Disproportionate Force Quotes

You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.

I think most people, in their lifetime, have seen somebody who has the ability to use force lord it over other individuals. I see a lot of those videos, and I am disturbed by people being yanked out of their cars, and it seems to be a disproportionate amount of young black men. I'm disturbed by it.

When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land. That's not defense. Call it what you like, it's not defense.

Jacksonian common sense does not give much weight to the concept of disproportionate force, believing that if you are attacked, you have the right and even the duty to respond with overwhelming force until the enemy surrenders.

If women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

The implied threat of using nuclear weapons to curb guerrillas was as absurd as to talk of using a sledge hammer to ward off a swarm of mosquitoes.

Hamas, they are using civilians' lives, they are using children, they are using the suffering of people every day to achieve their goals. And this is what I hate.

I don’t care how precise your bombs and weapons of war are. When you set them off, innocent people will die.

The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible.

Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.

You needn't kill everyone to complete the job... We instituted Civil Affairs, which provides development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%..

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it.

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima - the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.

Why don’t Israelis stop the tanks and fight us with rifles so the fight would be equal?

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war.

Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives.

The death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.

When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictablity about the outcome.

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United States fights somebody, we're going to be huge. They're going to be small.'