Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom

Eight thousand words scribbled in the drafty apartments of the U.S. embassy in Moscow could be the secret to winning the war against global terrorism. Their author was George F. Kennan, an ambitious, erudite Foreign Service officer with Victorian principles and a penchant for controversy.

In 1946, when Kennan penned what became known as the “Long Telegram,” few Americans had ever heard of him or his advice to the State Department about how to deal with the Soviet Union. In the pageant of history, however, Kennan’s missive has become one of those dramatic, movie-like moments—a turn of fate when an obscure government bureaucrat crafted the kernel of an idea that led to winning the Cold War.

The truth about the importance of the Long Telegram lies somewhere on the dividing line between myth and fact. Historians will continue to write books and build careers debating the point.[1] For us, the Long Telegram has more immediate relevance, for what cannot be debated is that within the final three paragraphs—a mere three hundred and fifty words—is America’s survival guide for dealing with the security challenges of the twenty-first century.

No winter in Moscow is enjoyable. February 1946 was doubly miserable. The cold, windblown, and cheerless Soviet capital hunkered under a crust of blackened snow. U.S.–Soviet postwar relations were as sour as the weather. To make matters worse, Kennan, the minister-counselor for the American embassy, was horribly sick. He had a cold, a fever, and a toothache. After taking sulfa drugs to combat an infection, he became even sicker.

Kennan could not have been more miserable. The U.S. wartime ambassador, Averell Harriman, had left the country, leaving the minister-counselor (largely an administrator responsible for managing the sprawling U.S. compound) in charge of everything. There was Kennan, dragging himself from his sickbed to answer the endless daily queries from Washington, including a despairing note stating that the Soviets were unwilling to participate in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—envisioned by the White House as two key instruments for stimulating global postwar economic growth. Awful as he felt, Kennan decided to use his response as an opportunity to critique U.S.–Soviet policy. (See Appendix 1.)

The minister-counselor began his reply with an unpretentious introduction, appropriate to his modest station: “In view of recent events, the following remarks will be of interest.” Even though he was the number two man in Moscow, Kennan’s anonymity and lack of influence were not surprising. Generals were the rock stars of World War II. Diplomats were note takers. That was the way President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted it.

President Roosevelt had intended to personally craft postwar relations with the Soviet Union. He had a plan.[2] Roosevelt believed he could ameliorate Soviet behavior by establishing “open spheres” of influence for the great powers, in which each could control security policies over adjacent territories, but with trade, people, and ideas flowing freely back and forth. In this manner, Roosevelt believed that Stalin’s Russia would be gradually seduced and disarmed.

There were only two problems. Roosevelt shared the totality of his vision with no one—least of all Stalin. Then he died.

Achieving Roosevelt’s postwar hopes would have been difficult, even had he lived. After all, the Soviet Union was—as President Ronald Reagan famously declared decades later—an “Evil Empire.” America’s wartime ally against the Axis powers had much to account for. Joseph Stalin killed more innocents than Hitler. His nation was guided by a soulless ideology that choked the hope of freedom for hundreds of millions. Security was sought by enslaving a ring of nations from Europe to Asia and making trouble around the world. Taming the Russian bear would be no easy task.

Although he has been treated kindly by historians (perhaps in part because of the grave handicap under which he began his presidency), Harry Truman was hardly equal to the job he inherited upon FDR’s death. Roosevelt had never explained his grand design to his Vice President. “You know,” FDR once quipped, “I never let my right hand know what my left hand does….”[3] When Roosevelt died shortly before the end of combat in Europe, the man from Missouri assumed the duties of finishing the war against Japan and determining the course of postwar affairs with scant knowledge of FDR’s plans or negotiations with wartime allies.

Bracing for the challenges ahead, Truman went so far as to appoint former Senator and Supreme Court Justice James F. “Jimmy” Byrnes as his Secretary of State. To placate the ambitious Byrnes, Roosevelt took him to the Yalta Conference at which FDR discussed postwar arrangements with Stalin and Winston Churchill. Impressed by Byrnes’s presence at the meeting of the Big Three, and looking to eliminate a likely competitor for the Democratic presidential nomination, Truman selected Byrnes as the architect for U.S. foreign policy. But, in truth, Byrnes had been excluded from the most critical and sensitive discussions with Stalin and was scarcely better informed than Truman.[4] He was also largely a failure as Secretary of State: He resigned on January 7, 1947.

