The Long War: Dispatch 2 -- Progress Reports and American Primacy

Retired Marine LtCol Frank Hoffman of the Marine Corps Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, moderated the panel on the Progress of The Long War. He started with a history of the names used to describe the conflict:

Global War on Terror or GWOT is a “wonderful, irrelevant Pentagon acronyms.” For a time it was called the “struggle against violent extremism.” Some like to call is World War IV, which “does suggest a long-tem conflict with a global dimension … but gives bin Laden and Al Qaeda too much credit.” For the moment we stick with ‘The Long War’ even though it doesn’t describe what we’re fighting against or for.

Hoffman is a “glass half-empty kind of guy.” Key points in his strategic assessment of progress:
1) We have been at war longer than World War II.
2) Department of Homeland Security “is obviously still a work in progress.” Moreover, we’ve “transformed our intelligence system … with another layer of management that’s seen as success.”
3) “Osama bin Laden is alive and reputedly well. Dr. Bruce Hoffman has testified that this enemy is dispersed and more lethal since he’s been fighting us.
4) We’ve spent $500 billion on this war, every dime of which has been borrowed.
5) We have successfully precluded other attacks here at home, but you can’t say the same for [all the cities throughout the world].
6) Attitudes about America are down around the world.
7) Our moral standing has somewhat been reduced by our detention and rendition policies.
8) James Fallows in The Atlantic suggests that we declare victory and come home. Fallows overestimates our success and underestimates the potential of our antagonists.
9) Our enemies are ‘autocatalytic’ now, meaning self-perpetuating.”

The panel attendees took issue with his dire summary, seeming to say instead that while things are bad, they aren’t horrible.

The panel included:
Col. Gary Cheek of the US Army, President of the Strategic Planning Division;
MajGen Steven Johnson, Deputy Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. Johnson was the Commanding General of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force Forward, and deployed to Iraq from the fall of 2004 to 2006;
Captain Eugene Gray, of the Coast Guard, who has led three different cutters at different points in his career;
Dr. David J. Kilcullen, a reserve LtCol in the Australian Army, currently on loan to the State Department, at the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

Col Cheek argued, “What the US government has done in the past year is very positive.”
The three key elements of the national strategy are working. The first two are to protect and defend the homeland and to attack terrorists and their ability to operate. “One of the lessons of the war on terror is that for every terrorist that we kill, we create new ones, because every terrorist has brothers or friends. Which brings us to the third element of US strategy, which is countering ideological support for terrorism … the State Department is really in charge of this.”

Overall Cheek believed that “Al Qaeda is greatly disrupted but still very dangerous and works through information to inspire enemies to attack us. The first aspect of their strategy is to establish an emirate in Iraq. What we do in Iraq and how long we stay there is very important. You cannot separate the environment from the Muslim people who live within it. That is a key aspect of the war.”

MajGen Johnson made key distinctions between the motivations of the enemy as he has experienced them versus how they are perceived via the media. “You hear now in the press the drumbeat of ‘let’s get the war over, let’s get the troops home,’ but as you all know the war will continue. We’re fighting an enemy that is not bent on defending his religion or his faith, but bent on dominance and on making the rest of us live as he sees fit.”

General Johnson described how he came to this realization. “In Musayyib, a guy drove a fuel truck into a mosque just as people came out of the mosque … He got out, he drenched himself in gas and then he lit himself on fire and blew the truck up and killed 100 people. At that point I realized the nature of the enemy.”

He also noted that we “must examine the long war in terms of emerging threats around the world.”

“In many countries throughout the world, there are problems with aging populations that can’t be cared for and youth that cannot be employed.”

Also, resources are becoming scarcer and this is “fuel for the fire” in the long war. Finally, “erosion of national identity and the erosion of borders and the difficulty of keeping nation-states together” are all “factors that are going to be used by our enemy.”

“We will not solve all these problems and fight the long war militarily. Even platoon commanders [in Iraq] don’t go out without the support of the other elements of [national] power.”

He also argued that while the scope of the threat and the scope of our efforts to combat it are well-known within military circles, “our countrymen don’t understand how this war is going to affect them. Our countrymen have been used to quick fixes to shock and awe, and this war is going to involve a lot more than that.”

