Mao Zedong Quotes

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

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Guerrilla warfare is used by the side which is supported by a majority but which possesses a much smaller number of arms for use in defense against oppression.

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

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.

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.

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

Guerrilla troops, especially when supported by much of the population, [can] hold a colonial army at bay.

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

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

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

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

The people are like the sea and the guerrillas are like fish swimming in that sea. Without the sea there will be no fish. We have to drain the sea.

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.

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.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

One of the things that I've learned, and I think we've all learned, is that we are not going to get the kind of decisive, permanent victories in this fight against terrorism that we would get from fighting another country. We're not going to get that MacArthur/Emperor moment, because by definition, even after decimating Al Qaeda in the Fata, even after taking out [Osama] bin Laden there's still people there who have both the interest and the capacity if we don't maintain vigilance to strike against the United States.