Douglas MacArthur Quotes

The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy. ... Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world.

We will get them stuck in the mud and we will certainly defeat them.

When the enemy is driven back, we have failed, and when he is cut off, encircled and dispersed, we have succeeded.

The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.

The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.

While I was not consulted prior to the President's decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea, that decision from a military standpoint, proved a sound one, as we hurled back the invader and decimated his forces. Our victory was complete, and our objectives within reach, when Red China intervened with numerically superior ground forces.

The success of our surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will prove to be the Waterloo of the war to follow. For this reason the Imperial Navy is massing the cream of its strength in ships and planes to assure success.

We need to focus on killing the bad guys, not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars that don't keep America safe.

The true lesson of the Vietnam War is: certainty of purpose and ruthlessness of execution win wars.

According to CNN, Donald Rumsfeld said the war in Iraq did not go according to plan. And President Bush said, 'What? We had a plan?'

It is imperative to master the principles of the art of war and learn to be unmoved in mind even in the heat of the battle.

It is the rule in war, if ten times the enemy's strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, be able to divide them; if equal, engage them; if fewer, defend against them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.

[To the House of Representatives before casting the only vote against allowing George W. Bush to use 'all necesary and appropriate force' in response to 9/11:] We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

A strategic plan based on the over-all situation of both belligerents is ... more stable, but it too is applicable only in a given strategic stage and has to be changed when the war moves towards a new stage. ... [Conversely, tactical plans may] ... have to be changed several times a day.

Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.

Isn't a policy of conventional weapons, with the terrible bombs raining down, with the missiles, with the aircraft, with the submarines, with the torpedoes, with the tanks, with chemical weapons - isn't that based on the possibility of threat?

When your weapons are dulled and ardour damped, your strength exhausted and treasure spent, neighboring rulers will take advantage of your distress to act. And even though you have wise counsellors, none will be able to lay good plans for the future. Thus, while we have heard of blundering swiftness in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged.

It was interesting watching the Afghanistan war review deliberations, this three-month process where Barack Obama did the most thorough foreign policy review ever by a modern American president. Compare that to Libya. For a month he said we weren't going to do anything, then suddenly changed his mind and did it on the fly. My view is that it's not how long or quick you take to make a decision, it's whether you make the right one.

One of the surest ways of forming good combinations in war would be to order movements only after obtaining perfect information of the enemy's proceedings. In fact, how can any man say what he should do himself; if he is ignorant what his adversary is about?

If they listen to the military people, we probably wouldn't be having an ISIS right now.

Obama's decision to leave, to not sustain the victory that resulted after eight years of fighting, from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq, was another incredibly stupid decision. It was totally based on politics, not based on any notion of national security. It's a nightmare for our national security. And then you have the Libya intervention.

To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war."

In war, the policy of least exertion always risks being paid for dearly.

This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.