Prolonged Conflict Quotes

The war against Islamic extremism will be long. They are in it for the long haul, which means that we have to be also.

We have been at war almost constantly since the last century. And it has not helped our institutions. Congress no longer represents the people. The courts do not practice justice any more. The armies never stop playing at being the policemen of the world and of oil.

A man can fight if he can see daylight down the road. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.

War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

The fight against terrorism will not be over tomorrow or next month, or even next year. The fight will endure for years to come, and as the threat changes, so too must we adapt to these transformations.

Both sides think that they have a good chance of winning. That’s the recipe for a long war.

Insurgencies have a way of going on for a long time historically.

I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.

We know that the end of any conflict is always messy. It's never a linear path when you've been at war for almost 20 years. It's never a clean, straight linear path to the end.

Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever.

As long as tides of war are in our favor, the United States will never stop fighting. As a consequence, the war will continue for several years, during which materiel will be exhausted, vessels and arms will be damaged, and they can be replaced only with great difficulties.

One of the things that I've learned, and I think we've all learned, is that we are not going to get the kind of decisive, permanent victories in this fight against terrorism that we would get from fighting another country. We're not going to get that MacArthur/Emperor moment, because by definition, even after decimating Al Qaeda in the Fata, even after taking out [Osama] bin Laden there's still people there who have both the interest and the capacity if we don't maintain vigilance to strike against the United States.

The United States seems inextricably committed to a long, inconclusive war. The Communists can prolong it for years.... But it is too late to disengage; our prestige has been committed. Washington says we will stay until the finish.

Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war.

The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review.

Defeating a terrorist organization is like fighting a forest fire; there's never a clear moment of victory, and even after you've won, you have to watch carefully.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

Before the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end.

I shall await the first shot, and if you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days.

Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.

In 2 wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] victory seemed to be measured not in terms of when the United States would prevail, but by when it would be able to leave.

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.

War that hasn't affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country.

A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.