Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war: think of it now, before you are actually comitted to war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: we have to abide their outcome in the dark. And when people are entering upon a war they do things the wrong way round. Action comes first, and it is only when they have already suffered that they begin to think.

War asks many people to do unreasonable things.

(Athenian embassy:) Realise, while there is time, the inscrutable nature of war; and how when protracted it generally ends in becoming a mere matter of chance, over which neither of us can have any control, the event being equally unknown and equally hazardous to both.

The misfortune is that in their hurry to go to war, men begin with blows, and when a reverse comes upon them, then have recourse to words.

(Book 1 Chapter 78.1-3)

War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end

If the newspapers begin to publish stories about wars, and the people begin to think and talk of war in their daily conversations, they soon find themselves at war. People get that which their minds dwell upon, and this applies to a group or community or a nation of people, the same as to an individual

For some reason, a lot of people back home — not all people — didn’t accept that we were at war. They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain. I’m not saying war crimes should be committed. I am saying that warriors need to be let loose to fight war without their hands tied behind their backs. According to the ROEs I followed in Iraq, if someone came into my house, shot my wife, my kids, and then threw his gun down, I was supposed to NOT shoot him. I was supposed to take him gently into custody. Would you?

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

No one starts a war — or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so — without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

War: first, one hopes to win;
then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;
in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

In war, truth is the first casualty.