Mark Esper Quotes

The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible.

I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker.

When you have the weapon that will win the war, you'd be foolish not to use it.

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United States fights somebody, we're going to be huge. They're going to be small.'

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

If you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much; you'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too.

If you can't outplay the opposition, you must outnumber them.

One who has few must prepare against the enemy; one who has many makes the enemy prepare against him.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

Military capability, viewed in terms of the history of its own development, has constantly been found wanting. Renewal and regeneration of military capability seems to be an indispensable part of the military doctrine, conceived to address what turns out inevitably to be the insatiable need of fear. For every level of fear addressed through a military strategy or state of readiness, a further threat comes to be conceived for which further military capability is sought.

Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks.

The combat man isn't the same clean-cut lad because you don't fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you.

I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.

Israel must win every single war that it fights. Our enemies only have to win one war.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

U.S. adversaries exploit power gaps. It's easier for Russia to invade Ukraine with irregular forces out of uniform, the so-called 'little green men,' than to send a conventional army that would challenge NATO.

There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you're going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it's like we called Saddam's army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.

Violence of action, as we call it in the Spec Ops community, will often change the odds in your favor.

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

In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day.

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

Furthermore, they had calculated that if 25,000 of them died for every one of us, they would finish with us first, for they were many and we were but few.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.