That we have had to spend several years relearning these lessons is a measure of the U.S. defense establishment's failure to take counterinsurgency seriously after the American retreat from Vietnam.
Quotes about counterinsurgency (9 Quotes)
You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.
Well, the oil, the oil spot, if you will, is a, is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you're trying to do is to always extend that, to push that out.
I think the central mission in Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that would be inclusive of everybody, and that in a, in an insurgency and a counterinsurgency, that's really the center of gravity.
But it's not only human rights activists who are concerned. The U.S. military is reluctant to be drawn into a counterinsurgency war, ... They don't think it's possible to say you're going to go down there and help the Colombian military shoot drug traffickers without shooting at the FARC, and that makes them very nervous. It's a rebellion that's been going on for some 40 years, and it's plainly not going to come to an end soon -- the Pentagon fears it's a whirlpool that's going to suck them in.
I think what we saw today was the effect of our counterinsurgency and security operations in Tall Afar in the previous weeks. The enemy then decided to bail out. They knew they were being destroyed.
We have built enough Iraqi capacity where we can begin talking seriously about transitioning this counterinsurgency mission to them,
You can't do counterinsurgency warfare without a large army. The operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are largely army affairs.
RUSH All right, well, we have three sound bites here. Let's go the first one. It is indeed on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, talking to Senator Dick Turban ... There are 32 Iraqi battalions, 27,000 Iraqi soldiers, who are trained now to lead counterinsurgency with the support of US forces. What's the Democratic plan What would you do now in Iraq, Senator Durbin