In practice, with or without Byrnes, Truman’s approach to dealing with the Soviet Union was a mish-mash of half steps and half measures, unguided by a coherent idea beyond hoping for the best and reacting to the worst. The Truman Doctrine, a 1947 pronouncement that accompanied a request for$400 million in military assistance to Greece and Turkey, contained a lot of rhetoric about helping free people everywhere. Yet the truth was that Truman had no clear conception for expanding support to other countries. Likewise, the Marshall Plan, an aid package for Western Europe launched in 1948, was more about speeding economic recovery than combating Soviet expansion.[5]

Truman’s boldest move proved to be the drafting of NSC-68, a top-level review of policies for dealing with the Soviet Union that concluded the Bolshevik empire could only be stopped if it were confronted at every turn on a global scale. (See Appendix 2.) The President took one look at the price tag implied by the declaration and ordered it hidden away. Truman did not begin to make significant budgetary investments in national security until after the outbreak of the Korean War forced his hand.[6]

Kennan had not watched these events from the sidelines. He was in the eye of the storm. Shortly after the Long Telegram arrived at the cables office in the United States, copies made their way around Washington. Navy Secretary James Forrestal admired the analysis so much he had mimeograph duplicates sent to senior officers throughout the Pentagon. After his posting in Moscow, Kennan, with his newfound notoriety, was appointed Deputy for Foreign Affairs at the recently established National War College, located on a spit of land in downtown Washington at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. In May of 1947, he left the academy to become Director of the Policy Planning Staff for retired General George C. Marshall. Marshall, whose steady hand as the Army Chief helped direct World War II, had been tapped by Truman to replace the mercurial Jimmy Byrnes at the State Department.

While serving as Marshall’s principal policy analyst, Kennan struggled mightily to influence the course of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. His article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published anonymously as “Mr. X,” became the talk of the town.[7] Kennan argued for using American might to “contain” Soviet power until the Communist empire collapsed.

Sadly for Kennan, little of what was being said and done actually squared well with the ideas that he had first proposed in the Long Telegram. For example, he “anguished” over NSC-68. “We should make our plans for steady, consistent effort over a long period of time,” Kennan countered, “and not for an imaginary ‘peak’ of danger.”[8] NSC-68, he feared, overemphasized the challenge of military competition with the Soviets. At the same time, the notion of “containment”—trying to block the expansion of Soviet influence everywhere, all the time—was, Kennan believed, just silly, as well as wasteful and dangerous.

The use of American might, Kennan cautioned in the concluding paragraphs of the Long Telegram, had to be measured in two important respects. “Much depends,” he wrote, “on [the] health and vigor of our own society.” In addition, Kennan argued, “We must have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us…is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” At the root of Kennan’s proposals were the essential concepts for prevailing in any long war—whether it be taking down a rival superpower or responding to the challenge of shadowy, transnational terrorist networks.

Most Cold War policy makers missed the subtlety of Kennan’s message. In the five years following VE Day, the United States largely failed to put his prescription into practice in any coherent manner. That would be a task for the boy from Abilene.

Kennan’s Long Telegram arrived in Washington on the anniversary of George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1946. On February 22, 1951, Dwight David Eisenhower, the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force that had vanquished the Nazi armies from the beaches of Normandy to the Rhine river, was rousted from a comfortable stateroom aboard the Queen Elizabeth for an unexpected rendezvous in a damp, cavernous Cherbourg warehouse. Bleary-eyed and unshaven, Eisenhower found himself surrounded by an unruly mob. A glass of champagne was thrust into his hands, followed by a litany of toasts to mark the occasions of the birth of the Father of America and the return of the liberator of France.

An unexpected road had led Ike back to Normandy. After leaving the military, Eisenhower had accepted the presidency of Columbia University. Residence in the ivory tower and retirement both proved short-lived. First, Truman asked Ike to fill in as an informal chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The creation of the JCS had been part of a massive government reorganization directed by the National Security Act of 1947. In addition to establishing the JCS—a body consisting of all the heads of the armed forces who would serve as statutory military advisors to the President—the act combined the armed forces under what later became the Department of Defense and created the Central Intelligence Agency. The following year saw the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Eisenhower approved of these initiatives. Yet while he supported Truman in each step, even agreeing at the President’s request to take command of the North Atlantic Alliance in 1951, in truth he disapproved of Truman’s scattershot approach to dealing with the Soviets. Thus, even as he sipped champagne at the break of dawn in a clammy Norman warehouse, Ike was already contemplating a run for the White House.[9]

When Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953, many of the key weapons that would be used to fight the Cold War had already been created and were in the process of being fashioned into effective instruments for national security. Yet beyond the vague notion of containment codified in NSC-68, the nation still lacked a practical, coherent blueprint for fighting and winning a protracted confrontation with the Soviets. Eisenhower provided that lifeline of a guiding idea, and his vision proved not too unlike the closing lines of the Long Telegram.

