War Uncertainty Quotes

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that.

Are we going to start a war, the end of which we cannot see?

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Haven’t we learned that when you go to war, the outcome is unpredictable.

The events of war are subject to great uncertainty.

All my burghers armed, mounted and ready. Whom do we fight—the British or the Germans?

When my father served in World War II, he wasn't told, 'Go to Europe for four months, for six months, and then you can come back, and there'll be plenty of big bases there for you to serve on, and don't worry about it.'

After engaging in acts of war against another nation, there exists a degree of uncertainty in terms of the enemy's reactions. War inspires an unpredictable psychology and evokes strong emotions that defy systems analysis quantification.

The fortune of war is always doubtful.

The affairs of war, like the destiny of battles, as well as empires, hang upon a spiders thread.

Only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.

No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.

It's impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.

War is uncertain, precisely because it is political and human.

Congress and the American people have good reason to fear that we are heading toward another permanent garrison of Americans in a Balkan country where our mission is confused, and our exit strategy a complete mystery.

The reality is no one knows how much it will cost us to wage war with Iraq.

We didn't get television until quite late, the late fifties, but we had radio, and I can remember listening to the Korean War news on the radio with my family and sensing the anxiety of the adults although not understanding it myself, not understanding exactly what was going on.

It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

[The cause of inaction in war] ... is the imperfection of human perception and judgment which is more pronounced in war than anywhere else. We hardly know accurately our own situation at any particular moment while the enemy's, which is concealed from us, must be deduced from very little evidence.

I'm just very wary that once you start military operations in any country, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome is.

In War more than anywhere else in the world things happen differently to what we had expected, and look differently when near, to what they did at a distance.