H. R. McMaster

We often operate effectively on the physical battleground but not on the psychological battleground. We fail to communicate our resolve.

Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy.

Offensive operations and hunting down the enemy is an integral part of any counterinsurgency approach.

It's astounding the degree to which these communities are intermarried. Iraq is a crazy quilt of ethnicities and religious sects.

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.

I think any of us who have been involved in the mission of Iraq have developed a great deal of affection for the Iraqi people and are emotionally invested in what we think is a vital mission... So I think any of my contemporaries would welcome the opportunity to go back and make a contribution to this extraordinarily important mission.

It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. 'The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War' is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.

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.

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.

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.

We confuse activity with progress, and that's always dangerous, especially in war.

Some people have a misunderstanding about the Army. Some people think, 'Hey, you're in the military, and everything is super-hierarchical, and you're in an environment that is intolerable of criticism, and people don't want frank assessments.' I think the opposite is the case.

In the Army, because the stakes are so high - right? - you can't just be a yes-man and say, 'Great idea, boss!' if you don't believe it - right? - because lives are at stake. And the commanders that I've worked for, they want frank assessments; they want criticism and feedback.

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.

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.

Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction.

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.

What we have found is that we were the principal mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role.

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?

Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.

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.

Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion.

My personal experience in Ninawa Province has been that, at the most fundamental level, people don't really care if it's a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that's providing them security as long as that force treats them with respect.

The important thing to remember is war does not progress linearly. The future course of events is going to be very difficult to predict with a high degree of precision.

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.