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“Insurgents tend to ride and manipulate a social wave of grievances, often legitimate ones, and they draw their fighting power from their connection to a mass base. This mass base is largely undetectable to counterinsurgents, since it lies below the surface and engages in no armed activity”
― David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency

“The same official commented that the Pakistani army response took approximately 48 hours to mount, consisted of a two-battalion sweep of the area, commanded by a full colonel, and found nothing—a further example of the uselessness of large-scale sweep operations in this type of environment.”
― David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

“The constant life and death struggles of the Everglades violent and implacable, but not mean, never mean.”
― Patrick Astre, The Last Operation

“They weren’t just typical keep-’em-scared politics.”
― Tim Tigner, Betrayal