He can occasionally say startling things: "It's fun to shoot some people," he told an audience in 2005, referring to enemy guerrillas.
Under the laws of war, which the Administration asserted were applicable in fata, it isn't necessary to know the names of enemy guerrillas before attacking.
The policies implicit in the document afforded Union field officers considerable discretion when handling enemy guerrillas; taken to its logical extreme, Lieber's formulation justified the summary execution for Confederate guerrilla fighters who fell into Union hands.
"The U.S. is a brutal enemy," a guerrilla leader known as Richard told a dozen rebels during a class about the invasion of Iraq.
He says his men have killed 50 enemy combatants — guerrillas of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, known by their French initials, F.D.L.R., which include remnants of the Hutu fighters who carried out the genocide in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 and who have since made a haven in Congo.
(As U.S. General David Petraeus skillfully and quietly demonstrated in extricating the United States from Iraq by buying off most enemy Sunni guerrillas and getting them to fight against al Qaeda, the policy is still used occasionally, but we just don't call it the a-word).
There is, of course, a hesitancy in time of war — and, in particular, during an increasingly unpopular war against an entrenched guerrilla enemy — to publish stories that could be interpreted as undermining military morale.
You can defeat a guerrilla enemy either by finding him and killing him, or by so transforming the political circumstances by which he garners his support that he no longer receives it".
By this time, Vann had seen enough of the flaws in the leadership of the Saigon forces (he had noted them individually in previous after-action reports) to begin to understand the dimensions of the problem that confronted the whole advisory mission: to wage a war of infantry combat against a guerrilla enemy with an army that suffered from an institutionalized unwillingness to fight.
The central issue of the American military mission here is at stake: how to defeat a shadowy guerrilla enemy without alienating fiercely independent Afghans with a long tradition of souring on, and then humbling, great powers, among them the British Empire and the Soviet Union.
