're only allowed to do that when invading Iraq.

Jay Leno

#14. You gotta love the names. They're so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.

Richard Engel

#15. Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.

Richard Engel

#16. The highest levels of the U.S. military, the Defense Department, and the White House must be held accountable for putting our troops at greater risk and diminishing Americas moral authority across the globe.

Lawrence Korb

#17. Sunglasses are a bit like watches for me - a real obsession. My favourites are Oakleys, Ray-Bans and Wileys, which are worn by the U.S. military.

Ross Kemp

#18. It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military. The reason is simple: the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security.

Bryan Fischer

#19. In fact, the U.S. military has bent over backwards to respect the religious beliefs of some very dangerous fanatics who want to kill us.

Linda Chavez

#20. The U.S. Military is us. There is no truer representation of a country than the people that it sends into the field to fight for it. The people who wear our uniform and carry our rifles into combat are our kids, and our job is to support them, because they're protecting us.

Tom Clancy

#21. Fundamentalist groups like Christian Embassy have infiltrated the very top of the U.S. military and gained positions of influence in the Pentagon.

Darrel Ray

#22. The successful establishment of a buffer zone around Fort Carson will provide an example for other bases around the country as we seek to protect the training mission of the U.S. military while preserving critical habitats on our ranges.

Wayne Allard

#23. Most fundamentally, the U.S. military is - and will continue to be - a product of our culture and our collective decisions. Whatever it is, it's what we have made it.

Rosa Brooks

#24. Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the U.S. military, you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing in Oklahoma City.

Timothy McVeigh

#25. In Iraq, the U.S. military's whack-a-mole approach to killing Saddam Hussein may have finally paid off. The bombs destroyed the area and left behind a 60-foot crater, or as coalition forces prefer to call it: a freedom hole.

Jon Stewart

#26. Sexual assault has no place in the military. It is a violation of everything that the U.S. military stands for.

Leon Panetta

#27. Nor should the U.S. military be forced to remain in Iraq essentially as an army for one side of a civil war.

Peter DeFazio

#28. The president's very right about one thing: When you have a disaster of that scale, whether it be natural or a terrorist attack, there's only one part of our entire government, state or local, that is equipped to handle it, and that's the U.S. military.

Warren Rudman

#29. Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.

John Stockwell

#30. Afghan human rights campaigners worry that U.S. forces may be using secret detention sites like the one allegedly at Rish-Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The U.S. military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.

Anand Gopal

#31. It turns out that, if you want to know what the U.S. military is doing in Africa, it's advantageous to be connected to a large engineering or construction firm looking for business.

Nick Turse

#32. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks.

Yanis Varoufakis

#33. The U.S. military is the best-trained, most effective fighting force the world has ever known. And the conduct of the vast majority of our service members makes Americans rightfully proud.

Claire McCaskill

#34. Gangs have had connections to the U.S. Military in every period since the founding of the country.

Carter F. Smith

#35. To the contrary, I believe the U.S. military has already done all that has been asked of them. Saddam Hussein is on trial. The threat from alleged weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq has been neutralized.

Peter DeFazio

#36. I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.

Sebastian Junger

#37. The U.S. military has done a phenomenal job of creating these facilities almost over-night and dealing with these sworn enemies of America with more respect and dignity than they ever would have considered according our officers had they captured any.

Charles Bass

#38. After the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Obama administration steadfastly refused to say which element of the U.S. military had participated in the assault. Until Vice President Joe Biden decided to talk about it on national television, that is.

Ben Shapiro

#39. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that the U.S. military had deliberately hidden information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which were much higher than reported.

Jemima Khan

#40. Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians.

Linda Chavez

#41. Whether I'm trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform - obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround.

Nick Turse

#42. '24' and 20th Century Fox and Sky TV are not responsible for training the U.S. military. It is not our job to do. To me, this is almost as absurd as saying, 'The Sopranos' supports the mafia, and by virtue of that, HBO supports the mafia.'

Kiefer Sutherland

#43. According to recent opinion polls, a large majority of Iraqis believe that the U.S. military has no intention to leave Iraq, and that it would stay even is asked by the Iraqi government to leave.

John Conyers

#44. Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.

Rachel Kushner

#45. The U.S. military was segregated 'til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.

Clint Eastwood

#46. If Peking wasn't stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as "the military colossus of the East." U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world's new nations would gravitate toward neutralism.

William Manchester

#47. Mary, Mary don't say no, down the basement we shall go. Slap your ass against the wall, here i come balls and all. Won't your daddy be disgusted, when he sees your cherry busted. Won't your mama be surprised, when she sees your belly rise! Sound Off....(ect.)

U.S. Military

#48. Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

Robert Dallek

#49. The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it's far more advanced.

Noam Chomsky

#50. Officers in command of colored troops are in constant habit of pressing all able-bodied slaves into the military service of the U.S.

Lovell Rousseau

#51. In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Noam Chomsky

#52. One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#53. Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Kitty Kelley

#54. U.S. power flows from our unmatched military might, yes. But in a deeper way, it's a product of the dominance of the U.S. economy.

David Ignatius

#55. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

Richard Engel

#56. 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

#57. Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.