Eisenhower has always been underrated. Some historians have derided Ike’s World War II generalship, dismissing him as merely a good “political” officer, keeping Roosevelt and Churchill happy while simultaneously refereeing the scraps between testy field commanders. These criticisms are misplaced. In coalition warfare, political skill is the acme of generalship. When Carl von Clausewitz, the great nineteenth century military theorist, wrote “War is an extension of politics,” he implied a double meaning. War was not only a tool of politics, it is like politics—a contest of action and counteraction between two determined foes. Eisenhower knew his Clausewitz. Fox Conner, Ike’s mentor, made the young officer read Clausewitz’s On War three times.[10]

Ike learned his lessons well. Eisenhower’s genius was that he always understood that war was more than just winning battles. Global conflict engaged leaders, peoples, economies, and ideas as deeply and intimately as bayonets stabbing across the trench lines.

Eisenhower’s contributions to setting the course of the Cold War have been largely unappreciated. Americans may have liked Ike; most presidential historians have not. While most scholars have offered Truman a pass, they have generally given the Eisenhower White House the back of the hand. In part, this was because Eisenhower’s leadership style did not lend itself to drawing attention to the Oval Office. Ike made policy with a “hidden hand.” He ran the government much like he ran the allied armies. There would be meetings, briefings, discussions— perhaps even some cajoling, negotiation, and a bit of subterfuge—and then Ike would make a decision and send forth his generals to do battle.[11]

Although his presidency has garnered scant respect from many academics, what Eisenhower did to shape the course of the Cold War was subtle, simple, and profound. Like many of his most important decisions, Ike’s influence was reflected less in public declarations, press conferences, and bold legislative proposals than in the reasoning behind administration policies and the understated manner in which they influenced virtually every national security program.

There was a guiding vision behind Ike’s approach to the Cold War, a worldview far more powerful than the crude notion of simply containing the Soviet Union. Eisenhower, like Kennan, believed that this was war of a different kind. It would have a military dimension, perhaps even battles and campaigns, but it would not end in an inexorable march to Moscow and a victory parade. Nuclear standoff made a direct confrontation unthinkable. Lacking the capacity to come to grips with the enemy, the war would inevitably be a drawn-out contest, a long war. Ike, the general, knew that winning long wars required strategies of a different character.

The bloody lines of history are full of tales of long wars, from medieval times to the modern age. When long wars are fought badly, even winners can be losers. The least preferable option for a long war is a battle of attrition in which the enemies fight to exhaustion—for instance, ancient Sparta and Athens in the Peloponnesus or the bloody trench warfare of World War I.

The way to win a long war was to ensure that the nation flourished, that the victor grew stronger, while it hounded its enemies into the pages of the past. Eisenhower was determined to craft a way of war that left America stronger at the end of the conflict than it had been at the beginning. Ike built his approach to the Cold War on four pillars:

Provide Security. It was important to take the initiative away from the enemy and to protect American citizens—therefore, the nation needed a strong mix of both offensive and defensive means. Nothing was to be gained, as Kennan had argued, by seeming weak and vulnerable in the eyes of the enemy. Build a Strong Economy. Economic power would be the taproot of strength, the source of power that would enable the nation to compete over the long term and would better the lives of its citizens. Kennan had it right; much depended on the “health and vigor” of society. Maintaining a robust economy had to be a priority. In addition, the United States, intricately tied to worldwide networks of trade and exchange, had to be concerned about its place in the global economy. Protect Civil Liberties. Preserving a vibrant civil society and avoiding what Kennan called “the greatest danger”—the threat of sacrificing civil liberties in the name of security—was critical as well. Only a strong civil society would give the nation the will to persevere during the difficult days of a long war. Win the Struggle of Ideas. In the end, victory would be achieved because the enemy would abandon a corrupt, vacuous ideology that was destined to fail its people. In contrast, the West had a legitimate and credible alternative to offer. In Kennan’s words, America needed to face its detractors with “courage and self-confidence.”

