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One of the banners I would put up in front of any American president and new administration is 'Do not overreact to your predecessors' policies.'
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I read people; that's one of my strengths. It's not that I can't be fooled, but I'm not fooled often.
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President-elect Trump wants to win them if you're going to be involved in a war. I don't think he wants to be involved in war, but when we are, he wants to win.
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Since 1989, we have been deploying on an average of every 18 months.
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The military executes policy decisions.
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To get an Army that's already fighting a war to change in stride to a total different military strategy on the ground - and to get everybody on the same page - was accomplished by the sheer force of Dave Petraeus' will.
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Radical Islamists spread from Western Africa through the Middle East, all the way to South Asia to sub-Indian continent.
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My involvement with Guantanamo began as vice chief of staff.
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If we have the intent to use the military only when needed, then that also becomes, then, therefore, a credible deterrent.
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'Duty' is a refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one. Mr. Gates scrupulously identifies his flaws and mistakes: He waited too long, for example, for the military bureaucracy to fix critical supply issues like the drones needed in Iraq and took three years to replace a dysfunctional command structure in Afghanistan.
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United States and our allied partners need to wake up. ISIS is at war with us and civilization.
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If you took ISIS' oil, that would not stop them. It's not their only source of revenue. It would be a setback, but it would not stop them.
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I have lots of concerns at working with Russia going against ISIS until we have agreements in terms of what Russia's behavior is going to be.
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The fact to the matter is, we never developed a comprehensive strategy to deal with radical Islam. And the 9/11 commission said one of the things we must do is develop a global alliance to combat it.
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Fighting forces, particularly ground forces, have to operate on the basis of unit cohesion.
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On a professional side, you've got a tough problem to fix, Geoff Miller's going to do it, and he's always going to do it to very high standards, and he's always going to be on the side of right. He's always talking about 'what right looks like' - just a phrase he would always use.
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Cyberespionage and cyberattack is exploding from our adversaries inside our country. We don't seem capable of stopping it.
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It's not that I can't be fooled, but I'm not fooled often.
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I have decorated soldiers for heroism before, and it was always such an honor to do it.
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The Arab Spring, nobody's in the streets demonstrating for radical Islam; they're in the streets with a window of democracy. They want our political reform, our social justice, and our economic opportunity.
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Qatar has funded and helped arm ISIS. They also, as we all know, fund Hamas. That's got to stop. And we've got to use our pressure against that country to knock that stuff off.
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In 2005 in Iraq, the constitution was written. A new government was elected. That government was trying to take office in 2006.
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By the end of 2008, clearly, the al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated. They actually said that in many of their transmissions that we were able to pick up. And the Shia militia, largely those trained by the Iranians in Basra and also in Sadr City, had been defeated.
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Most people who aspire to be president don't have a foreign policy and national security background. The exception was certainly Hillary Clinton.