Military Leaders From The United States

"what the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. It's not a betrayal that people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and the Black conservatives who are the heart of government are where they are. As a matter of fact, the civil rights movement demanded access, right? But I don't think that we can assume that what was done in the 1950s and 1960s is going to do the work of the 1980s and 1990s."

"After touring the South, General Colin Powell concluded that there was no impediment to a black being elected president in America, noting that he received his strongest support from white Southerners."

"There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said “we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge.” It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability."

"During the transition to the new Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright famously asked Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?""

"I didn’t have any choice... What choice did I have? He’s the president."

"It’s just like in the military — you argue, you debate something, but once the president has made a decision, that becomes a decision for the Cabinet."

"The people in my life made me what I am."

"As successes come your way, remember that you didn't do it alone. It is always we."

"Don't get me wrong. I don't look down on intelligence gatherers, and I don't mean to condemn any specific intelligence staff or the intelligence community. It's a hard, stressful, vitally necessary job. During my career I've worked with intelligence agencies and experts of every kind, from a young lieutenant, battalion-level intelligence officer to all sixteen branches of the U.S. intelligence community. With rare exceptions, intelligence analysts do all they can to give you the information and facts you need to understand the enemy and the situation and come up with the best decision. I found over the years that my intelligence staffs told the best story when I worked with them as they were putting it together. I questioned them constantly; I sent written analyses back, loaded with scribbles in the margins; I challenged them to defend their analyses. Staffs appreciated the challenge. They wanted to get the story right as much as I did."

"Verified facts don't always come pure, but with qualifiers. My warning radar always goes on alert when qualifiers are attached to facts. Qualifiers like: My best judgement... I think... As best I can tell... Usually reliable sources say... For the most part... We've been told... and the like. I don't dismiss facts so qualified; but I'm cautious about taking them to the bank."

"Facts are verified information that is then presented as objective reality. The rub here is the verified part. How do you verify verified? Facts are slippery, and so is verification. Today's verification may not be tomorrow's. It turns out that facts may not really be facts; they can change as the verification changes; they may only tell part of the story, not the whole story; or they may be so qualified by verifiers that they're empty of information."

"You can't make good decisions unless you have good information and can separate facts from opinion and speculation."

"I believe that when you first take over a new outfit, start out trusting the people there unless you have real evidence not to. If you trust them, they will trust you, and those bonds will strengthen over time. They will work hard to make sure you do well. They will protect you and cover you. They will take care of you."

"But leaders are not gods. Their understanding is never totally clear, totally accurate, totally certain. Every leader is human... imperfectly human. Water-walkers sometimes fail, and quiet walkers sometimes end up on top. Leaders need to watch all their subordinate; work with all of them, encourage the hotshots, but invest in the others. Always be prepared to change your mind, however firmly made up, when dealing with those infinitely faceted beings we call people. The leader must never forget that he may end up working for one of them."

"In the Army, we are measured constantly and exhaustively. We get evaluation reports annually and every time we change jobs or our supervisor changes jobs. Our immediate supervisor evaluates us. So does our next higher superior, and his evaluation compares us with all our peers who serve under him. Our school performance is graded. Our spouses are silently observed. Our careers are obsessively examined and managed. The reason is simple and obvious. We do not hire from outside. If we need a battalion commander fifteen years from now, we have to grow one now from a promising new second lieutenant. Sergeants major are not hired in from Walmart or Hertz. It takes many years to grow them from basic training recruits."

"When I was a young second lieutenant, I loved my job. I loved the Army. I put everything I had into doing the job well. And I was content. Nothing was promised, and I had few expectations. Count on maybe becoming a lieutenant colonel and retiring with twenty years of service at half pay, I was told. Just be thankful for anything that comes after that and thank your soldiers for making it happen. If you hit the walls of the pyramid, find satisfaction there. Be happy with that prospect. And I was."

"Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don't disappoint yourself."

"Naysayers are everywhere. They feel it's the safest position to be in. It's the easiest armor to wear... And they may be right in their negativity; reality may be on their side. But chances are very good that it's not. You can only use their naysaying as one line in the spectrum of inputs to your decision. Listen to everyone you need to, and then go with your fearless instinct. Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations?"

