Raymond T. Odierno Quotes

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

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

Offensive operations and hunting down the enemy is an integral part of any counterinsurgency approach.

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

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're not running out of [fixed] targets. Afghanistan is.

In the short run, using militias might be the quickest and easiest way to improve order on Iraq's streets and uproot the terrorists and guerrillas who routinely attack American troops and civilian targets.

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

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.

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.

The result is that you are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than the military strikes.

With an insurgency, people are the prize. We can win every battle and still lose the war.

When you’re fighting [private] militias, you have to quash them.

We are very well-trained soldiers and we are armed. We will start ambushes, bombings, and even suicide bombings. We will not let the Americans rule us in such a humiliating way.

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

Fighting forces, particularly ground forces, have to operate on the basis of unit cohesion.

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

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.

In my view, airstrikes without an effective ground force are unlikely to make any meaningful contribution to defeating Isis.

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.

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

Our troops shouldn't be mired in taking land for the Afghan military, providing force protection and fighting a permanent insurgency.

Responding to terrorism inevitably implies military consequences. This may shock some people, but these groups must also be dealt with on a military footing. I won't use the word 'combat' to avoid being painted as a crusader.

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.

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