Ben Carson Quotes

We do need our defense capabilities. It is a fact that the cuts we are facing today and the cuts that Senator [Ted] Cruz would have supported would leave us with an even smaller Air Force and a smaller Navy than the one we are going to be left with.

On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

We certainly have the best special operations forces in the world and know how to do counterterrorism extremely well.

When the United States first went into Afghanistan in 2001, it devastated the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks using only a few hundred C.I.A. and Special Operations personnel, backed by American air power. Later, when the United States transitioned to conventional Pentagon stability operations, this success was reversed.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

Unconventional warfare needs to remain the heart and soul of U.S. Special Operations Command and component commands.

I was point man, which meant I was the first through the door, hunting down Taliban commanders, knocking down forts every night.

My favorite is when you go to Afghanistan and you meet the special forces guys, and they look like these heavily armed surfers. These guys are the best. You see guys dressed as full Afghans, but then wearing a Yankees hat.

Our national defense will be consolidated and no imperialist will be allowed to invade our territory again. Our People's armed forces must be maintained and developed with the brave and steeled People's Liberation Army as their foundation. We will have not only a powerful army but also a powerful air force and a powerful navy.

You bomb ISIL. You're not trying to bomb innocent people. And that requires intelligence and confidence in our military to be able to develop the kinds of targets that we need. We're already doing Special Forces, who are going to help us gather that intelligence and help advise and assist and train local forces so that they can go after ISIL in areas like Raqqah and Mosul.

The thing we've learned from the last 20 years of counterterrorism is the significant value you get from removing leadership from the battlefield in degrading the organization.

Let me begin by saying that we have to understand who ISIS is. ISIS is a radical Sunni group. They cannot just be defeated through air strikes. Air strikes are a key component of defeating them, but they must be defeated on the ground by a ground force. And that ground force must be primarily made up of Sunni Arabs themselves, Sunni Arabs that reject them ideologically and confront them militarily.

Тhe battlefield in the air will be the decisive one

You can't carpet bomb ISIS if you don't have planes and bombs to attack them with. And if we continue those cuts that we're doing , not to mention additional cuts, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest Air Force this country has ever had, and that leaves us less safe.

We will build an Air Force of at least 1,200 fighter aircraft, which the Heritage Foundation again has shown to be needed to execute current missions. We now have 1,113. Not enough. We will also seek to develop a state-of-the-art missile defense system.

By the end of this decade, a majority of our Navy and Air Force fleets will be based out of the Pacific, because the United States is and always will be a Pacific power.

The challenge there is that ISIL doesn't have an air force, so the damage done there is not against ISIL, it's against the Syrian regime.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.

Our losses have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses.

The nearer the cutting off point lies to the main force of the enemy, the more immediate the effect; whereas the closer to the strategic base it takes place, the greater the effect.

We're not running out of [fixed] targets. Afghanistan is.

To conquer the command in the air means victory; to be beaten in the air means defeat.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

The CIA special unit that was searching for Osama bin Laden has been disbanded. So I guess, mission accomplished.