"In the "heat of battle"- whether military or corporate- kindness, like calmness, reassures followers and holds their confidence. Kindness connects you with other human beings in a bond of mutual respect. If you care for your followers and show them kindness, they will reciprocate and care for you. They will not let you down or let you fail. They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them."

"When things go badly, it is your fault, not theirs. You are responsible. Analyze how it happened, make the necessary fixes, and move on. No mass punishments or floggings. Fire people if you need to, train harder, insist on a higher level of performance, give halftime rants if that shakes a group up. But never forget that failure is your responsibility. Share the credit, take the blame, and quietly find out and fix things that went wrong. A psychotherapist who owned a school for severely troubled kids had a rule: "Whenever you place the cause of one of your actions outside yourself, it's an excuse and not a reason." This rule works for everybody, but it works especially for leaders."

"It is the human gesture that counts. Yes, medals, stock options, promotions, bonuses, and pay raises are fine. But to really reach people, you need to touch them. A kind word, a pat on the back, a "well done," provided one-on-one and not by mob email is the way you share credit. It is the way you appeal to the dreams, inspirations, anxieties, and fears of your followers. They want to be the best they can be; a good leader lets them know it when they are."

"Success ultimately rests on small things, lots of small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things — a feel for what is going in in the depths of an organization where small things reside. The more senior you become, the more you are isolated by pomp and staff, and the harder and more necessary it becomes to know what is going on six floors down. One way is to leave the top floor and its grand accoutrements and get down into the bowels for real. Don't tell anyone you are coming. Avoid advance notices that produce crash cleanups, frantic preparations, and PowerPoint presentations."

"Whenever I'm faced with a difficult choice, my approach has always been to make an estimate of the situation- a familiar military process. What's the situation? What's the mission? What are the different courses of action? Which looks most likely to succeed? Now, follow your informed instinct, decide, and execute forcefully; throw the mass of your forces and energy behind the choice. Then take a deep breath and hope it works, remembering that "hope is a bad supper, but makes a good breakfast.""

"I may be down, but never out. An infantry officer can do anything."

"As you will see, there are no conclusions or recommendations, just my observations. The chapters are freestanding. You can read them straight through or jump in anywhere. Everyone has life lessons and stories. These are mine. All I can say is that they worked for me."

"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."

"Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes."

"If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude."

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."

"The information I presented to the U.N. was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA. And they stood behind all that information. (From a 2009 interview by Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy )"

"I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world — onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama."

"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America. I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way."

"I wouldn't characterize it the way Larry has, calling it a cabal... what Larry is suggesting in his comments is that very often maybe Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney would take decisions in to the president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a number of occasions."

"I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?"

"Nothing was spun to me... What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us. (Powell told David Frost in a BBC television interview)"

"We want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking."

"There is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy."

"This may sound a little improper, but when the Vice President and I are alone it's Colin and Dick."

"You break it, you own it."

"I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure."

"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."

"There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found over the decades is that unless you do have hard power — and here I think you're referring to military power — then sometimes you are faced with situations that you can't deal with. I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan. So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world. We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works."

"My heart grieves when I think about the situation in the Middle East. I've worked very hard on this for two years, and for years before that. But trust is broken down. We have to do everything we can in our power — all of us, the United States, the European Union, any other nation that has the ability to influence the situation in the Middle East — to work with the Palestinians to put in place a leadership that is responsible, with representative institutions of government that will clamp down on terrorism, that will say to its people, "Terrorism is not getting us anywhere. It is not producing what we want: a Palestinian state. It is keeping us away from a Palestinian state." And we also have to say to our Israeli friends that you have to do more to deal with the humanitarian concerns of the Palestinian people, and you have to understand that a Palestinian state, when it's created, must be a real state, not a phony state that's diced into a thousand different pieces."

"Capital is a coward. It flees from corruption and bad policies, conflict and unpredictability. It shuns ignorance, disease and illiteracy. Capital goes where it is welcomed and where investors can be confident of a return on the resources they have put at risk. It goes to countries where women can work, children can read, and entrepreneurs can dream."

"Far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people. And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, "Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us"? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are."

"What the hell, what are these guys thinking about? Can't you get these guys back in the box?"

"The sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction ... And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq."

"If I were a member of Congress, I would not vote for the proposed amendment and would fully understand and respect the views of those who would. For or against, we all love our flag with equal devotion."