Bob Ainsworth Quotes

We must also recognize the new realities of modern warfare and the modern landscape of a battlefield.

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

But clearly, this is what this is about. It's about pushing the security bubble out. It's about rooting out every last guy, so that there's not even somebody who can fire a single, solitary RPG round from some little qalat out here.

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.

The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.

I believe that this is a different war than America has ever fought in the past. It is a non-conventional war. It means that you've got to use every tool you've got available to you.

The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit.

Time and again, attempts by machine-age armies to impose their will on irregular forces supported by a sympathetic population failed.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

To be a good spy you have to have to have an intense intellectual curiosity, also it requires the ability to deal with ambivalent situations, a certain degree of creativity and physical courage

The winner of the next war will be he who learns the most and learns the fastest.

If you don’t know who they are, where they are, and what they’re planning, you can’t get them before they get you.

A counter-insurgency is won by intelligence—not by bombardment.

Just take terrorism, for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's not like what people think about what Facebook is.

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

We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside looking out - instead of being on the outside looking in.

When you really start figuring things out as a quarterback, you realize you don't have to be perfect every time, but you do have to be quick and decisive.

Internal security implies also an external dimension, a defence capacity.

Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it's infinitely more effective to work with a country's soldiers and citizens at eye level.

Look, it's no longer about capacity, how many ships, how many air wings, how many battalions. It's about capability. If we dominate cyber space and know and can read the other guy's mail, and with a very accurate laser-guided munitions put it in this window or that window, it's not how much, it's knowing exactly where to pinpoint a target.

I'm from a generation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our battleground was where we learned. It's not like the old generation where they used to train and train and train, and then suddenly an operation would come up, and they'd go on it.

It is the duty of the Defence Ministry and the forces to keep India safe.

In the face of a rising China, along with authoritarian regimes from Brazil to the Philippines to Turkey to Russia, and the constant presence of belligerent non-state actors, we need to reform our military to deal with asymmetrical threats.

There is nothing quite like working on a counter-terrorism case in real time.