Eisenhower’s policies reflected the core of each of these principles. He supported strong defense spending, but not at the expense of expanding the economy. Ike demanded “guns and butter.” He eschewed the excesses of McCarthyism and racial segregation, rejecting the notion that stability and security could be achieved by sacrificing human dignity. He launched a concerted effort to make the case for democracy and free-market capitalism. These were Ike’s legacies and they served as a guiding star for America’s future; from the harrowing days of the Cuban missile crisis through the tragedy of Vietnam to the renewal of the Reagan years—and on to victory.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the past no longer seemed prologue. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became fashionable for politicians and pundits to deride every national security instrument as a legacy of the Cold War, irrelevant to the challenges of the twenty-first century. That is simply wrong. The most important lessons of the Cold War are worth remembering. We believe there are three valuable teachings that can be drawn from the global struggle with Communism that have relevance to any age.

Lesson 1: The fundamentals of fighting a long war remain unchanged— sound security, economic growth, a strong civil society, and willingness to engage in a public battle of ideas. All are important. One priority cannot be traded off for another. When a nation begins to make compromises, that nation becomes the servant of war, not its sovereign—and war is a jealous, greedy, insatiable master. Long wars usually centralize power in the state and in the long run diminish it by crushing innovation, stifling liberty, and inefficiently employing resources. Sprawling militaries are fielded. Industrial production is controlled. Taxes are exorbitant. Internal dissent is crushed. During the Cold War, the United States largely resisted these urges and established means to confront the Soviet Union that served America well.

Historian Aaron L. Freidberg has persuasively argued that by the close of the Eisenhower years, “despite some relatively minor changes, the broad outlines of both the internal and external aspects of U.S. policy would remain fixed for the remainder of the Cold War.”[12] There were mistakes and miscalculations along the way, but none threatened the survival of the nation or its cause because America never strayed too far from its chosen path. In the end, the results were as Kennan predicted. We left the Soviet empire in the last chapter of history.

Lesson 2: It takes time. History argues for patience. The National Security Act of 1947 created America’s premier Cold War weapons—what eventually became the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Yet it still took about a decade to figure out how best to fight the Russian bear and develop instruments like NATO, nuclear deterrence, and international military assistance, as well as the right concepts to guide how those instruments would be used. It required years of trial and error, experimentation, and bitter lessons to get it right.

Lesson 3: Now is the time to get it right. If there is one constant, it is how Washington works. Once our government is set on a course, change is very difficult, usually impossible. Momentum is Washington’s greatest industry. Thus, bad habits get carried into the future as determinedly as successful policies and programs.

Again, the struggle against the Soviets offers a case in point. One area in which Eisenhower failed to put his stamp on the American way during the Cold War was in how the Pentagon would be organized. In the debates about the 1947 act, and again as President, Eisenhower lobbied for more integration of the services. Based on the lessons of World War II, he argued for joint operations, in which Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force assets would work closely together. He largely failed to overcome the political opposition and service parochialisms that blocked necessary reforms.

On reflection, Eisenhower concluded glumly, “Tradition won.”[13] As a result, fundamental problems in joint operations went unaddressed until 1986, which saw the passage of the Goldwater–Nichols Act. Jim Locher’s excellent account of the Goldwater–Nichols history pointed out the following:

The inability of war hero Dwight Eisenhower—with his great prestige and influence in military affairs—to overcome opposition to reform convinced others not to challenge the unyielding alliance between the services and Congress. Although the service-dominated structure repeatedly demonstrated flaws over the next three decades, administrations studied, but did not propose, reforms.[14]

The message is clear. Fix it at the beginning or live with the mistakes for a long time.

We believe that the lessons of the Cold War are a checklist for how to win the long war.

These three principles could serve well as a measure of how well prepared any nation is to stand the test of protracted conflict.

This is not all just interesting history. Winning the Long War is about the future— not the past. The real issue is whether any of these lessons matter for the global war on terrorism. We think the answer to that question is emphatically yes.

