David Chandler Quotes

Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.

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

If we were fighting an army, the work would be comparatively easy. We are fighting a secret revolutionary organization.

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

Insurgencies have a way of going on for a long time historically.

A government needs 100 soldiers for every guerilla it faces.

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.

The main reason for the armed resistance is the American military presence.

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

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.

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

England pretends it is not by the naked sword, but by the good will of the people of the country that she is here. We will draw the naked sword to make her bare her own naked sword.

Since 1775, the average insurgency has lasted 7 years and since 1945 it has lasted 10 years.

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.

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.

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.

The Islamic State has proven that terrorists can seize and deploy modern military equipment on lesser-armed opponents.

We see a transformation of warfare from the big armies and battlefields in open spaces to a fragmentation of armed groups and smaller armies, which move into city centres, which increasingly become the theatre of warfare.

My father believed in armed struggle.

One of the things that I've learned, and I think we've all learned, is that we are not going to get the kind of decisive, permanent victories in this fight against terrorism that we would get from fighting another country. We're not going to get that MacArthur/Emperor moment, because by definition, even after decimating Al Qaeda in the Fata, even after taking out [Osama] bin Laden there's still people there who have both the interest and the capacity if we don't maintain vigilance to strike against the United States.

There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all. We besieged them and we killed most of them.

We have absolute support from all our masses inside our occupied territories and even outside our occupied territories. The "War of the Camps" [in Lebanon] is another picture of this strong support of our masses.

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.