Charles Krauthammer Quotes

Read over and over again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugene and Frederic. ... This is the only way to become a great general and master the secrets of the art of war.

Using overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS. To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.

Being Americans, we prosecute wars to win them, not to have reasonable response, not to have appropriate levels of retaliation. Our theory is you start bombing our cities; we're going to defeat you and make it impossible.

Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

We were lavish of blood in those days, and it was thought to be a grand thing to charge a battery or an earth-work lined with infantry.

According to true military art, one should never push one's enemy to the point of despair, because such a state multiplies his strength and increases his courage which had already been crushed and failing, and because there is no better remedy for the health of beaten and overwhelmed men than the absence of all hope.

The secret of war lies in the communications.

One bad general is worth two good ones.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

For the US, the Kosovo War was a success because it encouraged the development of the Pentagon's 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA). The war provided a test site for experimentation, and paved the way for emergence of what I call in Strategie de la deception 'the second deterrence'.

Ground which can be freely traversed by both sides is called accessible.

In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.

Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your [pacifist] congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second all civilized nations will recoil from war in horror.

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed...I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

In his fairy dreams of war [Thaddeus] always made conquest the sure end of his battles.

In war the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of the offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.

Wars are not won by evacuations.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

The harder the fighting and the longer the war, the more the infantry, and in fact all the arms, lean on the gunners.

In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.

The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition.

Only one military organization can hold and gain ground in war-a ground army supported by tactical aviation with supply lines guarded by the navy.

Our military superiority is so great - it's far greater than it was in the Gulf War, and the Gulf War was over in 100 hours after we bombed for 43 days. And so now they can bomb for a couple of days and then just roll into Baghdad... The odds are there's going to be a war and it's going to be not for very long.

Paris must either not fall into the hands of the enemy or the enemy must find it only a wasteland.