"Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it, and wipe it clean of life, but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did by putting your young men into the mud." 

—Military historian T.R. Fehrenbach