William Westmoreland Quotes

It became very clear that Hanoi was in effect strategically running the Viet Cong operation.

The French repulsed wave after wave of frontal attacks at Dien Bien Phu. The 1968 Tet offensive against the U.S. was a military disaster that effectively destroyed the Viet Cong. But Giap persisted and prevailed.

You want to keep the defense guessing.

Neither Johnson nor his party nor the government as a whole were willing to raise, train, equip, and then send Vietnam sufficient manpower to do the job.

Our military thought that they couldn't get to Pearl Harbor, that it was too long a journey from Japan to get there, and they proved us wrong.

We had avoided discovery by the Sioux scouts, and we were confident of giving them a complete surprise.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

You cannot tell the enemy you're going to leave and expect the enemy to not - and expect to succeed. I mean, that's just a fundamental of warfare.

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

Modern warfare is by no means merely a matter of military operations. Economic affairs stand together with them in the first rank of the factors of importance.

In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort.

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.

President Obama has never summarized the Obama Doctrine with such clarity, but here is what it would look like: 'I will undertake any military attack against our enemies, regardless of the risks and collateral damage, so long as it is over by the time I have to announce it.'

'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

The parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are striking. In each instance there were warning signs before the attack, and in each instance our government failed to connect the dots.

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?

Unfortunately, the historical record of failure to prevent strategic surprises is overwhelming. In conventional warfare, victims usually misread the evidence or miscalculate their responses, and they can suffer surprise even when their intelligence collection systems and defensive preparations are impressive.

What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

I have a very firm limitation in mind, but I don’t think the Joint Chiefs do. I know they don’t.

The United States is involved in a war in Vietnam. American troops will stay until victory.

The paradox of having wars with big objectives, at least in declaratory terms, but only being ready to use limited means and limited levels of mobilization to fight them, puts you in a pretty confused place.

Consequences of linear thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq included overestimating indigenous forces' capabilities, underestimating the enemy, and the associated expectation that the coalition could soon reduce force levels and shift to an exclusively advisory effort.

A key to McMaster's thinking is his 1997 book, 'Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.'