Joni Ernst Quotes

If the enemy has occupied them before you, do not follow him, but retreat and try to entice him away.

We shouldn't have politicians micromanaging this war because it is complex and unconventional.

We can stay in Afghanistan and stabilize the situation, or we can get out and win, or we can get out and lose.

We must either reduce the number of our engagements or increase the number of our troops.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

A war initiated by faulty intelligence should not to complicated by a premature pull out of our troops.

As Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.

We should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state... when you go to war, it can't be a half-step.

Defense is the first act of war.

If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.

President Obama is sending a couple hundred troops to Iraq. We spent six years trying to figure a way to get out of Iraq. And now we're back. But this time there is an exit strategy. Barack Obama has an exit strategy. In 2016, he's gone.

To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.

Attack the enemy's strategy.

If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits.

The secret of war lies in the communications.

No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.

We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again. And we're not putting ground troops into Syria. We're going to defeat ISIS without committing American ground troops.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.

There was an assumption that aerial bombing of civilians in World War II would cause fragile, working-class people to basically have nervous breakdowns and it would paralyze the state. That was the logic of aerial bombing. In fact, it doesn't happen at all, but the logic behind aerial bombing has never stopped, even though it never demoralizes, terrorizes, or paralyzes a population.

The task [in Afghanistan] is to reduce civilian casualties while still not hesitating to respond to enemies who are trying to kill our soldiers.

The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy, not permitting the greater portion of our armed forces and our valuable material to be immobilized within the continental United States.