Otto Schily Quotes

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

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

Clearly-drawn front lines have become a thing of the past due to complex locations with ubiquitous enemy threats.

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

Unconventional warfare needs to remain the heart and soul of U.S. Special Operations Command and component commands.

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.

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.

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

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.

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

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

Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who distained open battle in favor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In fact, conventional warfare is the relatively recent invention.

In Afghanistan this week, outnumbered Northern Alliance rebels on horseback defeated Taliban forces armed with tanks. Experts say the victory is just like the story of David and Goliath and David's friend, the Stealth Bomber.

A colonial war is a very dirty kind of war. You're not fighting armed forces. You're fighting mostly unarmed people. And to fight that kind of war requires professional killers, which means mercenaries.

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.

The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.

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

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

There should be victory in war—not management.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

Can a foreign army, particularly with a vastly different culture, be a successful counterinsurgent?

The Special Operations community is rooted in unconventional warfare.

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.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.