Quotes from Andrew J. Bacevich

Of course, some captains are more adept at doing so than others. A successful president correctly discerns what existing conditions require and creates the impression that he is the master of circumstance rather than its servant. James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley offer illustrative examples.

Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.

Americans today must reckon with a contradiction of gaping proportions. Promising prosperity and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the United States toward insolvency and perpetual war.(Washington rules, p. 250)

I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high-whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops-is inherently suspect.

The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.

In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It's the perfect antidote for excessive self-regard.

As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11 - a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.

In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.

Far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.

What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power that he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding.

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post–Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers like Sullivan were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action.

In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism.

If you will the end, you must will the means.

For a democracy committed to being a great military power, its leaders professing to believe that war can serve transcendent purposes, the allocation of responsibility for war qualifies as a matter of profound importance.

as the Age of Bush gave way to the Era of Obama, little of substance changed. That was the greatest irony of all.

Like the present-day GOP, the Northern Alliance was a loose coalition of unsavory opportunists, interested chiefly in acquiring power.

American warriors may not win wars, but they do perform the invaluable service of providing their countrymen with an excuse to avoid introspection. They make second thoughts unnecessary. In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism. In

Indeed, Greenspan deemed it "fortunate" that "policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces," so much so that "national security aside, it hardly makes any difference" whom Americans installed in the White House.9

As for diversity within the military itself, highly publicized instances of tokenism—female officers becoming fighter pilots or graduating from the army's Ranger School—divert attention from gaping inequities related to class.

the United States military did not fight a decade-long war to preserve South Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times over.

effort to rebuild American military power while restricting its use, initiated by Creighton Abrams and carried to its fruition by Colin Powell, failed.

Ethnic cleansing, genocide, failed states, civil war, terror: these became the defining characteristics of the decade-long interval between Desert Storm and the events of 9/11.

The line in the sand that Carter drew along Iran's Zagros Mountains now stretches from Central Asia through the Middle East and across the width of Africa. That the ongoing enterprise may someday end—that U.S. troops will finally depart—appears so unlikely as to make the prospect unworthy of discussion. Like the war on drugs or the war on poverty, the War for the Greater Middle East has become a permanent fixture in American life and is accepted as such.

One result has been to contrive a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier.