Hugh Shelton Quotes

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.

This is a totally different war than any we've ever fought before.

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

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.

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

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

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

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

Clearly-drawn front lines have become a thing of the past due to complex locations with ubiquitous enemy threats.

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.

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.

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

We live in an age that is driven by information. Technological breakthroughs... are changing the face of war and how we prepare for war.

The battle against terrorism is not only a military fight but primarily a battle of information.

Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.

The aim of war now is not to defeat your enemy – that’s probably impossible – but to change the way he and his supporters think.

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

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one… The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks.