Che Guevara Quotes

Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.

There is in guerrilla warfare no such thing as a decisive battle; there is nothing comparable to the fixed, passive defense that characterizes orthodox war.

George Washington hated the guerrillas. He wanted to imitate the British red coat armies, fighting as gentlemen are supposed to fight.

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.

[Francisco Franco] said they should resort to guerrilla war. Which has a history in Spain.

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

The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

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

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.

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

Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists.

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

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

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.

Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.

The guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.

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

This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra… Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us.

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

Freedom can be gained only at the point of an IRA rifle, and I apologize to no one for saying that we support the freedom fighters of the IRA.

The resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. This new group will be defined soon by me.

In Afghanistan this week, outnumbered Northern Alliance rebels on horseback defeated Taliban forces armed with tanks. Experts say the victory is just like the story of David and Goliath and David's friend, the Stealth Bomber.

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968...Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops...Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces.