Bruce Riedel Quotes

Our calculus with the Drone Program is very simple. Kill them before they kill you!

Drones have turned Al Qaeda’s command and training structures into a liability, forcing the group to choose between having no leaders and risking dead leaders.

Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do.

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

The worst terrorist crimes going on right now are the drone campaigns.

The worst thing about being a drone pilot is that there is no intimate connection with what is happening in reality.

Drones are not going to solve the problem alone but they are part of the package.

The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from targeted killing itself.... The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333.

Terrorism is a strategy of provocation.

It’s hard to know whether drone strikes have provoked more anger than other forms of Western power.

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

Ungoverned spaces in the Islamic world will be exploited by people who wish us ill. They will not be contained.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the number of violent extremist groups has grown across multiple continents. From Syria to Somalia to Pakistan, the United States is combating many of these groups - usually with bombs and missiles. Large numbers of innocent people are invariably caught in the middle.

A real possibility exists that we will be forced to confront, contain, and ultimately defeat radicalism and al-Qaeda alone, or at least with far fewer allies in the region than we had before.

The safe haven that al-Qaida has found in Pakistan is very troubling.

Defeat the Taliban. Secure the population.

Without U.S. forces in the country, there is a strong possibility Afghanistan could host a reinvigorated Taliban allied to a reinvigorated al Qaeda.

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.

Drone attacks are against the national sovereignty and a challenge for the country's autonomy and independence. Therefore, we won't tolerate these attacks in our territorial jurisdictions.

I know that 'boots on the ground' is a scary phrase and that the Western world has gotten used to sterile attacks.

We don't have enough American troops inside of Iraq to destroy ISIL any time soon.

How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake -- one person killed that was a civilian -- and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that.

If you look at ISIS, General MacArthur, and General Patton, they're spinning in their graves.

Terror is a tactic. We can not wage "war" against a tactic.

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.