Helmut Schmidt Quotes

I'm very, very pro-defense.

But the federal government, our collective government, has responsibilities that none of these other levels of government can fulfill; and chief among these is national defense.

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.

No nation ought to keep a navy larger than is necessary to do police duty.

There are in most states one or two ministers of war, one of whom is the minister of naval affairs.

Any great power—especially a great one suddenly deprived of its traditional adversary—faces the perennial dilemma of showing a reasonable return on its costly military investments.

Japan is the only country in the world that does not call its defense organizations a military. That is absurd, when the government is spending 5 trillion yen a year for self-defense.

Avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.

You're not hearing people like Madeleine Albright argue that the budget of the State Department should be as large as the Defense Department. The Pentagon is going to be larger by its nature. It's going to have more people.

I think it's encouraging that President Trump is talking about strengthening our national defense, something he ran on again.

The No. 1 purpose of the federal government is national defense.

Militarism is the most energy-intensive, entropic activity of humans, since it converts stored energy and materials directly into waste and destruction without any useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Ironically, the net effect of military, as opposed to civilian, expenditures is to increase unemployment and inflation.

I do not believe that we must maintain a bloated military budget which spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined and may lead us to perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

I'm very skeptical of the amount of money that goes into military expenditure, not just in the poor countries [but] also in the rich. I think it's one of the most massive wastes in the world, but education is [at the] other end. It's the bearer of the greatest fruits that mankind has ever known.

Can it be that a generation of school children is growing up heedless of the simple truth that the Pentagon's centrla role for many years has been to buy weapons that don't work, against threats that don't exist?

The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.

The more a country makes military weapons, the more insecure it becomes: if you have weapons, you become a target for attack.

It is not whether an independent Scotland could go it alone and develop its own defence forces - of course it could - but what sort of forces would they be?

We need a very strong military to protect the freedoms we do have.

A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defense issues.

The reality is, the United States has global interests. Our defense budget is about the same as the defense budgets or military budgets of every other country in the world put together.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

We have to have a conversation about whether Obama's plan to increase spending to occupy Afghanistan helps make America a safer country, or not. I think at some point, we may decide that we don't have to have that size military and cost footprint in the country. You look at what you want to accomplish, how many soldiers you need.

It will be sufficient to point to the enormous burdens which armaments place on the economic, social, and intellectual resources of a nation, as well as on its budget and taxes.

We need to stop spending money on those weapons systems that do not advance national security.