Politics & Power Quote by David Hackworth

Hackworth’s line reads like a field order dressed up as civic advice: identify the enemy, remove it, prepare for a long campaign, mobilize the home front. The verb “excised” is doing heavy work. It’s surgical, clinical, and deceptively confident, suggesting terrorism is a diseased tissue you can cut out cleanly. But the sentence immediately undercuts that fantasy with “wherever it exists” and “will take years,” a tacit admission that the “body” is not one battlefield but an everywhere-problem with no tidy borders and no quick victory parade.

Coming from a soldier who made his name criticizing bureaucratic war-making, the subtext is partly a warning shot at political impatience and media cycles. He’s insisting that any serious counterterror effort won’t be a lightning strike; it’s endurance, logistics, and morale. Yet the rhetoric also expands the theater of war to daily life. “Total commitment” and “everyday involvement” sound democratic, but they carry the ghost of ration books, surveillance, cultural conformity, and the expectation that citizens perform loyalty as a routine.

Context matters: post-1990s terrorism and especially the post-9/11 atmosphere made “involvement” a malleable term, easily translated into public consent for open-ended policies. Hackworth’s phrasing both steadies and escalates. It prepares Americans for duration and sacrifice while normalizing the idea that the fight against terrorism isn’t merely conducted by professionals abroad; it becomes a civic identity at home. That’s the line’s power and its danger: it turns a security problem into a permanent national posture.