Ashraf Ghani Quotes

It costs us $1 million for every troop[soldier] in Afghanistan.

We disarm ourselves by making weapons so expensive.

The only way to make budget cuts is to bring down force structure.

[The] up-and-down pattern of [defense] spending over the last 18 years averages out to below zero percent real growth. In other words, if defense spending had followed a path of zero percent real growth, the U.S. probably could have obtained more defense for its dollar.

No state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

In our town meetings, and in our school district meetings, wealthy and substantial men oppose the grant of $15 to a school library, and of $30 for both library and apparatus; while at West Point they spend $50 in a single lesson at target firing, and the government keeps a hundred horses, and grooms and blacksmiths to take care of them, as an indispensable part of the apparatus of the academy. The pupils of our Normal schools, who are preparing to become teachers, must maintain themselves; the cadets at the academy receive $28 a month, during their entire term, as a compensation for being educated at the public expense.

There has never been a military commander in history who didn’t want more men for a longer time …

It is not how much you spend on defense as much as how you spend it.

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.

The Pentagon has expended stupendous sums. Yet when it comes to promised results—–disorder curbed, democracy promoted, human rights advanced, terrorism suppressed—–the United States has precious little to show.

Well, no American wants to in any way hurt our capabilities to national defense, but that doesn't mean an unlimited amount of money, and a blank check for anything they want at any time, for any purpose. Not at all.

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.

With the winding down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States now has an opportunity to implement real defense reforms without having a serious impact on immediate battlefield needs.

... when you have a draft you're more likely to go to war than if you have to pay for a volunteer army. A draft lowers the cost for the wealthy because the people who are important don't have their children going off and they're also not paying as much in taxes.

Our guns are not called upon to hurl huge projectiles each one of which costs as much as the construction of a happy home.

The Pentagon has a long tradition of dialing up the threat to get more dollars at budget time.

The public was entirely free of the great danger and expense of a standing army.

How much do we really need for the defense of the United States of America? Only the defense to defend its shores? Well I suppose that the maximum for the defense of our shores is one billion dollars. So the rest of our defense budget relates to what we regard as our responsibilities as a world power.

It's worth two divisions to me.

As long as I am president, we will maintain the greatest fighting force that the world has ever known.

Our clothing and our armor ought to be of such a kind that men of mature experience will not say that we have spent too much on them, nor younger men say we have spent too little.

Wars cost money.

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

Because the resources available to the U. S. military will be increasingly limited, the objectives must be too.

Keep no troops on the field too long