Conventional War Quotes

If a nuclear power is willing to be bolder than another, it can take limited conventional actions without fear of major pushback.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who distained open battle in favor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In fact, conventional warfare is the relatively recent invention.

They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called 'war' too. And there will still be no conventional war.

The United States can certainly defeat North Vietnam, but the United States cannot defeat a guerrilla war which is being raged from a sanctuary through a pattern of penetration, intervention, evasion, which is very difficult for a technologically advanced country like the United States to combat.

The open-ended nature of the struggle against it means that the war on terrorism, unlike conventional wars, cannot be viewed as a passing emergency. That fact has important implications for the debate about how much liberty we should give up so the government can fight terrorism more effectively. Since there’s now way of knowing when the war is over – no territory to occupy, no surrender to accept – any sacrifices we make are likely to be permanent.

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

'Cyberwar' has nothing to do with the destruction brought about by bombs and grenades and so on.

I was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.

Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

While conducting a conventional war in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has staged terrorist attacks on a global scale against the people from the countries who are fighting ISIS.

This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.