Counter Insurgency Quotes

The Pakistani Army, the Frontier Corps, the Frontier Scouts and Police have carried out quite impressive counter-insurgency operations.

American forces focus just on the enemy, on Al Qaeda, and they forget about the people…. If you want to win the war against al Qaeda, you should protect the people first

Sure, we have an obstacle, ISIS. They can do great damage. They can do great damage and they scare the living hell out of everybody with good reason. But they are, instead of dealing with nation-states that are arranged against us, we're to deal with non-state actors that can do damage to us. But this is within our control. We are beginning to make genuine progress as to how we isolate them, how we take them out. We're in a situation - I mean, I just could go on. But I am - the only generic criticism I had is we're not talking about the possibilities.

War on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement operation.

Counter-insurgency, as you know, is a roller-coaster affair.

The way you really stop Al-Qaeda is by stopping their funding. It's not by carpet-bombing or land invasions or anything.

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

Counter insurgency is unworkable without a responsive and politically popular national government.

We have a duty to fight ISIS; air operations alone will not defeat ISIS.

Civil Cooperation Bureau

Please provide continuous Predator coverage over anti-government militants.

We could have prevented the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon if we had 20,000 troops shoulder to shoulder.

But one thing that we have done in the last four years is we have really put pressure on the leadership of this organization [Al Qaeda]. We have killed a significant number of leaders. We've captured others. Those that remain have to look over their shoulders, they have to be on the run. So that even if we don't manage to kill or capture them all within four years, what we do do is put the kind of pressure on them that makes them focus on their own skins, as opposed to carrying out attacks.

GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism.

We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.

But the key shift in focus will be from counter-insurgency operations to more and more cooperation with Iraqi security forces and to building Iraqi security capacity.

You cannot deal with an industrial-strength extremist problem just with force of arms. You have to have that political component as well.

We are helping our Somali brothers get rid of these narrow-minded attackers. The Somali people do not support the extremists, they are on the side of our soldiers.

Let's have a conversation about how we destroy ISIS.

As we are all aware, Special Operations Forces, SOF, are playing an increasingly essential role as we continue to fight and, more importantly, win the war on terror.

We also have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS and eventually support our Arab and Kurdish partners to be able to actually take out ISIS in Raqqa, end their claim of being a Caliphate.

How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS?

ISIS has leadership, just like al Qaeda has leadership. It's important to be able to eliminate the individuals that are leading the organization.

It's important to remember that some of our best sources in the war against radical Islamic terrorism are Muslims, both in America and overseas.

A change of strategy suggests there is a strategy. I don't see a strategy that deals with - that concerns with dealing wit with ISIL overall. There is some sort of strategy for dealing with it in Iraq. I'm not sure there is one in Syria. And Libya is another problem altogether.