Lee Zeldin Quotes
We should make sure that we are never sending our troops into harm's way unless they're sent with a clear strategy to win, and learning lessons of the past to ensure that best path forward with what lies ahead.
Zeldin, Lee. "Remarks on Troop Deployments." Congressional Record, U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2015.
Then Navy Assistant Secretary Roosevelt had just seen photos of Samuel P. Langley's early attempts at manned flight.
During the Iraq War, the Congressman partially changed his mind the following year and called for a plan to move American troops to the periphery of the fighting. A highly decorated war hero with two Purple Hearts, he was then called a coward, by some Republican members of Congress and the Bush Administration—almost always by people who had never served in the military and often sought and obtained deferments.
With the successful Chinese Communist Revolution, the Nationalists were driven off the mainland of China and occupied the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and had a small garrison of soldier on two tiny islands off the Chinese Coast, Quemoy and Matsu. The communist Chinese government wanted control of all three of the Nationalist held islands. U. S. Military doctrine at the time planned for nuclear retaliation against China for an attack on either of these two tiny islands which had no resources and no population other than a garrison of nationalist Chinese troops. This was the first time that American officials came to grips with a problem that nuclear weapons were so powerful a weapon that it was practically impossible to use them on a limited basis. The threat by any of the nuclear powers of nuclear attack for minor problems simply became not credible. No country would risk a nuclear war for two uninhabited islands in this case and Smith was one of the first leaders to perceive this.
Lee Michael Zeldin is an American attorney, member of Congress, and officer in the United States Army Reserve. A Republican, he has represented New York's 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives since 2015. New York's 1st district includes Central and Eastern Suffolk County, including most of Smithtown, as well as the entirety of the towns of Brookhaven, Riverhead, Southold, Southampton, East Hampton, and Shelter Island, and a small portion of Islip.