Most of the “experts” in Washington have, not surprisingly, entirely missed the point. For a decade, they have trashed anything invented before 1989 as hardly worth our interest or consideration. Any look back earns the tired chestnut of “preparing to fight the last war” or “repeating the mistakes of the past.” These witless criticisms confuse the trappings of the Cold War with the core concepts behind it. Mutual Assured Destruction, “duck and cover,” red-baiting, and the idea of armored battles on the West German plain deserve to be left in the past: The secret of future victories does not.

The Cold War’s real lessons are not how to fight the last war, but any long war. And no one should mistake the global war on terrorism as anything but a real, life-and-death struggle. It is a war by any name.

When President George W. Bush declared a war on global terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., he sparked, among other things, a furious war of words about whether we should or even can be at war with terrorists.

It is true that no country can top the United States when it comes to metaphor mania. “War,” in particular, is a staple of American political discourse. We have declared war on everything from abject poverty to overweight pets. Few terms are more overused—but perhaps not in this case.

• First, there is no universal definition of terrorism, and thus no clear enemy.

• Second, combating terrorists, whoever they are, is not primarily a military operation, but a matter of law enforcement and social, cultural, and economic conflict. It is not “traditional” war, as one U.S. defense analyst declared, in the sense understood by military professionals. Wars, he argues, are supposed to have “clear beginnings and ends...[and] clear standards for measuring success in the

Every country in the United Nations may not have signed on to the Webster’s dictionary definition of terrorism, but that does not mean that it does not exist and does not present a terrible threat to world peace. After all, there is no universal definition of fascism, but that did not keep the Allies from declaring war on the Axis powers during World War II.

Nor do terrorists seem concerned about definitional nuances. They have decided they are most certainly at war with us, and they think they are in a war they can win. In an interview before the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared, “We no longer believe in the great powers.... [W]e have heard from our brothers who fought in Somalia, American soldiers are weak and cowardly.... [T]hey ran away.”[16] Al-Qaeda’s leader frequently cited such incidents as proof that the United States could be attacked directly and could be defeated if bloodied.[17]

Additionally, arguing that this is not a “traditional” war is mere semantics. What is a real war? Only in the history books are war and peace divided into discrete chapters with bombs and bugles separated in neat paragraphs from social, cultural, and economic strife. Real wars are a competition between two thinking, determined foes who may or may not elect to restrict themselves to traditional military instruments or to respect quaint notions such as law, sovereignty, borders, or governments.

America is at war. It is not a war that can hope to forestall every terrorist act, everywhere, but it is a war that can find victory in destroying the capacity of those who seek to transform transnational terrorism into a corporate global enterprise for the indiscriminate murder of innocents. It is also a war that can be won by discrediting the legitimacy of terrorists in the eyes of those who believe that their violent acts will somehow miraculously address political, social, religious, or economic injustice.

The global war on terrorism, like the struggle against the Soviet shadow, will be a protracted conflict. The Cold War was constrained by the threat of nuclear Armageddon. This war will be long because the enemy is dispersed and disparate. It will take years to root them out and discredit their ideas. Indeed, it may be years between major confrontations. We know now that five years of consultation and planning went into the September 11 attacks.[18] Today, in some back room could be brewing the genesis of a plot that might not appear for another five years.

The terrorism war is also a war, like the Cold War, that needs to be placed in perspective. Kennan feared equally that the Soviet threat would be overstated and ignored. The Soviets were, he pointed out in the Long Telegram, “by far the weaker force.” Thus, Kennan argued that it was critical that the United States not overreach and unnecessarily diminish itself against an enemy that could not win in the long term.

Similarly, transnational terrorist groups have limited means. They cannot attack everywhere, all the time. There is no need to waste national treasure or abandon our way of life, values, and aspirations for the future in the course of defeating this determined, but vulnerable and beatable enemy.

On the other hand, like the Soviet Union, terrorists cannot be ignored. Although the Soviet empire was built on a shaky foundation of inefficiency, repression, and corruption, it nevertheless had enough chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to annihilate the world several times over.

