Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

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

Living in this manner also gave them the opportunity to locate targets and develop methods of attack that would make the most impact on the population, infrastructure, and governments of these areas.

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.

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

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

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.

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

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.

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

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.

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.

With an insurgency, people are the prize. We can win every battle and still lose the war.

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

A government needs 100 soldiers for every guerilla it faces.

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

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

The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of annihilating enemy forces...The concept that success in counterinsurgency consisted of separating the insurgents from popular support never took hold. The U.S. Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army –p even if it had a hard time finding it.

Killing every insurgent is normally impossible … Force must be used with incredible restraint and discrimination and … risks generating popular resentment, creating martyrs that motivated new recruits, and producing cycles of violence.

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

The United States, acting within the constraints imposed by its traditions and public attitudes, cannot crush a revolutionary movement which is sufficiently large, dedicated, competent and well supported…. The structure of U. S. military power is ill-suited to cope with guerrilla warfare waged by a determined, resourceful, and politically astute opponent.

We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.

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

Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.