Mao Zedong Quotes

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Asymmetrical warfare is a euphemism for terrorism, just like collateral damage is a euphemism for killing innocent civilians.

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

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as 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.

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

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.

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

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.