H. R. McMaster Quotes

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

You've got to hae ground forces that are capable of going after them and rooting them out.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

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

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

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

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

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

We certainly have the best special operations forces in the world and know how to do counterterrorism extremely well.

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

The thing we've learned from the last 20 years of counterterrorism is the significant value you get from removing leadership from the battlefield in degrading the organization.

In combat operations in places like Afghanistan, we often confronted the specter of dangerous people with powerful weapons who were a threat to their community and to our soldiers. Our aim was to quickly determine who in that community was a legitimate actor who could be trusted with a firearm and who was not.

Counter-insurgency, as you know, is a roller-coaster affair.

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

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.

We need a military strategy to defeat terrorists on the ground.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

When the United States first went into Afghanistan in 2001, it devastated the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks using only a few hundred C.I.A. and Special Operations personnel, backed by American air power. Later, when the United States transitioned to conventional Pentagon stability operations, this success was reversed.

As the Obama administration negotiates with the Karzai government and with Pakistan, we may be tempted to make commitments that, in the name of nation-building, restrict our ability to fight terrorists. If we must involve the Afghan government in every night raid, our operations will slow and targets will escape.

It strains credulity to suggest that an agency charged with gathering intelligence affecting the national security does not have an 'intelligence interest' in drone strikes, even if that agency does not operate the drones itself.