Targeted Destruction Quotes

The day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centers on a vast scale may become the principle operation of the war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.

I told him there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the Tartars [Turks], and then proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stones and dust, and when the villages became untenable and the inhabitants fled from them into the fields, bullets and bayonets completed the work.

Treat everyone found outside the walls [of the city] as anti-Japanese and destroy them…. Since it is convenient in conducting sweep operations to burn down houses, prepare materials.

Armenians were absolutely hunted like wild beasts, being killed wherever they were met, and if the slaughter was not greater, it was, I believe solely owing to the vastness of the mountain ranges of that district which enabled the people to scatter, and so facilitated their escape. In fact, and speaking with full sense of responsibility, I am compelled to say that... the object was extermination, pure and simple.

I immediately sent a regiment up with orders to destroy the place, leaving [at least] one house.... The regiment has returned and Randolph is gone. It is no use tolerating such acts as firing on [civilian] steamboats. Punishment must be speedy, sure, and exemplary.... I would not do wanton mischief or destruction, but so exposed are our frail boats, that we must protect them by all the terrors by which we can surround [them].... The town was of no importance, but the example should be followed up on all similar occasions.

Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations.

There is such thing as a 'smart bomb' - bombs are smart these days, you know.