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H. R. McMaster

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What is certain about the future is that even the best efforts to predict the conditions of future war will prove erroneous. What is important, however, is to not be so far off the mark that visions of the future run counter to the very nature of war and render American forces unable to adapt to unforeseen challenges. - H. R. McMaster
#Best
#Challenges
#Future
#Nature
#War
We often operate effectively on the physical battleground but not on the psychological battleground. We fail to communicate our resolve. - H. R. McMaster
#Fail
#Often
#Our
#Physical
#Resolve
Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy. - H. R. McMaster
#Enemy
#Every Time
#Every
#Time
#Treat
We're so enamored of technological advancements that we fail to think about how to best apply those technologies to what we're trying to achieve. This can mask some very important continuities in the nature of war and their implications for our responsibilities as officers. - H. R. McMaster
#Achieve
#Best
#Mask
#Nature
#War
It's important to study and understand your responsibilities within any profession, but it's particularly important for military officers to read, think, discuss, and write about the problem of war and warfare so they can understand not just the changes in the character of warfare but also the continuities. - H. R. McMaster
#Character
#Important
#Understand
#War
In the years leading up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking about defense was driven by ideas that regarded successful military operations as ends in themselves rather than just one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve - and sustain - political goals. - H. R. McMaster
#Goals
#Ideas
#Political
#Power
#Thinking
Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security. - H. R. McMaster
#Early
#Poor
#Security
#Understanding
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. - H. R. McMaster
#Emotions
#Enemy
#Uncertainty
#War
People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor, and interest. - H. R. McMaster
#Fear
#Fight
#Honor
#People
#Today
When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity - what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship with ethnic and sectarian divisions. When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things. - H. R. McMaster
#Do The Right Thing
#Live
#Man
#Society
Consequences of linear thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq included overestimating indigenous forces' capabilities, underestimating the enemy, and the associated expectation that the coalition could soon reduce force levels and shift to an exclusively advisory effort. - H. R. McMaster
#Afghanistan
#Effort
#Enemy
#Thinking
The key thing about force protection is... if you focus too much on force protection, and you disengage yourself from the community, you're putting yourself at greater risk because you need to interact with the community in a positive way to gain the intelligence you need. - H. R. McMaster
#Community
#Focus
#Intelligence
#Positive
Lyndon Johnson was a profoundly insecure man who feared dissent and craved reassurance. In 1964 and 1965, Johnson's principal goals were to win the presidency in his own right and to pass his Great Society legislation through Congress. - H. R. McMaster
#Goals
#Great
#Man
#Society
#Win
It is in their inherent moral components that recent Western strategies may be deficient. What percentage of the populations in countries engaged in the 14-year effort in Afghanistan could even name the three main Taliban groups with whom their soldiers have been engaged? - H. R. McMaster
#Afghanistan
#Effort
#Moral
#Name
#Three
We confuse activity with progress, and that's always dangerous, especially in war. - H. R. McMaster
#Activity
#Dangerous
#Progress
#War
Much of the conventional wisdom associated with Vietnam was highly inaccurate. Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration. - H. R. McMaster
#American
#Communism
#Result
#War
#Wisdom
The professed war-weariness among populations who have sent only a small percentage of their sons and daughters to fight in recent wars may derive from a failure to communicate effectively what is at stake in those wars and explain why the efforts are worthy of the risks, resources, and sacrifices necessary to sustain the strategy. - H. R. McMaster
#Failure
#Fight
#Risks
#Strategy
#Why
Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction. - H. R. McMaster
#Communication
#Death
#End
#Perspective
The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the 'New York Times' or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C. - H. R. McMaster
#College
#Field
#Lost
#New
#War
There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you're going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it's like we called Saddam's army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army. - H. R. McMaster
#Avoid
#Fight
#Stupid
#Try
#War
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