Donald Rumsfeld Quotes about War

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact.

Most US presidents since World War II have led military actions without a declaration of war by Congress, though most, if not all, have properly consulted and sought support from Congress. That is the wise thing to do.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

We know where they are [Iraq's weapons of mass destruction]. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Five days or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last longer.

We are in the process of trying to liberate that country. And at the moment where the war ends and the coalition forces occupy the areas where those capabilities - chemical and biological weapons - are likely to be, to the extent they haven't been moved out of the country, it obviously is important to find them.

Any country on the face of the Earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.

I'm glad you asked. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.

It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

The Cold War was a war, and we won it.

An institution that...would permit Iraq, a terrorist state that refuses to disarm, to become soon the chair of the United Nations Commission on Disarmament, and which recently elected Libya - a terrorist state - to chair the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of all things, seems not to be even struggling to regain credibility. That these acts of irresponsibility could happen now, at this moment in history, is breathtaking.

No. That's someone else's business. Quagmire is - I don't do quagmires.

As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe - it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.

The implication that there was something wrong with the war plan is amusing.

There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily that there are going to be unintended loss of life.

... something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.

The reality is that [Barack] Obama has some 15 countries in the current Libya coalition. President Bush put together close to 50 countries for the Afghan coalition, some 40 countries for the Iraqi coalition, more than 90 countries for the Proliferation Security Initiative and over 90 countries in the Global War on Terror.

Every country should be tired of going to war. War is a terrible thing. If I had been in Congress, as much as I would be inclined naturally to be supportive of a president, any president, I would have voted no, had the issue come to a vote.