Political Quotes

“Another thing has happened since September 11, and that is a lot of Americans realize there are people in the world who do not care about mutual assured destruction; and there are people who have technology, who understand how to leverage technology. Today the experts call it asymmetric warfare, that is, you do something that has a great deal of leverage and damage capability, far beyond the parity or the proportionality of your military to the other military. That is, you may have a very small military that could not in a conventional war take on the United States of America; but if you can use a technological weapon, and that includes today missiles, you can do a lot of damage, far beyond your size. So I think since September 11 it is no longer unimaginable that one of these thousands of missiles that are now being built by our adversaries may in fact be used by them at some point. In fact, with all the construction of ballistic missiles that is taking place right now, it would be the first time in our history that all this construction and development and technology dollars went into a program and it was never utilized. When we saw technology go into the building and development of tanks, they used tanks. When we saw building and technology development go into the development of machine guns, they used them. The same thing with aircraft and artillery. So the idea that the bad guys are building these missiles but they do not intend to ever use them is itself a myth.”