George C. Marshall Quotes

Logistics is the ball and chain of armored warfare.

The German Air Force was not sufficient to protect the sea crossing on its own. While the leading part of the forces might have landed, there was the danger that they might be cut off from supplies and reinforcements.

An army should always be so distributed that its parts can aid each other and combine to produce the maximum possible concentration of force at one place, while the minimum force necessary is used elsewhere to prepare the success of the concentration.

It has been said by a certain general, that the first object in the establishment of an army ought to be making provision for the belly, that being the basis and foundation of all operations.

Free supplies and open retreat are two essentials to the safety of an army or a fleet.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.

I don't like fantasy where a king snaps his fingers and suddenly a whole army appears and goes off to war - he's got to feed them, he's got to pay them, he's got to take care of the camp followers and the gamblers and the people who cause disorder.

The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply.

Their armies [the Ottoman Turks] are encumbered with immense baggage, and their camp has all the conveniences of a town, with shops etc. for such was their ancient custom when they wandered with their hordes.

If you contemplate some enterprise against the enemy, the commissary must scrape together all the beer and brandy that can be found so that the army does not lack either …

Military decisions are much more difficult and more often wrong than civilian decisions.

The military executes policy decisions.

All of the military services - land, sea, and air - spend a great deal of time awake. This is a direct result of the high tempo of operations we conduct while forward deployed well outside our national borders.

History tells us that a general can move and feed an army as efficiently as he likes, but the real litmus test is the battlefield.

General Longstreet,when once in a fight, was a most brilliant soldier; but he was the hardest man to move I had in my army.

The battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters, long before the shooting begins.

There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

The fact is that as soon as they reach Baghdad gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them.

It's unclear how air strikes on our part can succeed unless the Iraqi army is willing to fight, and that's uncertain given the fact that several Iraqi army divisions have melted away.

Streamlining the army with Chinese characteristics is the right choice for China in military modernization.

There is nothing more common than to find considerations of supply affecting the strategic lines of a campaign and a war.

Every decision in government is so important, especially when it comes to the military where thousands of people can lose their lives.

There is nearly always uh, a process of wanting contingency plans made in the military.

The secret of war lies in the communications.