Anand Gopal

#58. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the arm of the Pentagon most responsible for shiny, futuristic technology, recently gave a $100,000 grant to Logos Technologies, Fairfax, Va.-based defense tech company, to develop a silent, hybrid-engine motorcycle for the military.

Anonymous

#59. Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

Noam Chomsky

#60. The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

Jose Saramago

#61. The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

Noam Chomsky

#62. 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

#63. My father was a military judge, and my mother was a psychiatric social worker. My brother and sister and I were moved around constantly, in and outside the U.S., living in Germany for much of our teens.

Julianne Moore

#64. 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

#65. In committing an estimated 3,000 U.S. forces to join international Ebola relief efforts in West Africa, President Obama seems to be fulfilling the plans of highly influential progressive groups who seek to transform the American military into more of a social-work organization.

Aaron Klein

#66. With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.

John Spratt

#67. America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.

David Brooks

#68. I proposed a law that every country where the U.S. has a military base - those people should be allowed to vote in the American election.

Bill Ayers

#69. With freedom comes responsibility, and I can think of no responsibility greater than putting on a U.S military uniform and standing in the gap between an enemy threat and civilian life.

Zack Wamp

#70. Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

Ted Cruz

#71. U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.

Noam Chomsky

#72. Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.

Merrill McPeak

#73. If there are threats to the United States, then I would of course go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. military ground force.

Martin Dempsey

#74. The U.S. couldn't play a military role in different areas like Iraq and Afghanistan without huge quantities of oil. So a shortage or disruption in oil would not only damage the U.S. economy; it would undercut American military supremacy.

Michael Klare

#75. We are seeing reports that NATO's sending early warning radar planes and German military personnel to Turkey. That might reduce the chances of another incident like this jet shoot down. And obviously both NATO and the U.S. are pressing their ally Turkey to urgently deescalate the situation.

Peter Kenyon

#76. In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti - France and the United States - combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

Noam Chomsky

#77. The Canadian Prime Minister said Canada would lend the U.S. its full military support. You know what that means: Both tanks.

Jay Leno

#78. The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.

Immanuel Wallerstein

#79. If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbours those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force.

Dick Cheney

#80. Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars.

Camille Paglia

#81. 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

#82. Obama was elected on a slogan of hope and change because both were in short supply: the military exhausted by two wars, the banks failing their public trust, the U.S. Congress a comedy of dysfunction, and a federal government that seemed designed to idle on the sidelines.

Nancy Gibbs

#83. I feel very strongly that the significance of 9/11 cannot be underestimated. It forces us to think in new ways about strategy, about national security, about how we structure our forces and about how we use U.S. military power.

Dick Cheney

#84. The weather records of the U.S.A. are the best kept and most accessible in the world, thanks to consistent government/military taxpayer support. There are longer European data sets, but the U.S.A. data is enough to forecast major extreme events.

Piers Corbyn

#85. We need to ensure our men and women in uniform are equipped with the very best money can buy. We also have to make sure critical military technologies are developed in America and that the U.S. defense manufacturing base remains healthy and strong.

Joe Lieberman

#86. We are not utilizing the Iraqi oil for U.S. purposes. We are not asking that the Iraqi oil be used to pay our military expenses. We are asking only that the Iraqi oil be used to rebuild Iraq - that is, to rebuild Iraq for the Iraqi people.

Arlen Specter

#87. Cyberspace is the battlefield of tomorrow ... Instead of confronting us head-to-head on the traditional battlefield, adversaries will confront the U.S. at its point of least resistance- our information infrastructure.

Fred Thompson

#88. If you put two brigades on the ground right now with U.S. forces, they would push ISIS back into Syria in a heartbeat.

Anthony Zinni

#89. Funny how the U.S. sends in the military to fight "terrorists" in any country which has resources we want ...

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#90. The U.S. must renounce any U.S. interest in constructing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Peter DeFazio

#91. In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#92. In Pakistan anti-American protesters set a Kentucky Fried chicken restaurant on fire. The protesters mistakenly thought they were attacking high-ranking U.S. military official Colonel Sanders.

Jimmy Fallon

#93. In 1975, the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with U.S. helicopters seeking to rescue leading U.S. personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.

Martin Jacques

#94. The U.S.'s major strength factor and weapon is its economy. If you cripple it, you cripple the military.

Chester W. Nimitz

#95. The U.S. government did not seem to recognize that its punitive foreign policies, its military installations in countries all over the globe, might arouse anger in foreign countries, and that anger might turn to violence.

Howard Zinn

#96. We're probably going to see some post-2014 military presence - some U.S. presence and a NATO presence - and while we've got much work to do in the next 29 months, we'll have additional time later for the continued professionalization of the Afghan security forces.

John R. Allen

#97. On the battlefield, (the U.S. war in Iraq) cannot be considered a success. It's a struggle. We're doing what we can to support them with equipment, assistance, training, and sharing any intelligence.

Robert S. Beecroft

#98. My guess is that before Obama departs, he will adopt some of the more aggressive military options he has been resisting, such as 'safe zones' inside Syria and more aggressive deployment of U.S. special forces.

David Ignatius

#99. In March 1861 alone - Lincoln's first month in office - the U.S. Senate would receive for its advice and consent some sixty pages of names submitted for civilian and military appointments ranging from secretary of state to surveyor-general of Minnesota.

Harold Holzer

#100. History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

Frank Gaffney