Giulio Douhet Quotes

A hostile airship hovering over London … could inflict enormous damage.

About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.

Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids.

If, sir, men were all virtuous, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither wall, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.

There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.

The hatred we bear our enemies injures their happiness less than our own.

Anyone who is aware of his environment knows that the peril of physical assault does exist, and that it exists everywhere and at all times.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

I'm sure the most favorite airplane in my career would still be the Sabre F86 cleft wing , which allowed me to be credited with 2 Russian-built Mig-15 destroyed during the Korean War. Where I was in 1953.

The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I'm not going to die.

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.

Because of its independence of surface limitations and its superior speed the airplane is the offensive weapon par excellence.

This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me—oh, god!

The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

I have a mathematical certainty that the future will confirm my assertion that aerial warfare will be the most important element in future wars, and that in consequence not only will the importance of the Independent Air Force rapidly increase, but the importance of the army and navy will decrease in proportion.

Sometimes paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.

Fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world.

This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.

You can't carpet bomb ISIS if you don't have planes and bombs to attack them with. And if we continue those cuts that we're doing , not to mention additional cuts, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest Air Force this country has ever had, and that leaves us less safe.

With the CGI, suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.

Above all, I shall see to it that the enemy will not be able to drop any bombs.

There is nothing like the sight of an old enemy down on his luck.