Posted on 02/15/2006 3:24:03 AM PST by Cornpone
The message from General Peter Pace, the chairperson of the United States joint chiefs of staff, was apocalyptic. "We are at a critical time in the history of this great country and find ourselves challenged in ways we did not expect. We face a ruthless enemy intent on destroying our way of life and an uncertain future."
Pace was endorsing the Pentagon's four-yearly strategy review, presented to Congress last week. The report sets out a plan for prosecuting what the the Pentagon describes in the preface as "The Long War", which replaces the "war on terror". The long war represents more than just a linguistic shift: it reflects the ongoing development of US strategic thinking since the September 11 attacks.
Looking beyond the Iraq and Afghan battlefields, US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces.
Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3 000 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units -- an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.
The Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, North Africa, Central and South-East Asia and the northern Caucasus.
The Cold War dominated the world from 1946 to 1991: the long war could determine the shape of the world for decades to come. The plan rests heavily on a much higher level of cooperation and integration with Britain and other Nato allies, and the increased recruitment of regional governments through the use of economic, political, military and security means. It calls on allies to build their capacity "to share the risks and responsibilities of today's complex challenges".
The Pentagon must become adept at working with interior ministries as well as defence ministries, the report says. It describes this as "a substantial shift in emphasis that demands broader and more flexible legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms ... Bringing all the elements of US power to bear to win the long war requires overhauling traditional foreign assistance and export control activities and laws."
Unconventional approach The report, whose consequences are still being assessed in European capitals, states: "This war requires the US military to adopt unconventional and indirect approaches." It adds: "We have been adjusting the US global force posture, making long overdue adjustments to US basing by moving away from a static defence in obsolete Cold War garrisons, and placing emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to troublespots across the globe."
The strategy mirrors in some respects a recent readjustment in British strategic thinking but it is on a vastly greater scale, funded by an overall 2007 US defence spending request of more than $513-billion.
As well as big expenditure projects, the report calls for: investments in signals and human intelligence gathering -- spies on the ground; funding for the Nato intelligence fusion centre; increased space radar capability; the expansion of the global information grid (a protected information network); and an information-sharing strategy "to guide operations with federal, state, local and coalition partners". A push will also be made to improve forces' linguistic skills, with an emphasis on Arabic, Chinese and Farsi.
The US plan, developed by military and civilian staff at the Pentagon in concert with other branches of the US government, will raise concerns about exacerbating the "clash of civilisations" and about the respect accorded to international law and human rights. To wage the long war, the report urges Congress to grant the Pentagon and its agencies expanded permanent legal authority of the kind used in Iraq, which may give US commanders greatly extended powers.
"Long duration, complex operations involving the US military, other government agencies and international partners will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries round the world, relying on a combination of direct [visible] and indirect [clandestine] approaches," the report says. "Above all they will require persistent surveillance and vastly better intelligence to locate enemy capabilities and personnel. They will also require global mobility, rapid strike, sustained unconventional warfare, foreign internal defence, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capabilities. Maintaining a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where US forces do not traditionally operate will be required."
The report exposes the sheer ambition of the US attempt to mastermind global security. "The US will work to ensure that all major and emerging powers are integrated as constructive actors and stakeholders into the international system. It will also seek to ensure that no foreign power can dictate the terms of regional or global security.
Building partnerships "It will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the US and friendly countries."
Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: "When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades." He added that the strategy was aimed at responding to the "uncertainty and unpredictability" of this conflict. "We in the defence department feel fairly confident that our forces will be called on to be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they're currently not engaged, but we have no idea whatsoever where that might be, when that might be or in what circumstances that they might be engaged.
"We realise that almost in all circumstances others will be able to do the job less expensively than we can because we tend to have a very cost-intensive force. But many times they'll be able to do it more effectively too because they'll understand the local language, the local customs, they'll be culturally adept and be able to get things accomplished that we can't do. So building a partnership capability is a critical lesson learned.
"The operational realm for that will not necessarily be Afghanistan and Iraq; rather, that there are large swaths of the world that that's involved in and we are engaged today. We are engaged in things in the Philippines, in the Horn of Africa. There are issues in the pan-Sahel region of North Africa.
"There's a number of different places where there are activities where terrorist elements are out there and that we need to counter them, we need to be able to attack and disrupt their networks."
Priorities The report identifies four priority areas: Defeating terrorist networks, defending the homeland in depth, shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads and preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction
Lawrence's legacy The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.
The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate "an indirect approach", building and working with others, and seeking "to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.
They write: "One historical example that illustrates both concepts comes from the Arab revolt in 1917 in a distant theatre of the first world war, when British Colonel TE Lawrence and a group of lightly armed Bedouin tribesmen seized the Ottoman port city of Aqaba by attacking from an undefended desert side, rather than confronting the garrison's coastal artillery by attacking from the sea."
States's should be States'
Now I shall go back and read. :)
Recommend reading....
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Wow! Thanks for the ping. Most enlightening. FR is an incredible classroom with many very smart professors.
Thanks for the ping!
I don't ping the people on my list very often...like maybe once a week or so.
Where do I sign up?
Rudy Guiliani pointed the way with the way he tackled crime in NYC.
AND..when he refused the check from the wahabbi king after 9/11.
Lucky Dog, I reread your posts on this thread, and we seem to agree on the most important points, so lets cut this back to the basics.
Permit me to reduce a rather long and erudite post to a few simple statements of your strategy as I understand it: Islam will collapse on its own, based upon its inabilities to deal with the modern world coherently. Its collapse will not be quick, and, most certainly, will be violent.
Correct.
Therefore, we should merely attempt to limit damage to the West from Islam’s implosion by encouraging/helping the Hashemites to overthrow the Saudi’s. Is this the essence of your strategy, or have I misunderstood?
IMHO the Saud element should not be our only strategy but far closer to the core of our strategy to force a reformation of islam by keeping the ummah divided, making use of its divisions and playing factions off against each other on the road to true islams ultimate demise. Once Iraq has been stabilized and oil production pushed back up we will have more options.
The situation is a fluid one and we will have to adapt to events and think ahead so we have our bases covered while we keep the pressure on from all sides. Exposing the Sauds, exposing the islamic ideology they back and pushing the Sauds as hard as we can, to the very breaking point if need be, to make them carry out not only internal but also international reforms will take time. Call this our "hudna" to them, while we cover other bases - get Iraq settled, develop anti-jihad multilateral alliances to help take on the OIC's agenda among other things, face off against Iran, unilaterally strenghten our very useful ties with the Hashemites, and make preparations in Pakistan for the very real possibility Musharraf is taken out at any time and their weapons go unaccounted for (you get the picture).
The House of Saud is surviving on borrowed time. They are not only hated in the west, they are hated right across the ummah for their corruption, decadence, arrogance, hypocrisy, and lies. The Saud support of the wahhabi ulema is fueling the blowback on them as the "true believers" bite the hand that feeds. Our support of the saud has backfired on us. We must recognize they can be used as as a tool, as they used the west, but they are expendable.
(BTW, one book on the KSA I highly recommend, if you have not already read it, is Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, by Dore Gold)
Be ready and have back up plans (Plan A, Hashemites retaking and dividing the hijaz from much of oil wealth funding islam today; Plan B striking at very the heart of their belief system itself) if/when the Saud reforms fail. Accept democracy may need to be a two step solution, not an end in itself, and recognize Turkey (a secular society and not a true example of an "islamic" society) was able to reform only under the brutal rule of the Kemalists iron fist which stamped out many of the excesses of islam.
The clock is ticking for both sides.
In the west, the lefts lefts "PC" myopia, islamic immigration, islamic front groups spreading dawah and self enforced dhummitude is undermining the historical centers of Christendom so we sit back and watch as EUrabia ignites in flames.
On the islamic side, modern advances in communications mean ideas of democracy, freedom, and rights are making inroads to their youth, as well as for the spead of islam, as islam itself is being exposed and finds itself under critique in the west and the ummah itself. The thoughts of western hegemony and ideas, an antithesis to islam, is frightening to them so they will continue to seek the powers of nuclear weapons (or other WMD) to defend themselves with and gain "respect."
Clash indeed, but sooner better than later.
