Deficiencies in American military doctrine in War on Terror

LTC Joseph Myers is a man whose name ought to be on the lips of all who care about victory in the Global War on Terror. For quite some time he has been fighting a lonely battle to get our military to study and counter-strategize against the distinctively Islamic elements in the strategies our enemies use against us....

Only if we understand the enemy's strategic thinking can we anticipate their moves, identify their points of vulnerability, and carry out a winning strategy. Yet our military and political establishment refuses to recognize the religious-based aspects of the thinking of our enemies.

Congressional Quarterly carries an interview with Joe that is concise and highly informative. Well worth reading. An excerpt:

We focus on al Qaeda and violent actors, we focus at the tip of the spear to prevent terrorist attacks on the homeland. We are orienting all our resources, intelligence, homeland defense, against preventing attacks....

Major errors made in the WoT. My own point of view.

1) The WoT should have begun with a program to covertly execute anyone instigating, financing, or encouraging terrorist acts. These executions would appear due to normal causes, not military action.

2) Captured enemy combatants should have been systematically psychologically conditioned to no longer desire to commit terrorist acts, including a small electronic implant in their mastoid to reinforce their conditioning. It is in no way a violation of human rights to prevent someone from committing terrorist acts.

3) The US military should have had identification units accompanying all operations. Their purpose would be to take detailed biometric, fingerprint, DNA and photographic information of every person we met. They would then issue them ID cards, with only their picture on the front, and encrypted data on the back.

This would have been of immense value to military as well as civilian operations, and the restoration of government services, including census, voting, health care and rations.
It would have also effectively prevented non-local terrorists from blending in with local peoples.

4) Enormous scale, labor intensive public works projects should have been used early on, at fairly low cost, to provide employment to all fighting-age males. By placing these in rural areas, with the men’s pay being sent home to their families, millions of men could have been isolated from terrorist recruitment. This could also have been used to provide public education, literacy training, and government information.

Want to know the correct way to fight these death-worshipping fanatics?

See my tagline.

There’s also an old Marine saying that says it all: “Kill them all, let God sort them out”.

Semper fi

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