Why America Needs to Rethink How It Wages War

This is the topic of my article: Why American Military Strategy is Outdated

The war in Afghanistan is, put nicely, not going so well. Recent reports bring news of a revitalized and growing Al Qaeda. Liberals and even some conservatives have pointed to the Bush administration's negligent treatment of the war in Afghanistan while focusing more energy and resources on the war in Iraq, a boondoggle meant to further a neoconservative viewpoint of the world. This may be arguable (probably true), but to blame the struggles in Afghanistan on such a simplistic reason is, in my opinion, to allow Americans to continue suffering under the delusion that the solution to any military threat against America is simply an issue of how many guns and tanks are needed.

The reason we need to rethink how we wage war is, I think, not necessarily obvious, but easy to understand once laid out.

The US is at war against those behind the 9-11 attacks. Who and what is Al Qaeda? Simply answered, they are a terrorist network. It would be easy to stop there, but to do that is to make a big mistake. And, I think this is my biggest point. The "War Against Terror" is not, as most politicians would have us believe, a war of, or, against people. No, it is a war of IDEAS.

OLD DOG WITH OLD TRICKS

The US is trying to fight against 21st century enemies using 20th century strategies. Another false logic we need to get past is the idea that because we have the biggest, most advanced military in the world, we can win ANY war. Yes, we are the best. But to use a sports analogy, the best team on paper isn't always the team that wins. Why? Because they don't play games on paper. In Super Bowl XLII, the 18-0 New England Patriots faced the 13-6 New York Giants. By all calculations, the Patriots were the superior team. Then the Giants went out and beat the undefeated Patriots 17-14. And here is a fact that makes this analogy even better: The Patriots had previously beaten the Giants in the last game of the regular season. But when they met in the Super Bowl more than a month later, it was obvious that the Giants were not the same team as before. The Giants had retooled, adapted, evolved. The Patriots were relying on what worked last time, and on that night in February, it was no longer good enough.

The US's current military strategy is equivalent to the Patriots. From 1917 to mid-2001, the US military existed as the most dominant force in the world, and, in my opinion, one has to go back to the Roman Empire to find a worthy contemporary. But during the past 8+ years, our military strategy has been stalemated at best, and ineffective at worst.

Why is this so? Stated simply, Al Qaeda is unlike any enemy the US has ever fought. Furthermore, Al Qaeda is unlike any aggressor in the history of the modern world. They are an amorphous group of individuals without a defined command structure. They operate in sleeper cells under the most general of orders: plan and execute attacks against America and her allies. They are nationless and they have no elected leaders which means they have no official government that can be defeated and removed.
In WWII, Germany invaded France on June 5, 1940. On June 14, German forces took Paris. While it is astounding that it took Germany only 9 days to knock France out of the war (wow!), that is not pertinent to this discussion. What is pertinent is the fact that, once Paris fell, France was out of the game, for good. US forces took Kabul with greater ease during the Afghanistan war, but the end result was the opposite. Yes, the Taliban was the ruling group in Afghanistan at the time, and yes, they were a potential threat. For the third time, yes, they were who we removed from power once we took Kabul.
But the Taliban was not the objective nor the true threat. The Taliban did not attack the US, Al Qaeda did. Afghanistan is where they trained and, supposedly, were strongest. So we sent brigades to Afghanistan.
But, Al Qaeda was not and has not been knocked out of the war on terror. They are not like our past foes.

WWI and WWII were wars over territory. Thousands of lives were lost gaining a handful of yards, only to lose those yards in the next days or weeks. The Cold War is difficult to compare, but loosely stated, it was a war over influence. Still, that influence was defined by territory, by soil.
"If the USSR and communism takes Vietnam, the WHOLE country of Vietnam, we're in big trouble."
A common theme is that the solution for all three were relatively the same: pure military might. Another common thread is that in each of these wars, America's enemies were nations with governments and defined borders.
Yes, Al Qaeda finds its strongest support in the Middle East. But, Al Qaeda is not a nation state. There is no border to invade, no capital to take, no government to overthrow and replace with leaders selected by us.
The focal point of our war on terror has been the poor, undeveloped, rock-worn country of Afghanistan. We're led to believe that this is a war over territory. It isn't. And that is where we went wrong. That is where our failure lies, in our inability to understand and say aloud that the war on terror will not be won by taking over THIS country or occupying THIS region, fixing THIS government or rebuilding THIS nation.
Easily forgotten is the fact that the 9-11 terrorists did most of their planning in Germany and in the US. That's right, IN THE UNITED STATES.

