War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.

The simile frames insurgent or revolutionary warfare as an inherently inefficient, frustrating enterprise: the tools and methods available are ill-suited to the task, so progress is incremental and wasteful. “Messy and slow” suggests not only logistical difficulty but moral and political complication—rebellion blurs lines between combatant and civilian, and victory rarely comes through clean, decisive battles. The image of “eating soup with a knife” emphasizes mismatch: conventional military force (the “knife”) cannot easily “consume” a fluid, adaptive opponent (the “soup”). The quote thus captures a recurring insight in modern irregular-war thinking: success depends less on brute force than on patience, intelligence, legitimacy, and adapting means to ends.