Likewise, today it would be folly to ignore fanatical transnational terrorist groups with even a modicum of resources. The age when only great powers could bring great powers to their knees is over. As the September 11 attacks so vividly remind us, the global links that ferry goods, services, people, and ideas around the world in unprecedented volume and at unprecedented speed can also carry terrible threats. To this must be added the viable threat of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or conventional high-explosive arms that, if used to their most deadly effect, might endanger tens of thousands of lives and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

The sad truth is that the twenty-first century could be a war of never-ending vigilance. After all, the threat did not begin with Osama bin Laden. Before al-Qaeda, there was Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that conducted the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. At that time, the cult had $1 billion in resources at its disposal, which Aum Shinrikyo intended to use for triggering an apocalyptic war that only its members would survive. Plans included striking American cities with biological weapons. Documents seized during the process of investigating the cult and arresting its leaders also revealed members had an interest in buying nuclear weapons.[19] They failed only because of the ineptness of their operations and the poor quality of their weapons development programs.[20] The rise of Aum Shinrikyo is a cautionary tale. Even if al-Qaeda was destroyed tomorrow, that would be cold comfort. The modern world offers too many opportunities. There will be transnational terrorists after al-Qaeda.

If we can agree that the global war on terror is indeed a war, and likely to be a protracted one, then we must agree that ensuring we have the right approach to winning the long war is a compelling national imperative. Now is the time to ask the hard questions. That is why we have written Winning the Long War—to address what we believe are the most critical issues for all Americans.

Strategy matters. It matters not just for presidents and generals, but for the Congress, business leaders, the American Civil Liberties Union, the local Parent-Teacher Association, auto mechanics, Internet geeks, and soccer moms. That is the premise of this book. The strategy settled upon in the next few years will determine how we fight the global war on terrorism; how we decide to fight the terrorists will determine how we will live our lives.

Strategy consists of the ends, ways, and means of achieving national objectives. The ends define the goals of the strategy. Ways comprise the methods that are employed to achieve the ends. Means describe the resources that are available to accomplish the goals. National strategies involve more than just the use of the armed forces. They consider all of the economic, political, diplomatic, military, and informational instruments that might be used to promote a nation’s interest or secure a state from its enemies.

Strategies are important because they are a call to action. The most influential strategies are those that make hard choices—allocating scarce resources, setting clear goals, or establishing priorities. U.S. strategy during World War II, which declared that the allies would “defeat Germany first,” was one example. That simple declarative sentence drove a cascading series of decisions and actions that defined the conduct of the war. U.S. strategy for the global war on terrorism requires a similar clarity of focus if it is to serve as a focal point for national effort.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, eight new national strategies were published; five were specifically developed to deal with the challenges of combating terrorism, while others were revised to account for the dangers of the post-9/11 world. The strategies break down into two basic components. The first is the global war on terrorism and the objective is to destroy global terrorist networks—to root out their sanctuaries, garner international cooperation in attacking their means and resources, and undercut their legitimacy and support in the global community. The second part of the strategy is to provide homeland security—layered protection consisting of a web of public and private measures at levels from the federal government to the individual.

The real issue is: How good are these strategies? There is no universal agreement about the necessary components of strategy for describing ends, ways, and means. An initial analysis of the national strategies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) listed several useful criteria. The characteristics GAO identified are:

(For the GAO’s assessment of the national strategies, see Appendix 3.) By the GAO’s count, the grades are mixed.

Winning the Long War takes a more holistic and less dogmatic approach to gauging where we are. The details of strategy are not to be minimized, but it is important to make sure that the first order questions—the fundamentals— are right. Have we learned the three lessons of the Cold War?

Our assessment of the first three years is generally encouraging. In fact, we argue that much of the hard thinking has been done and done right. The fundamental concepts argued by Kennan and embedded in U.S. policies by Eisenhower have already taken root in contemporary strategy.

Lesson 1: Organize to fight for the long term. We find, generally, that the United States is developing the right strategic approach for a protracted war, neglecting neither offense nor defense, focused on promoting continued economic growth, sincere in its desire to preserve the constitutional rights of its citizens, and mindful of the nation’s responsibilities to set an example in the world.

Lesson 2: Be patient and get it right. It is also clear that the United States has tried to do more than simply throw money and the military at the problem. Efforts are underway to build long-term, sustainable security programs, measures that can protect Americans today, tomorrow, and ten years from now.

Lesson 3: Do not put off getting it right: Once innovation ends, stagnation begins. The area in which the assessments of Winning the Long War are less sanguine is on this third point. In virtually every key area of the strategy— security, the economy, civil liberties, and the war of ideas—there is more work to be done.

First, we must convince Americans that they should believe in the diplomat from Princeton and the soldier from Abilene. There is a right way to win a long war. Americans must also believe in themselves: The United States is taking the right approach to the war on global terror.

