Rumsfeld and the New Threat

Good article in today's Chicago Trib about the rise and fall of Rumsfeld. Of particular interest to me is Rumsfeld's attempt to transform the military:

He came back with an ambitious plan to transform the military. Marshall's theory was one element, and it had Bush's backing. And by almost any account, the Pentagon was indeed badly in need of transformation. Military leaders were immediately distrustful--and defensive.

Expensive weapons systems hit the chopping block--the Army eventually lost its coveted Crusader artillery piece and its Comanche attack helicopter.

Rumsfeld backed missile defense--a return of the failed Reagan-era Star Wars program. And he worried about new, big threats, revealing a Cold War mind-set.

Testifying before Congress, Rumsfeld "wanted to talk about how the world had changed, and because of those changes ... there were new security concerns," said Victoria Clarke, his former spokeswoman. "All they [lawmakers] wanted to talk about were the votes on the projects supporting the shipyard in their district. Walking down to his car afterward, he asked, `Why don't they understand how important this is?'"

Clarke said she replied that it was hard for people to think "security" after a decade of peace and prosperity.

"And he put his hand on my shoulder," she recalled, "and said, `Unfortunately, someday I'm going to be proven right.'"

But Rumsfeld, like so many others in Washington, had misjudged the nature of the threat.

The enemy who attacked made simple, destructive use of Western technology--airliners and hand-held satellite navigation units and box cutters. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for such a threat.

In fact, a few of the bureaucratically brave in the Pentagon had been pushing ideas about the threat of terrorism as the future of warfare. In 1989, for example, a group of Marine Corps officers and a civilian analyst wrote about "Fourth Generation Warfare."

The previous three generations, they said, had evolved into the modern, high-tech military. But a new kind of warrior, they predicted, would use rudimentary means to defeat a technically dependent force, just like the one the U.S. had built.

Indeed, the article predicted something like the conflict in Iraq with stunning accuracy.

Three years later, Marshall's Office of Net Assessment offered a similar view. Buried in a report titled "The Military-Technical Revolution--A Preliminary Assessment" was the description of a new kind of threat and warrior. The report called him a "streetfighter."

In Rumsfeld's new Pentagon, though, terrorism was a lower-priority threat. Instead, he and his staff had launched a series of studies, from ways to "transform" the military to new fighting techniques to looks at the Pentagon's purchasing and personnel policies.

Rumsfeld was recycled from the Cold War era so it makes sense that he would apply Cold War philosophy to modern threats. Say what you will, but the man certainly understood that there are people in this world who would love nothing more than to see us all dead and that a traditional military isn't going to stop them.

Maybe it's strange that a Cold War baby like me (who was raised on the threat of a cataclysmic nuclear event a la "War Games") doesn't fear a nuclear state of Iran. It's not that I'm unconcerned about it, it's just that I don't believe Iran would benefit from waging nuclear war as much as it benefits from having the mere capability to do so. Same as for most nuke states -- eventually it's going to come down to self preservation and the global economy. Iran is not some small, isolated militant group -- they're a completely functional state, fully engaged in the global economy. I find it implausible that Iran would prioritize Israel's obliteration over its own existence. I also have to wonder how anxious Iranians are for war again -- their eight year war with Iraq (1980-1988) cost them 1 million casualties and $319B -- although I'm sure it would be possible to provoke one if Israel decided to get pre-emptive.

No, I am far more afraid of the crippling effects of lower-tech threats. I think all the time about how truly terrorized we'd all be if someone blew up an elementary school in the midwest. How many parents would be willing to drop their kids off at school the next day? Or the long term effect on our economy if al-Qaeda managed to blow up, say, the Mall of America, and people everywhere were afraid to go shopping for a few months. It's not unthinkable... Timothy McVeigh managed to load enough fertilizer onto a truck to wipe the face off a public building and kill 168 people. An explosive device inside a container in a California shipyard would likely paralyze commerce for months. How about a toxin poured into a city water supply? These kinds of attacks are far more likely -- and with huge, huge repercussions -- than a nuke on our soil.

We are somewhat lucky that we've got two oceans serving as geographical moats and, for as concerned as we are about immigration, we in America are still a pretty homogeneous group. We've got a worrisome uncontrolled entry on our South border that needs to be addressed but I think the terrorism threat is -- or at least was, until Iraq -- something that we could effectively counter with specially targeted operations and organized international effort. Never eliminate, but certainly marginalize. We could nuke the entire Middle East and still never anticipate or eliminate every remaining terror threat.

The great debate, it seems to me, is not whether or not there is a threat against us but rather how best to counter it. Iraq has been counter productive in that regard and, if the election is any indication, people are starting to recognize that. Maybe now we can start to refocus our energies accordingly. The pre-emptive strike theory was naive at best, immoral at worst, and just about the worst read of a situation, ever. I hope this experiement is over... we've wasted precious time.