John Pike Quotes (69 Quotes)


    They recognized that our air power was just going to brush aside their conventional forces, which is what happened in the early part of the ground campaign. They knew that the only chance they had was to wage a struggle against us that marginalized our air power.

    The paradox of war is that it has always been both glorious and terrible. What we had with air power in the first Gulf War and in Kosovo was the glory without seeing the horror. What we have now with the insurgency is the horror without the glory.

    If I was going to be going through all the trouble to conduct a well-planned assault on a nuclear power plant, I'm not going to trust some Web site to do my intelligence collection. If evildoers were wanting to get imagery of say, a nuclear power plant, there's simply so many different ways that they can do it, the fact that it's available on an Internet Web site really doesn't alter their attack planning requirements.

    It's a zero sum competition among these politicians to bring home the bacon.

    Some would say it's time to recognize that the world has changed - that the number of intelligence questions that can be answered with images from space is very limited.


    Whatever level of aid and comfort they are providing to various other regional troublemakers, at this point they seem to have gauged successfully how annoying they can be without provoking a significant response.

    A telephone company, for instance, can tell which team is winning the Super Bowl simply by looking at how many people are making phone calls at any given time, ... The National Security Agency uses this technique to monitor calls in Afghanistan or Pakistan, to try to predict an impending terrorist attack.

    I think there will be growing interest in using biometric scanning at international access points in order to catch known people coming in on false papers. The problem is, even if all these searches disclose the identity papers of some of the perpetrators, that will not tell you necessarily what their mother named them since none of these people travel under their own names,

    There's some interest here in retrofitting barns. Most farms in Southern Illinois don't have a lot of on-farm storage. And the local elevators and terminal elevators are not set up to hold grain. They have to move it out.

    It really doesn't matter what's the color of their uniform. It's not like they're going down to the flight line and grabbing a mechanic and handing him a rifle. These folks have the skills.

    It seems to me that after this last flight, NASA's painted themselves into a corner on the shuttle. They don't want to fly it if it's manifestly unsafe, but they also don't want to spend a lot of money trying to fix something that they're only going to use a few more times.

    They're all armed. If they weren't, they'd be in trouble. There are clan rivalries there. Without a weapon they'd feel naked.

    What are you training for To kill insurgents.

    Risk-averse American decision-makers would have to be focused on the possibility that the Chinese will beat us back to the moon. It would be a reasonable worry from the political perspective,

    The struggle against evil doers is a growth industry and the Marines want a piece of that. The special operations community is getting a lot larger and they need more people.

    Discovery's mission was a very nice Christmas present, ... Santa Claus has been very, very good to NASA, no lumps of coal in their stocking.

    The problem with the current conflict is that when our people get captured, they get their heads chopped off.

    Three in just slightly more than six months, versus two in the previous four years, has the makings of a trend.

    In addition to the ones they acknowledge having ... to pick up stuff that we've dropped, they probably have got others that can be used to pick up stuff other people have dropped.

    It depends on how many nodes you're talking about. A minimal survivable radio network for emergency crews, the improvement of state emergency-management operation centers these kind of steps are feasible. But when people start talking about a nationwide survivable network, I tell them, 'Welcome to what's called the real world.' No one is going to pay for such a thing.

    It's a lot easier to hit one of our own targets on a test range than it is for them to actually intercept nuclear- tipped missiles in a combat environment.

    To have a generic evacuation requirement that is not scenario-specific is unrealistic. Different areas have different levels of requirement for evacuation. Everybody needs to have a pandemic influenza plan. Not everybody needs to have a hurricane plan.

    I think that they found the urgent and compelling necessity to get Sen. Thune re-elected,

    As with every other weapon, there is no reason to hope that it is going to work perfectly all of the time.

    Back in the old days, 15 years ago, they caught them in nets. It was very undignified.

    It's a Jim Dandy concept. I have just had some difficulty sitting down and pointing to it on the map.

    It's a market that almost didn't exist five years ago, and it's now very competitive.

    To make sure there is some money left over at the end of the year, they're going to cut costs. A good place to cut costs is security.

    Historically, the Marines were recruiting warriors, and the Army was recruiting people looking for a good career move, ... Well, if you are recruiting warriors, Iraq is what you have been waiting for. But right now, Iraq doesn't look like such a good career move.

    The plan all along was to burn through the Guard and Reserve as a stopgap measure, since the fall of 2003, when it finally started to sink in that Army leaders had a long war on their hands.

    You want to look at both of them. You have to look at the total program cost, though, because that is what the taxpayer is actually paying.

    The Iraqi security forces have disintegrated on two previous occasions, in early 2004 and late 2004. They will probably be a work in progress for some time to come.

    They just weren't going to give Connecticut a big, wet kiss like that without some payback.

    Part of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is some tangible improvement in their quality of life. An essential way of doing that is increasing petroleum production and using some of that money to get the electricity on. In both cases, they seem to be doing just enough to keep things from getting worse. They do not seem to have a plan for victory on this front. They seem to have a plan for stalemate.

    If you want to think about airplanes that have defined the air age, this would have to be on the short list.

    For a Predator, it certainly did make a pretty good size bang. Normally one thinks of the warhead on the Hellfire (missile) destroying the contents of the building rather than destroying the building.

    It's basically designed to get across the beach and get a few dozen miles inland. The point being, once (Marines) had managed to secure the beachhead and get a few miles inland, the Army would come ashore and take over from there.

    I think there is a very real probability the first choice of diplomacy is going to be shown to be a dead end. And then everybody is going to have to confront what your second choice is is it atomic ayatollahs or is it the military option

    We're the sole remaining superpower, the only country that's sent people to the moon. If the Chinese sent people to the moon they'd take us down a notch.

    Is the problem that they are only just now beginning to understand how serious the damage was Did they not have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude

    If it is an international transaction, the National Security Agency is monitoring it,

    As recently as Desert Storm, they thought advanced communications was a fax machine.

    Today, you're much less worried about maritime patrol aircraft coming after you and a lot more worried about dropping bombs on the bad guys.

    It's discredited the American military without any basis in fact,

    It's certainly not going to be able to intercept all of them all of the time. If we're talking about incoming nuclear missiles, that imperfect defense is going to simply be a false sense of security.

    When I think of a surveillance company, I tend to think of Northrop Grumman rather than General Dynamics.

    Labs like Los Alamos are working with private industry to develop a number of technologies like this, but whether these guys think they have a magic bullet is a different matter.

    I think it is going to strengthen the perception that we've rounded up a bunch of bystanders - that we just rounded up a bunch of Muslims to torment them.

    It will be several years before we can say it marks the beginning of a new space company. It's too soon to say either it's going to be another road kill or it's going to be a new kid on the block.

    The problem for the enemy is that computer security vulnerabilities will almost certainly prove fleeting and unpredictable,


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