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first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the
statesman and commander have to make is to establish...the kind
of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor
trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This
is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."
So wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian "philosopher of
war," in On War over a century and a half ago.
This is excellent
advice for President Bush and his advisers as they begin the campaign
against worldwide terrorism proclaimed by the president in his speech
last Thursday. The president promised to "direct every tool
of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial
influence, and every necessary weapon of war" in this campaign.
But before the Bush team can formulate a response that has a high
probability of success, they know that they have to answer a broad
array of strategic questions.
The logical
approach to the problem might go something like this. What is the
desired end state, the outcome at which we aim? What conditions
must prevail for this outcome to exist? What combination of the
various instruments of power, e.g. diplomatic, economic, informational,
and military, is most likely to bring about the desired end state?
What is our preferred strategy for employing these instruments of
power in order to achieve the end state? What are the defensive
and offensive components of our strategy?
But this gets
at only part of the problem. The adversary, as Clausewitz reminds
us, possesses an active will that responds and adapts to our actions.
What are the enemy's objectives? What is his strategy? What does
he perceive to be our critical vulnerabilities? What will he target
as our "center of gravity" — "the hub of all
power and movement on which everything depends....The point against
which all energies should be directed?" On the other hand,
what does our adversary value? What is his center of gravity? What
weaknesses can we exploit? While the tools of war may change and
while the character of war may change as a result, these questions
must always be asked and answered.
Strategy is
the art of using time and space in the pursuit of one's political
objectives. Strategy also links end and means. The strategy we follow
in this war will depend a great deal on what our objectives are.
The president placed the bar very high when he stated that our goal
would be to root out and destroy terrorism everywhere. To do this,
we must destroy the terrorists' moral and material support structure,
a structure that is not easily localized. But although the task
is a difficult one, it is not insurmountable.
Someone once
observed that "it's not the things we don't know that get us
into trouble, it's the things we know that just ain't true."
This applies to the oft-repeated cliché that the military
always prepares to fight the last war. The fact is that the military
and policymakers have come a long way since Desert Storm in 1991.
As William Arkin reported recently in the Washington Post,
even before the events of September 11, Pentagon planners were war-gaming
a concept called "effects-based operations (EBO)," an
approach employing the full spectrum of national power — economic,
diplomatic, military, and informational — "to simultaneously
influence, deter, and coerce a potential adversary."
In security
circles over the past decade, there has been much discussion of
a putative "revolution in military affairs" (RMA). Some
analysts have stressed the central role of technology in creating
an RMA, but some of the most important military revolutions in history
have resulted primarily from the innovative use of new organizations
and concepts. This seems to be the case with EBO.
The president
said in his speech that the war on terrorism will include "dramatic
strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success."
Thus we can envision not only air strikes against the terrorists
and their support structure, but also special operations against
individuals and groups, economic operations to dry up the enemy's
sources of funding, information operations designed to deceive the
enemy and destroy his communications networks, and psychological
operations to sow distrust and discord among the terrorists and
their supporters.
The defensive
component of our strategy must focus on preventing further terrorist
attacks. Many individuals have claimed that they predicted the events
of September 11 but that no one would listen. There is no doubt
that the United States had become complacent about homeland security,
but in fact this was precisely because so many commentators had
cried "wolf" over the last decade that many policymakers
had stopped listening. It is one thing to predict in a general sense
that an event is going to take place. It is another to provide adequate
warning as to a specific time and place.
The events
of September 11 constituted an "intelligence failure,"
but one that must be traced to organizational factors and political
decisions made years ago. The organizational cause of this failure
was described by Thomas Schelling in his forward to Roberta Wohlstetter's
classic study of strategic surprise, Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision.
Surprise,
when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated,
diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility
but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated
that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also
intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear,
is too sensitive to give to those who need it. It includes the
alarm that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off
so often it has been disconnected
....It includes
the contingencies that occur to no one, but also those that everyone
assumes somebody else is taking care of. It includes straightforward
procrastination, but also decisions protracted by internal disagreement.
It includes, in addition, the inability of individual human beings
to rise to the occasion until they are sure it is the occasion
— which is usually too late.
As much as
organizational factors may have contributed to the nation's intelligence
failure, they are less significant than political decisions made
over a decade ago that gutted the human intelligence capability
of the United States. For no matter how sophisticated technology
may be, it cannot replace "humint."
But concerns
in the 1970s about a "rogue" Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) led to congressional reforms that forced the agency to shift
away from the use of human assets to reliance on technology. But
without using the often unsavory characters that agencies have managed
in the past, it is difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate a
terrorist support system and gain information about specific terrorist
events. As one former government official familiar with counterterrorist
operations remarked on TV shortly after the attack, "we can't
follow the rats down into the sewer."
The United
States needs to replace the current stove-piped intelligence system
and fix the organizational problems arising from crevices in overlapping
jurisdiction and responsibility. The creation of a new agency for
homeland defense seems a reasonable first step.
As the president
warned in his speech last Thursday, this is going to be a long campaign.
Just how long might be illustrated by another passage from On
War: "...even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always
to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the
outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may still
be found in political conditions at some later date."
The key to
success will be to make it clear to our adversaries that our war
on terrorism will hurt them worse than their terrorist war will
hurt us. In so doing, it will take a concerted effort to maintain
the unity of the American people and the coalition. Let us hope
we are up to the challenge.
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