Daily Inspiration Quote by Rand Beers

Counterinsurgency, Rand Beers reminds us, isn’t a video game about racking up enemy casualties. It’s a political contest staged in neighborhoods, where the decisive metric is whether ordinary people believe tomorrow will be safer than today. The line lands because it flips the usual battlefield hierarchy: the “center of gravity” isn’t the insurgent force, but the public’s perception of security, and perception here isn’t a soft, optional add-on. It’s the terrain.

The intent is bluntly practical. “You can’t succeed” sets a hard condition: no amount of raids, drones, or checkpoints matters if civilians think cooperation will get them killed. Protection isn’t only body armor and patrols; it’s predictability, rapid response, and the absence of arbitrary violence. Beers’s phrasing - “convince the people” - signals the uncomfortable truth that safety has to be both real and legible. If the population can’t see it, it doesn’t function.

The subtext is a critique of militaries that treat insurgency as a purely kinetic problem. Insurgents thrive on demonstrating state weakness: assassinations after elections, intimidation of local leaders, spectacular attacks that say, “We’ll still be here when the foreigners leave.” Against that, protection becomes a credibility campaign. Every failure to shield informants or keep markets open becomes insurgent propaganda.

Contextually, the quote sits in the post-9/11 era’s hard-earned lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, where “winning” regularly meant tactical victories paired with strategic erosion of trust. Beers is naming the wager: legitimacy is built, or broken, at the doorstep.