George W. Bush Quotes

All able bodied male citizens … are hereby declared to be the National Forces.

If they can send you to war at 18, maybe it's beneficial for some people to think that most of us gotta go to war for our own existence.

I've never been a soldier. In Denmark, at 18, as a male, you go in a draw, and if they pick you, you go and serve for a year. I didn't.

With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.

We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.

I did not want to avoid service. I did realize reservists could be called up, and that it was something that I wanted to do.

Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.

I was honestly willing to accept compulsory military service, provided that the voluntary system had first been tried out, and had failed to supply the men needed and who could still be spared from industry, and were numerically worth troubling about.

I want you for US Army

We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens, and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education.

Congress have a right by the Constitution to raise regular armies, and no restraint is imposed on the exercise of it …. It would be absurd to suppose that Congress could not carry this power into effect otherwise than be accepting the voluntary service of individuals.

... we might better reexamine the reasons for entering the war than abolish volunteers and substitute for them men dragged into the ranks by draft.

Nobody wants to go to war, but the burden of service cannot fall only on volunteers who, are attracted to the military for financial reasons.

The militia system, … has no hold upon the affections of our citizens.

That all the … men of the nation, betwixt sixty and sixteen, be, with all diligence possible, armed with bayonets and firelocks, all of a calibre, and continue always provided in such arms with ammunition suitable.

Universal military training is the only truly democratic solution to the problem of [military] preparedness.

A small country like Israel has compulsory military training. But countries like India, that are so much bigger, have no compulsory military training, so people don't understand how the military functions. They have no knowledge of how it works, no respect for it.

Donald Trump in Philadelphia, and he's delivering a very substantive speech on military preparedness, the status of the current military. He detailed the deterioration of the U.S. military in the past eight years and explained how he's going to rebuild it and why we need to, and it's a very tough audience. It's an expressly military audience, and they are of course listening for any sign that he's not really genuine here. I think, knocking this out of the park as far as that audience is concerned.

The truth is, that the military people are so important to our country.

I think a draft produces a better Army than the one we would have with all volunteers, because I think you get average Americans if you have a draft. And if it's an all-volunteer Army, you get people who join up because of some problem in their own lives. They don't have anything else to do, they don't have a job, or they can't find what they want to do, so they join the Army. And it doesn't produce the best Army.

With respect to where we are now, we have a voluntary army. And if we ever go back to conscription I hope that at time it will be the kind of conscription that was put in at the end of the Vietnam War. And that is, everybody is equally liable to be called to serve the nation in time of conflict.

We have great people, we have a depleted military.

How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation? The means of security can only be regulated by the means and the danger of attack. They will, in fact, be ever determined by these rules, and by no others . . . . If one nation maintains constantly a disciplined army, ready for service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the most pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to take corresponding precautions.

I think one of the reasons I'm standing here instead of other people is that, frankly, I talked about it, we have to have a strong military.

Keeping our military strong means keepin' our families strong.