John Abizaid Quotes

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.

The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.

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.

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

Here’s the difference between us [and Hamas]. We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.

On military battlefields, we have defeated radical Islamic forces every time we have seriously gone after them, from Iraq to Afghanistan.

It's true that since 9/11, the application of conventional military rules of engagement has gotten a bit foggy. The Taliban were not an 'enemy state,' but the Canadian Forces conducted its operations in Afghanistan as though the rules of war applied anyway.

Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles.

During the surge in Iraq, we were able to roll back the tide of al-Qaeda and associated insurgents because we succeeded in mobilizing Iraqis - especially Sunni Arabs - to join us in fighting against the largely Sunni extremist networks in their midst.

Air power will not defeat ISIS. It has not been able to deny ISIS freedom of maneuver and the ability to attack at will.

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

I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way.

Despite what you hear in the news from the Obama administration and the military, our strategy of conducting infrequent airstrikes and re-taking pockets of Iraq and Syria terrain will only help us achieve short-lived tactical victories.

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.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

Before the surge started, frankly, after I left Iraq towards the end of 2006, I was worried that we were losing the war. But after the surge, I felt that we succeeded.

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.

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.

There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you're going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it's like we called Saddam's army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.

In the early 2009, a campaign plan developed by Petraeus and General McChrystal to defeat the Taliban, they required a minimum force of 40,000. President Obama rejected that recommendation and provided 25 percent less. He also decided he would pull the force out in 12 to 15 months.

If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.