Same Old Questions
It all comes down to Clausewitz.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens, professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Owens led a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968-69.
September 25, 2001 8:20 a.m.

he 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.