If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.

I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.

If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything in recent history, it is the unpredictability of war and that these things are easier to get into than to get out of, and, frankly, the facile way in which too many people talk about, 'Well, let's just go attack them.'