Frank Carlucci Quotes

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.

When I first deployed as a military intelligence officer my resources were a map, a grease pencil and two corporals.

Some of the best fan mail I get are from our men and women in the military and intelligence communities. They say, 'Boy you do your homework, this is exactly how we're doing it.'

Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.

We need to do a lot more thinking about how the regime is going to evolve, how the bad guys are going to adapt their tactics, and what measures we're going to need in order to go forward.

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

They have involved co-operation between the Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda operatives on training and combined operations regarding bomb making and chemical and biological weapons.

So we have a group within the office that is devoted to support for the war fighter. That's, of necessity, an operational and tactical level of concern.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

You don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on.

Unfortunately, the historical record of failure to prevent strategic surprises is overwhelming. In conventional warfare, victims usually misread the evidence or miscalculate their responses, and they can suffer surprise even when their intelligence collection systems and defensive preparations are impressive.

If a military mission has no guide who knows the inside information of the opponents, it will likely have to retreat half of the way.

The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences

America’s military defense capability owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any other single source of intelligence… it’s value is worth more than five CIAs

Intelligence isn’t just something for the Cold War. When you think of Pearl Harbor, you can understand why. Unpleasant surprises are out there.

We haven’t done strategic military analysis in so long that most of our analysts don’t know how to do it any more..

The military executes policy decisions.

Unless more efforts based upon long-range planning are put into military preparations and operations, it will be very hard to win the final victory.

There is not a military commander alive today who is genetically predisposed to say that he has enough ISR and assets, and particularly not in the Central Command theater.

One of the first things I learned in the Marine Corps is that any military mission has to be defined as precisely as you can possibly define it, and then you size the force and equipment force to accomplish that mission without fail.

CIA will continue to pursue every lead; analyze the information we collect with critical, objective eyes; and brief reliable intelligence to protect U.S. forces deployed around the world.

When developing intelligence assessments, initial tactical reports often require additional collection and validation.

History tells us that a general can move and feed an army as efficiently as he likes, but the real litmus test is the battlefield.