Quotes About Counterinsurgency

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed.

Colonial counterinsurgency policies rest undiluted in current security measures. Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably act.

I think the central mission in Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that would be inclusive of everybody, and that in a, in an insurgency and a counterinsurgency, that's really the center of gravity.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out.

Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism.

Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations.

first, that in a counterinsurgency campaign, the top priority is not to kill the enemy but to protect the population from enemy intimidation. This was a dramatic change from U.S. policy

The other pillar was more original. It centered on the need to build adaptive learning organizations to succeed in counterinsurgency campaigns, which the manual described as competitions in learning.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't acknowledge that there was an insurgency. (Rumsfeld was old enough to know, from Vietnam days, that defeating an insurgency required a counterinsurgency strategy, which in turn would leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq for years, maybe decades—whereas he just wanted to get in, get out, and move on to oust the next tyrant standing in the way of America's post–Cold War dominance.) Out

The Germans have done wonderful work. Not long ago, a German battle group battalion conducted a very impressive counterinsurgency operation in a portion of Baghlan province. I think these are the first counterinsurgency operations conducted by any German element after World War II. And they did a very impressive job.

The brutality of The Story of the Lion and the Mirror refracts the violence of this historical moment. The lion, intoxicated by the taste of blood, mistakes his own blood fort hat of the calf he wants to devour and ends up bleeding to death. We wonder if this story is perhaps a parable about how counterinsurgency fails: thinking it is consuming the blood of its enemy, the state bleeds itself out.

You can't kill your way to success in a counter insurgency effort. You have to protect the people, get the civil military balance right, train the locals, and practice effective strategic communications.

McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory. This was why counterinsurgency - blanketing the population in safety and winning them over - was necessary.

In practice, American modernizers tended to be distrustful of populist politics and inclined to favor elite-led societies; often they turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and social control.

Mr. Ambassador," Rice replied, "in counterinsurgency, if it doesn't seem like you're winning, you're not winning." She added, "This war isn't working."20

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

I think every war certainly wears on national will and national patience, particularly a counterinsurgency.

counterinsurgency"—a standard term for terrorism that we direct.

The overseas frontier—wars in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti—acted as a prism, refracting the color line abroad back home. In each military occupation and prolonged counterinsurgency they fought, southerners could replay the dissonance of the Confederacy again and again. They could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals—liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, camaraderie—while putting down people of color.

Offensive operations and hunting down the enemy is an integral part of any counterinsurgency approach.

I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself, without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency, will work.

Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order.

President Barack Obama started by accepting the military's counterinsurgency, but came out of Afghanistan having decided that counterinsurgency actually doesn't work.