HISTORY DOESN'T REPEAT ITSELF

Current US military strategy is largely created by men old enough to remember firsthand how we did things following WWII and in the Cold War. That is the problem. They are outdated and so is their thinking. In the future, we will not fight enemies like those we fought in the 20th century. China is not a military threat, they don't want to fight. Russia doesn't want to either. There is a reason why they don't want to fight - our defense budget is more than double the size of the industrialized nations COMBINED. We live in a post-modern, ever globalizing world. The spread of information is too prevalent.
In the middle of WWI, German and French troops realized they had more in common than their governments. On Christmas Eve in 1914, German and French troops laid down their guns, crawled out of their trenches and joined together to sing hymns. They realized they were farmers fighting farmers.
WWI was supposed to be the last world war, but Hitler forced the second. Since then, no industrialized nation has waged war against another. I think a strong argument can be made that modern, industrialized, educated nations will never go to war again. I think a stronger argument can be made that whatever fighting does occur in the future, it will be fought between modern nations against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. If you accept this argument, then you must accept the conclusion that the way we fought in the 20th century is not the way to fight now or at any point going forward.

TOMORROW IS A NEW DAY

So, if America needs to rethink how it wages war, what is the "how"? As stated earlier, this is a war of ideas. Does that mean the US should drastically reduce it's militaristic capabilities? No. Wartime expenditures? Yes. But its capabilities? No. I'm not near the dove this article may imply. The world is full of wonderful, genuinely kind people who only want to go about their day, raise a family, and enjoy life. However, the world is also filled with evil people who want to harm others. And somewhere in the middle are those that could do the former, but are impressionable enough to be recruited by those evil to do the latter. Therefore, the US should fully adopt a two-prong strategy.

THE STICK AND THE CARROT: REDUX

America's military strategy should focus on two kinds of people: the bad guys, and those that the bad guys wish to indoctrinate.

The bad guys --- These are the individuals that are trying to kill Americans, abroad and at home. These people get the big stick. The US should employ small, special ops type forces against these enemies. These true enemies of the US should be eliminated by force. Left alive, they will continue to try to take American (and western) lives. Counterintuitively, I believe this group is not the true threat to America's future. Like everything else, time is not on their side. They will grow old, and the plans they lay will depend on others, younger, to put into action.
Due to this they will also try to grow their ranks by convincing young, confused, impressionable individuals to take up the fight against America. This leads us to the second group . . .

Those still choosing a side --- These are the individuals that will determine the kind of future to become present. Every day that Al Qaeda recruits a single member is a failure of US military strategy and foreign policy. As Al Qaeda grows, the war on terror extends into unknown lengths. If the US is able, through a change in strategy, to drastically reduce Al Qaeda's ability to convince youth that jihad against America is the path towards a better future, then in less than 10 year's time the terrorist network will be starved of resources and it's ability to fight will whither away. The rank and file will, by attrition, shrink until the point in which Al Qaeda and terrorist organizations like it will no longer be able to persist.
Every youth that refuses to join a terrorist group will not only exercise a force against evil, but will also grow the power of good.
This is a zero-sum scenario. The world is a big pie, and every time Evil's slice gets a little bit smaller, Good's slice gets a little bit bigger.

Admittedly, this part of the strategy is harder, simply because America is not as proficient in it as it is the first. We should double-down on our diplomatic measures by drastically increasing the number of reasonable, level-headed, experienced American diplomats who should canvas the world offering assistance when needed, and advice when it is asked for. We should stop this whole "nation building" enterprise, at least in the sense of how we mean it now. The US is more rare than it realizes, perhaps the rarest of its kind in human history. We got to where we are by smarts, hard work, but also a lot of luck. We cannot forget that our existence is the exception, not the rule, and we should not allow the hubris of assuming we have the ability to create other nations like us. Culture has deep roots, and any attempt by the US to simply ignore cultural history and cultural norms in other places in the world as we try to shape them in our image will only led to more conflict and failures.
Remember, the world is full of good people. We can point the way, but let us have the wisdom and the restraint to stop there.

For the past eighty or so years, the US has been the main protector of freedom and liberty. We have strived to fight against oppression both at home and abroad.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
That is what our nation was founded on -- an idea.

We are in a war of ideas. Whoever wins this war, wins the future.