Rumsfeld Rules !
The recent leak of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memo may have well been a purposefully executed trial balloon to test the elite response to the idea of a sweeping reorg of the DoD. It may have been leaked by the staff officers of the Joint Chiefs in an ongoing effort to kill off such a prospective ” Revolution in Military Affairs ” that threaten bureaucratic empires in the armed services.
In any event, if this represent’s Rumsfeld’s real thinking I’m very glad that he’s the Secretary of Defense because at a critical time of transition to asymmetric warfare ( the strategic position of the United States is such that all foes – separately or in combination – are in an asymmetric position and will wage war and diplomacy accordingly). Not being a captive of the Pentagon bureaucracy Rumsfeld has the vision to try to change the DoD rather than be changed by it to become yet another guardian of the status quo.
Rumsfeld has asked his chief advisers some pointed questions. here are the answers they should give:
Q: Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Absolutely. The American political-ideological response to Islamism has been the least effective and amateurish aspect of the War on Terror while the creative use of Special Operations and high tech have been the most effective. This is a war of tracking,surveillance, stealth and attacks of surgical precision punctuated by bursts of larger, conventional force actions.
A large percentage of the world’s population is sitting on the sidelines, afraid to offend Islamist terrorists, apprehensive of our ultimate intentions and in the case of Europe, resentful that our response was not simply to passively absorb the effects of terror as the price of ” leadership ” but to dare to do something about the root causes – Islamist totalitarianism and rogue state actors. We have hedged regarding the nature of the threat too often and only intermittantly emphasized our own ideals as competiting memes, which even many of our critics admit might be beneficial if enacted in the Arab world as political reforms. The move by President Bush to invest in Indonesian schools today before Saudi Arabia can radicalize them as they did in Pakistan should be the precedent for a greater ” Hearts and Minds ” effort.
Q:Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Yes. Timidity and inertia work against us. The assumption should be that the next administration will not have the will to initiate major changes in terror policy and might even retreat from the battle. Strategy needs to be ” locked in” today in an aggressive posture.
Q:Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
The last part begs the question of the issue of ” clerical command and control “. When radical imams and mullahs issue fatwas that result in their organizations initiating paramilitary and terrorist operations against American targets they cross the line from noncombatant to military commander. As such, they would become legitimate military targets for the United States. We are not yet treating such figures or those who act as financiers of terror as targets.
Secondly, getting caught up in a ” body count ” attrition mentality may be able to offer up yardsticks of bureaucratic measurement but doing so plays to the enemy’s numerical strengths. We might as well be passing out contraceptives in Pakistan if we are going to look at the Terror War in that fashion. This perspective could also distract us from the need to think in terms of employing a strategy that seeks a disruption of networks, denial of critical resources, ideological delegitimization and retention of the intiative over the enemy. More Sun Tzu and less McNamara please.
Q:Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions.
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