Elliott Abrams Quotes

Nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft.

The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe.

Air warfare is a shot through the brain, not a hacking to pieces of the enemy's body.

Since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine.

If we lose the war in the air we lose the war and we lose it quickly.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy's aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.

The one effective method of defending one's own territory from an offensive by air is to destroy the enemy's air power with the greatest possible speed.

Air power is indivisible. If you split it up into compartments, you merely pull it to pieces and destroy its greatest asset, its flexibility.

Carey wants proper air cover in case of war with Vermont.

The development of air power in its broadest sense, and including the development of all means of combating missiles that travel through the air, whether fired or dropped, is the first essential to our survival in war.

Lots of people throw around phrases of 'no-fly zone,' and they talk about it as though it's just a game - a video game or something. Some people who throw that line out have no idea what they're talking about.

Military history shows air action only cannot achieve the goal of defeating an enemy.

We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground. It will allow the moderate opposition to be able to neutralize the helicopters and aircraft that are dropping chemicals and have been carpet-bombing them, just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there.

Using overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS. To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.

It's unbelievable what one squadron of twelve aircraft did to tip the balance.

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.

With us air people, the future of our nation is indissolubly bound up in the development of air power.

The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.

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

For good or for ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank.