Nancy Gibbs Quotes

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.

I believe that this is a different war than America has ever fought in the past. It is a non-conventional war. It means that you've got to use every tool you've got available to you.

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

The consequences of U. S. superiority is that its opponents, both state and non-state actors, will have little choice but to resort to guerilla tactics and urban warfare because they simply cannot confront U. S. forces head on..

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

Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

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.

We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers.

This is a totally different war than any we've ever fought before.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

it is an end to the era of classical wars. Classical wars unified nations. But the [Islamic] terrorists don’t have the support of any nation.

The history of warfare has not yet enabled any army, any civilized army, the army of a democracy like Israel, to be able to deal with a ruthless terrorist enemy that uses civilians as a human shield without having some incidental civilian casualties.

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.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

We must also recognize the new realities of modern warfare and the modern landscape of a battlefield.

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called 'war' too. And there will still be no conventional war.

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

War has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front.

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we should come into control of an utterly ruined land.

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

If the innocent people who died in the attack on Afghanistan, and those who have been dying from lack of food and medical care in Iraq, are considered collaterals, are not the 3,000 who died in New York and the 200 in Bali also just collaterals, whose deaths are necessary for the operations to succeed?