hard core

“Since news organizations from around the world could arrange for their journalists and crews to cover Tora Bora, it is puzzling why the U.S. military could not have put more soldiers on the ground to entrap the hard core of al-Qaeda.”

Simon & Schuster: The Longest War

“A hard core of such women—estimated by sociologists Martin Rein and Lee Rainwater to number about 750,000—stay on AFDC for as many as twelve years at a stretch.”

Simon & Schuster: Why Nothing Works

“But Pelopidas had organized a hard core of rebels to remain stationed before the gates, and Calepios had a tent pitched where, he told the joyous mob, he would wait until the Spartans accepted his invitation to leave.”

Lion Of Macedon

“Crumpton countered that taking on the al-Qaeda hard core hiding out in Tora Bora was not the same as defeating the Taliban: This was different, this was a high mountain stronghold heavily defended.”

Simon & Schuster: The Longest War

“John wrote speeches warning against a sure-to-return government, a government of the power classes, a government to whom we will never surrender, we Americans possessing within us a hard core that will serve us well, loyal to our king, we will never give up.”

Simon & Schuster: Our American King

“(T-34/85 in the Guards tank armies) fanned out around a hard core of the slower-moving JS's (usually about two bat - talions or less in strength, i.e., thirty to forty tanks) with their long-barrelled”

Barbarossa