Wednesday, September 19, 2001

We are losing the Terror War and losing it badly. How can this be?

The reason we are still being defeated is that we have squandered our military and economic strength employing a failed strategy. The policy of calling terrorism a crime made any response as slow and uncertain as our legal process. Terrorism is an act of war. We must have a policy of immediate, devastating, and decisive military response to any act of war directed at any of our citizens anywhere in the world.

We have responded to ever-greater acts of terrorism with ever more cumbersome and restrictive security measures. Security cannot defeat an aggressive strategy such as the terrorist employs. Security, while necessary at some minimal level, is essentially a defensive measure. It is impossible to maintain a high state of effective security. Time between attacks dulls security measures. Security measures are necessarily static in time and space. The enemy has all the time they need to study the security and develop a tactic to successful breach that security.

A terror Maginot Line will work no better for us than the original did for the French. Perfect airport security would only cause the next terrible attack to occur somewhere else. We cannot secure all targets against a determined enemy.

Another popular but failed idea is that the Terror War can be solved by better intelligence. Each failure of the intelligence infrastructure is greeted by a call for spending more money on rebuilding our intelligence system. In this context, intelligence is a security or defense measure. Worth something, yes, but not much. No amount of defense is sufficient in the face of a dedicated and persistent enemy such as we are facing in the Terror War. Just as a pertinent aside, we routinely ignore most of the good intelligence we have, as we did in the current case. Better to spend more money on weapons to destroy the enemy.

The solution to these seemingly intractable problems is really quite simple and far more economical than our failed strategy. We need to not just call terrorism an act of war, but to treat it that way.

What we need is a winning strategy that emphasizes our strengths. Elements of a winning strategy:

1. Within 48 hours of anyone anywhere in the world making a credible terrorist threat against America or Americans, those people or their infrastructure will receive a devastating military strike.

2. Within 24 hours of any terrorist attack on America or Americans anywhere in the world, military strikes will begin and continue until least 10 times as many terrorists as Americans have been killed.

3. Any strike against America or Americans that is or can be characterized as a counter-strike against our first or second strategy will be met within 24 hours with military strikes and continue until at least 100 times as many terrorists as Americans are killed.

4. Any strike against America or Americans that is or can be characterized as a counter-strike against our third strategy will be met within 24 hours with military strikes intended to exterminate those terrorists, their relatives, and their supporters.

This strategy seems harsh only to those who do not understand effective military strategy. For most of the second half of the last century we had a nuclear war strategy of mutually assured destruction. That strategy made the cost of nuclear war so great that it was never used.

Our new Terror War strategy will make the cost of terrorism so great that after terrorists learn of our sincerity, it will be pointless for them to continue the war. The key to this strategy is to have the courage to follow it every time we are attacked by terrorists.

Benefits of this strategy include: 1. Terrorism will soon be defeated and will decrease to zero or near zero. 2. Onerous and expensive security measures will no longer be necessary. 3. Americans and our allies will enjoy freedom to do business and travel around the world without fear. 4. Those who would use terror to achieve political goals will have to learn more civilized methods of dealing with their fellow human beings.

In the opening years of 19th century, our new nation was faced with the terror of the Barbary pirates. European nations routinely bought protection from the North African Arab states that harbored the pirates. Eventually, the United States adopted a policy of using military forces to destroy the pirates. We have not had trouble with pirates in almost 200 years. If we have the courage and persistence to pursue this tough new strategy in the Terror War, terrorism will eventually be just as distant a memory as piracy.

Strength and resolve work every time they have been tried.

Don Dickinson

Colonel, Infantry, USA, Retired

Peachtree City

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