Fighting the Last War

by Dennis Green

The U.S. Military is obsolete. You don’t fight terrorists with platoons, squadrons and brigades of grunts going out on patrol as bait to tempt the insurgents out of hiding. To begin with, insurgents and terrorists are not one and the same.

Terrorists fight alone, or in very small groups, and by stealth. They plant roadside bombs, or take explosives on board airliners, or send small boats filled with explosives to collide with warships. They attack subways with poison gas and bio-weapons, and used box cutters to take down four airliners on 9/11. They rarely repeat themselves.

If anything, you fight such actions with investigative security and police forces, as Israel does with its Mossad (The Institute) forces. But our own CIA has proven itself seriously incompetent, again and again, encumbered by bureaucratic procedures and American misgivings about the use of stealth and assassination.

But sending 30,000 MORE American troops into Afghanistan is sheer lunacy, and amounts to fighting the last war, not the one the terrorists are fighting. And we’ve been fighting the same war since our original Revolution, with armies and artillery and supply lines. Today, it takes many weeks simply to deploy those forces, and then costs the taxpayer one million dollars per year per soldier to keep them in the field.

And it isn’t that the generals don’t know any better, but that politics and economics weigh against the kinds of reformation of our “defense” forces required in the 21^st Century. In the run-up to the recent decision by Obama, it was made public that the great debate was between “Counter Terrorist” and “Counter Insurgency” tactics. But what strategy?

“Containing Al Qaeda” is not a strategy. Or at least certainly not a realistic one. Islamic extremists and terrorists exist all over the world, just as radical Christians do. Such religious sects or subsets are not confined to Iraq, or Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. They exist in Oakland, in Chicago, in New York, and even, as we just learned, within the U.S. Army at Fort Hood, Texas.

Right-wing paramilitary groups training in uniform in the woods of Idaho are not much different in methodology than Al Qaeda operatives training in camps in western Pakistan. Given the opportunity, they will attack the established order that they perceive as the enemy — whether it’s an abortion clinic or the World Trade Center or the Oklahoma City federal building. The mindset of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden is savagely similar.

Radical Islam claims that a colonial-minded America, siding unilaterally with Israel and hungry for foreign oil, interferes in the internal affairs of Muslim countries, that its occupying troops offend and insult their customs, especially the dignity of their women, and that the power of a post-Cold War America arrogantly threatens the sovereignty of every other nation on earth. Such claims, of course, may be unwarranted, but are taken to heart by millions.

So we’re not going to defeat “terror” or terrorists with force, or make friends by invading other countries and sending in grunts who don’t speak the language and haven’t even been trained to respect the local customs. “Counter Insurgency” employs far more military people, military advisors, military contractors and industrial workers here at home than “Counter Terrorism” does. We can’t fight unemployment and draw down our military forces at the same time.

But if we were as smart as we think we are, we would engage thousands of small teams of highly trained stealth fighters — not unlike the Navy SEALS — as raiding parties that could move quickly anywhere in the world, strike against Al Qaeda and melt back into the night. Small war parties like my ancestor Crazy Horse led against the Crow. They would be multi-lingual assassins who could kill without leaving a trace of their presence. The rest is obsolete nonsense.

©2009 Dennis Green