Noam Chomsky Quotes

Today, we have a powerful military that serves as a deterrent, but the enemy we have today is not like World War II, where you sign a piece of paper and the war is over. Today they're not in uniform. In my time we knew what the enemy looked like, we knew his weapons systems and such. Today, your cab driver may be the person, you have no idea. I don't know how we got into this fix, but we're there.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army.

An insurgency is the most difficult to fight of all military activities.

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

There isn't a war on terror, there is a war of terror.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers.

Al-Qa'ida does not follow a traditional command structure, wear uniforms, carry its arms openly, or mass its troops at the borders of the nations it attacks. Nonetheless, it possesses the demonstrated capability to strike with little notice and cause significant civilian or military casualties.

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

If we were fighting an army, the work would be comparatively easy. We are fighting a secret revolutionary organization.

Counter insurgency is something we can’t do, can’t do well, and shouldn’t be doing.

The insurgent can sow disorder anywhere, whereas the counterinsurgent—fighting on behalf of the government—has to maintain order everywhere.

Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who distained open battle in favor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In fact, conventional warfare is the relatively recent invention.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

Unconventional warfare needs to remain the heart and soul of U.S. Special Operations Command and component commands.

Our enemy now is a stateless network of religious extremists. They do not obey the laws of war, they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians. They have no armed forces per se, no territory or citizens to defend and no fear of dying during their attacks.

War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

The United States is at war with the al Qaeda terrorist group. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.