Ryan Zinke Quotes

I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way.

Hamas is firing at our cities, at our people, firing from these areas, from these homes, from these schools, from mosques, from hospitals. They are actually using them as weapon storage, as command posts and as firing positions, or right next to them.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

If we accept the notion that terrorists will have immunity because as they fire on civilians they hide behind civilians, then this tactic will be legitimized and the terrorists will have their greatest victory.

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.

In other words, for every 10 enemy you kill you bring on 20 new recruits to their anti-coalition cause then essentially you are working against yourself.

The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

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. Otherwise we should come into control of an utterly ruined land.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one… The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.

Here’s the difference between us [and Hamas]. We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.

Hamas, we know, embeds missiles, embeds command-and-control units in civilian areas.

Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.

We see a transformation of warfare from the big armies and battlefields in open spaces to a fragmentation of armed groups and smaller armies, which move into city centres, which increasingly become the theatre of warfare.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

The history of warfare has not yet enabled any army, any civilized army, the army of a democracy like Israel, to be able to deal with a ruthless terrorist enemy that uses civilians as a human shield without having some incidental civilian casualties.

Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.

Attacks on cities are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of allied soldiers.

Terror is a tactic. We can not wage "war" against a tactic.

When the enemy is at ease, be able to weary him; when well fed, to starve him; when at rest, to make him move. Appear at places to which he must hasten; move swiftly where he does not expect you.

In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values and kill innocent people.