Turkey’s model of conversion seems to be the most viable for the Islamic world of today.
Does that include the genocide commited agaist the Christians?
You're on...
Damn skippy!
Consiering that mankind has always been in a state of war, in one form or another, not this is not Orwell's permanent stae of warfare.
Orwell's war was ideological, but was not waged as a matter of opposing IDEOLOGIES (his three super-states all had the same ideology). Orwell described war as the means by which the planned economy was sustained (no surpluses to upset the applecart), and the use war as a means of controlling the population AT HOME (the direction in which Red China is headed).
THIS war (the global war on terror), at it's most basic, has very little to do with ideology, but everything to do with CULTURE.
Nothing Orwellian (in a 1984 sense) about it.
"Islamm (sic) was a danger, 1300 years BEFORE Communism and it's still a danger -- it was an evil thing BEFORE communism and still is now, AFTER communism. Get over the cold war."
Incorrect. Islam is the ORIGINAL Communism. It is system disguised as a religion in which total control is extered over the minutest detail of it's follower's lives.
The (former) KGB is green with envy.
Islam only becomes an imminent danger when the West (collectively) becomes soft, wavers, or appears weak. One only has to look at the historic pattern of Islamic advances and realize what this means. We are now, militarily, strong but morally and politically divided. More of less the same situation the ragheads found when they overran Spain, Sicily and the Byzantine Empire.
The battlefield is not ideological, nor is it religious; it is cultural. Do we have the guts to stand up for Western Civilization or do we allow the PC-tree-hugging-faux-disaffected-communism-was-a-good-idea-poorly-executed-tie-died crowd sell us down the river slowly by cultural retreat (disguised as "tolerance")?
Western Civilization is mankind's crowning achievement. We cannot let it just die quietly.
"The Soviet Union has disbanded, but communism has merely taken a blow and is regrouping."
Wrong. The Chinese don't even PRETEND to be Communists anymore, and anyone who does (Castro, Chavez) merely does so for romantic notions that still tug at (some) people's heartstrings.
Communism, more or less, has ceased to be a viable system or ideology and has become, merely, an affectation and public relation's posture.
The lure of Islam, unlike the lure of Communism, is not based upon any economic or political theory. Islam simply allows it's adherant, in return for complete surrender, the ability to indulge both sides of human nature without guilt. For every verse in the Koran that extolls the virtue of charity, piety and brotherhood, you will find a verse that allows rape, pillage and murder. Simply paint your target as an "infidel", "apostate" or whatever other adjective you can think of, with the thinnest of pretenses, and presto!, you're in business with full religious sanction.
It is no different than a Pope granting absolution of sins PRIOR to a Crusader going into battle. The only difference is that Christianity, and Western Civilization, managed to grow up and evolve, while Islam remained wedded to both the 7th century and desert tribal superstition and values.
You are making an assumption; that Islam and pluralistic democracy can peacefully co-exist. In the case of Turkey, that nation had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century by military force. Only after the advantages of modern life filtered down to the average Turk did democracy become something like a good idea.
That, of course, is in danger. There are fundaMENTAList movements in Turkey today, vociferous and active. They are vocifierous and active because democracy ENABLES them to be so. Delicate balancing act, to be sure.
The problem is that Islam, like Communism, cannot allow a rival system of thought or devotion to exist anywhere on the planet. What remains to be seen in the Islam vs. democracy battle is whether or not the vast bulk of the Islamic poipulation is willing to chuck superstition for reason.
That is a matter of culture. Islam must undergo a major cultural change before the conditions are right for full-blown democracies erupt with popular support.
I put it to you that Islam has not had three of the most crucial pillars of that democratic tradition in it's history: it has not had anything like the Protestant Reformation, the Rennaisance nor the Age of Enlightenment.
Until Islam has any of those things, it will continue to be a stagnant model for society. Which is why Western civilization must be defended at all costs. So long as the followers of Islam are wedded to their religion and their religion is wedded to authoritarian control over every aspect of life, there can be no Rennaisance or Reformation.
That also used to be true in Christendom. Inquisitions, people burned at the stake.
With God, all things are possible, including the conversion of Islam to Christianity.
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