Second, we are not there yet. There is more work to be done in building the basic weapons we will need for this war and it is essential that we forge these weapons now and get them right—or we will face the future with a flawed arsenal that will likely remain faulty for a long, long time.

Our assessment of what has been accomplished and what remains undone follows in seven chapters, corresponding to the four cornerstones of long-war strategy. Chapters One and Two look at the issue of security. Chapter One examines “offensive” measures; the task of taking the battle to the terrorists. Here is one area in which the criticism of “preparing to fight the last war” does have some validity. The genius of fighting a long war is knowing how to set priorities—to know which national security instruments have to be replaced, refurbished, or replenished first. At the center of America’s offensive means are three key capabilities: strategic intelligence, military force, and interagency operations. They are all in need of attention. They are the prerequisites. All the other instruments of a great power build on them. Equipping these three assets for the long war has to be a top priority.

Chapter Two looks at “defense,” or what we now call “homeland security”: protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. Here the third lesson of the Cold War seems least learned. There is still much to be done in establishing the right kinds of organizations and programs to serve the nation for the long term. Topping the list is reorganizing the Department of Homeland Security; fixing the shortfalls we have observed in its first few years of operation, before it, like the Pentagon, becomes set in concrete, unmovable for a generation. This chapter also considers the requirement for building a truly national homeland security “system of systems,” which incorporates all appropriate public and private entities. Additionally, this chapter examines the lack of reform in congressional oversight for homeland security.

Chapters Three and Four look at the issue of civil liberties. They debunk the notion that in the twenty-first century we must have a stark choice between security and liberty. Chapter Three establishes the principles that should be guiding our efforts to fight terrorism through the adoption of new legal authorities, technologies, and programs that promise to provide both greater security and better protection of civil liberties.

Chapter Four offers practical recommendations for the kinds of domestic counterterrorism resources that are needed. In particular, it considers the role of the USA Patriot Act, controversial legislation intended to provide law enforcement with new tools for combating terrorism. This chapter also examines how we should legally detain terrorists when we “out” them before they have committed a crime. Finally, it looks at the role technology must play in providing a decisive edge in battling terrorists.

Chapters Five and Six examine the prospects for maintaining a strong economy while vigorously pursuing the war on terrorism. Chapter Five focuses on the domestic economy, concluding that it is not the cost of security that threatens the future of the nation, but other forms of discretionary and mandatory federal spending. It recommends the measures that have to be taken to ensure continued economic growth in the decades ahead—in particular, fixing a broken tax code that may be as a big a threat to U.S. security as the terrorists themselves.

Chapter Six looks at the U.S. role in the global economy. It is about the imperative of making international trade and travel both freer and safer. Free trade is essential to winning the long war. Additionally, while new security measures will make us safer, they also have the potential to stifle global growth, particularly in the developing world, which lacks the capacity to fully implement anti-terrorism measures designed to safeguard the flow of people and products. This chapter also examines efforts to clothe protectionist measures in the cloak of homeland security, false arguments that somehow by closing American markets, Americans will be more secure.

Chapter Seven examines the struggle of ideas. It finds that more must be done to discredit the ideologies that feed terrorism. At the same time, the United States must continually make the case that democracy and free markets offer a credible alternative to extremism and repression. Finally, the United States must make clear that it will never retrench or retreat. The “idea” offensive must destroy any glimmer of hope among the terrorists that we will ever let them prevail in their fascist schemes.

In the epilogue to Winning the Long War, we offer a new (albeit shorter) Long Telegram, a restatement of the ideas for ensuring national survival recrafted for the challenges of the twenty-first century. We could not hope to recapture the power and poetry of Kennan’s writings or Eisenhower’s breadth of vision, but in our own words we hope to rekindle the call to action, the courage and confidence in the rightness of America’s cause, and the optimism that that this nation can—and will—not just prevail, but thrive and grow in the decades ahead.

Much thanks for posting this. Will take some time to read and . . . digest.

But this should ring true from the get go for a lot of us who believe Iraq is not so much a war as a campaign in a much larger war of long term duration:

• Organize to fight for the long term.
• Be patient and get it right.
• Do not put off getting it right: Once innovation ends, stagnation begins.

5 posted on 07/23/2005 9:49:26 PM PDT by Squeako (ACLU: "Only Christians, Boy Scouts and War Memorials are too vile to defend.")

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