Rosa Brooks Quotes.

1. "As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform ad they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack. . . . This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle."
- Quote by Rosa Brooks

2. "It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world"
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

3. "It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

4. "What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)"
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

5. "My point here is not that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place (though it certainly was). My point is that this cynical, foolish, arguably illegal war might still have come right in the end—if only we had tried a little less hard to fix everything that struck us as broken."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

6. "the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all—and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

7. "I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

8. "Building relationships on a global scale requires putting human beings on the ground in regions all over the world—and only the Army has the manpower to do this."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

9. "Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

10. "only a small minority of military personnel have combat-related jobs. In 2015, even after two lengthy wars, the percentage of military personnel in combat specialties was only 14 percent overall—with substantial differences between the services: for instance, 28 percent of enlisted Army personnel serve in jobs that are classified as combat positions compared to just 3 percent of Navy enlisted personnel. To be sure, many military personnel in noncombat positions end up in combat [zones] anyway. . . . But even when deployed in combat zones, most members of the military never end up fighting."
- Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon