McGeorge Bundy Quotes

Our military plans for everything.

When it comes to our military, what we have to think about is not, you know just budgets, we've got to think about capabilities.

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars.

Well, you know, any defense force worth its salt has to be able to deal with uncertainty, has to be able to deal with events that we may not have planned for.

The military has to think in terms of worst case scenarios. In a sense, they have to play the pessimist.

We haven’t done strategic military analysis in so long that most of our analysts don’t know how to do it any more..

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.

We've got to strengthen our military long-term. We don't know what the world is going to throw at us down the road.

I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

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

In the military, we have known for decades, if not centuries, that the time to prepare, whether it's for a hurricane, a typhoon or strategic changes, is before they hit you

The military executes policy decisions.

Unless more efforts based upon long-range planning are put into military preparations and operations, it will be very hard to win the final victory.

Our national-security strategy must drive our military budget, rather than the budget setting our strategy.

What we can afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be and, by doing so, introduce into our defense vulnerabilities based on self-delusion.

As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, my first priority is to ensure the readiness of our military.

The National Defense Strategy remains our guiding document, and everything we do should support its stated objectives.

Using the ‘military decision-making process’ is extremely valuable when making policy decisions.

I have found in my experience of war, that plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.

[Donald] Trump is speaking in Philadelphia on military matters. He's doing quite well. I want to join a little bit of this in progress just to give you a flavor for how Trump is sounding.

Now that you're Secretary of War, what kind of an army do you think we ought to have?

Only when you have got a clear statement of what you want to achieve, do you ask yourself how you are going to achieve it. In the military we are taught never to go for a single answer, no matter how obvious that might be.

Developing a strategy, leading the world, funding it to make sure that we have a military that's second to none, and doing the job and making sure that we destroy ISIS there. That's how you keep America safe.