Anthony Zinni Quotes

I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation because you’re going to walk into chaos

No man could know whether war might not at any moment break out.

Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.

When you start a military intervention, you do not know what will happen even in the next hour

The unknown is the governing condition of war.

The troops are at war, but the Pentagon is not.

... deployed on the sands of Saudi Arabia and facing possible extinction, are young men and women drawn, in the main, from the poorer families of our republic.

Life is one big minefield, and the only place that isn't a minefield is the place they make the mines.

They will try to enter Baghdad, and I think this is where their graveyard will be.

The war in Iraq was unwinnable.

Four elements make up the climate of war: danger, exertion, uncertainty and chance.

I think war is a dangerous place.

Performances are always more interesting to me when something is at stake.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.

There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.

We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face.

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

We're not going to spread democracy at the business end of a M16 held by a 23 year old Marine.

Your time is up. Go now. Don't wait until there has been more death and destruction

The military market is based on human folly, not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists. It's depths have never been plumbed.

War is always a very blunt instrument and almost always produces uncertain results.

In war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities …. all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects.

I have picked up this vibe that...you’re going to have this massive strike with massed weapons, and basically that’s going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that.

The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of annihilating enemy forces...The concept that success in counterinsurgency consisted of separating the insurgents from popular support never took hold. The U.S. Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army –p even if it had a hard time finding it.