Michael Hastings Quotes

George Washington hated the guerrillas. He wanted to imitate the British red coat armies, fighting as gentlemen are supposed to fight.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

William R. Polk discusses the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon [ Bonaparte] and other cases where the conflict turns into a political war, and the invader, who usually has overwhelming power, loses because they can't fight the political war.

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.

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

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.

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

The U.S. public is more likely to sour on a conflict when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure. So to keep up our staying power, our skill in hunting and killing our foes has to be matched by our care in concealing and protecting our troops. Three particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon. But these things are expensive for a military that has historically been enamored of big-ticket items such as fighter planes, ships and missiles.

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

Nobody has yet found a way of bombing that can prevent foot soldiers from walking.

Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight?

Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he's lost the battle.

To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

In Afghanistan this week, outnumbered Northern Alliance rebels on horseback defeated Taliban forces armed with tanks. Experts say the victory is just like the story of David and Goliath and David's friend, the Stealth Bomber.

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.

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it's far more advanced.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

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