Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

…the Army stood in need of talent as never before… the whole department is unscientifically managed, over officered and wastefully conducted.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

That was a pretty fine Army that we had in 1965. By 1973, it was in tatters. It was a disgrace to the country and to itself, to its own heritage, really. So it's, you know, the Army belongs to all 307 million of us. It is our common possession, it's our common heritage. As goes the Army, so goes the republic.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

Pop culture is like our subconscious.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

For politics to change … culture must change too --- and that takes much more than dispatching troops, holding elections, and writing constitutions.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

Warfare evolves. It changes as a result of technology. It changes as the culture changes.

The National Defense Act of 1916 left the United States with a General Staff of 19 officers, against Germany's 650.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

It takes more than a trained army … it takes an institutionalized army.

Everybody wants change. But the problem is how you manage change.

The politics of traditionalisation and the celebration of Islam as a component of national identities have thwarted the possibilities of modernizing tools of thought and institutions

Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

Senior military officers will not accept defense reform unless it is forced upon them.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more money. What it needs desperately is a functional procurement system …. The result [of not having one] is not just ordinary waste, fraud and abuse … but also deep and lasting damage to the country’s ability to project power and wage war.

No American officer was a proven commander when we entered the First Word War I…. No one had ever commanded a large body of troops. General Pershing, who was selected, had only commanded a brigade in the Mexican war.

The end goal of the feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist revolution, not just elimination of male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

War is the great auditor of military institutions.

Secretary Perry became the 19th secretary of defense and the first enlisted man to serve in that role. He had time in the highest ranks of the Pentagon and was instrumental in the dismantlement of the nuclear warheads in the United States and Russia. Throughout his career, he has devoted himself to protecting the interests of the nation.