General Johnson also described the way the areas in which the Marine Corps is focusing what might be called its future development. These were distributed operations, comprising
1) “The ability of Marines to take the fight to the irregular battlefield will affect our training, our equipment and our manpower structures;”
2) “Command and control capabilities, including initiatives “to increase the ability of commanders to” gather all the information available and better command and control their forces; and finally,
3) Seabasing.

The Coast Guard’s Captain Gray described efforts that the Coast Guard is taking to adjust to the Long War. “The Coast Guard has developed a plan called Maritime Sentinel … boiled down, the position is to prevent, detect, and stop attacks in the maritime domain.”

The Coast Guard’s initiatives include three main areas, maritime domain awareness, effective maritime security regimes, and facilitating the free flow of legal trade.

“The Coast Guard is a unique agency. It is a regulatory agency … It is a law enforcement agency … It is the nation’s fifth military service … And most developing nations when they start forming naval forces … often need Coast Guard assistance before they need Naval assistance.”

Dr. Kilcullen of the State Department, being both a civilian and not an American, seemed a bit freer than the military members of the panel to elaborate on his views of the current situation.

“A lot of what we’re going to talk about right now is a guess. We are involved in a continuous live experiment against an adaptable enemy,” and things can change easily, he noted.

He reminded the audience of a chart in the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, a matrix divided into four quadrants: conventional threats, irregular threats, catastrophic threats, and disruptive threats.

“The US has unprecedented superiority against every other nation in the world. We can incinerate any other nation on the face of the globe … It is no surprise that our enemies have moved out of that quadrant into quadrants where they can survive: irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive.”

“Most of our other opponents lack the technological capability to” pursue catastrophic or disruptive means, so they choose to fight us in the irregular quadrant.

He pointed out some key myths about irregular warfare:
1) “That it is a euphemism or code for Islamic extremism.” This is not true at all, he argued, noting that “environmental, far-right groups, far-left groups, and a variety of other players” are all adapting to irregular warfare. “Everyone that wants to fight us is moving in the direction that Al Qaeda has shown the way. Anyone that wants to fight us is going to adopt this approach.”

2) “Irregular warfare and the China problem are opposites.” He noted that this is especially prevalent in the Navy.

3) The US is “so good at network central warfare and so good at technology and that’s going to give us a decisive advantage.” Instead, he argued that insurgents can adapt faster than we can, and can exploit the media better than we can. He referenced a video of Zawahiri from some time ago in which he described a strategy to be used against the US: We “can beat Americans by being slower than them because they have attention deficit disorder.” This ability to think differently in terms of time is key to Al Qaeda’s abilities.

As far as the length of the war goes, Dr. Kilcullen reminded the audience that the wars of national liberation after World War II lasted for several decades; that the Indian wars in the US lasted for nearly two centuries. The Long War “will not be over in 5 or ten years … This longstanding dynamic will create a movement possibly longer than the Cold War.”

As to Al Qaeda itself, Dr. Kilcullen posited that it “has transformed itself into primarily a propaganda shop. They offer commentary on events.” Their sphere of operation is “not Waziristan, it is the global media.”

“We are seeing more 3/11s and more 7/7s. Think of the 9/11 attack as an example of expeditionary terrorist warfare. It forms the cell elsewhere, travels intercontinentally, then plans and mounts the attack.”

“What we are seeing now is a guerilla model. The team is already there, they grew the team near the target.”

Finally, he noted the interagency aspect of the fight. “The idea that the war on terrorism is largely a ground forces activity is a temporary phenomenon. The military is not too small, but other agencies are too small. Australia has as many diplomats as the United States.”

In response to a questioner, Dr. Kilcullen elaborated on a key point of the national strategy that is never explicitly stated.

“Preserving American primacy is the unstated goal of the US national security policy. I think we need to be able to talk about that. I’m of the opinion that American primacy is one of the greatest things to ever happen to the world,” but some elements of our strategy contradict this unstated goal.

“Defending the homeland [by itself] does not preserve American primacy. In a likewise manner, attacking everyone that puts up a terror flag can undermine our moral standing and does not preserve our primacy.”