Arundhati Roy Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I think the primary message to the world is that the United States is going to remain the strongest military power in the world.

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

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.

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

Let no one expect us to disarm unilaterally. We are not a naive people.

Any great power—especially a great one suddenly deprived of its traditional adversary—faces the perennial dilemma of showing a reasonable return on its costly military investments.

Overruling the Joint Chiefs of staff, overruling the State Department, overruling the CIA, President Reagan Authorized providing Stinger Missiles to the Mujahedeen Afghanis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The West only talks about how you can militarily defeat the terrorists, but terrorists are very difficult to defeat because they can appear anywhere.

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 guerrilla band is not to be considered inferior to the army against which it fights simply because it is inferior in fire power.

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.