It’s not just amateurs (like me) that think Bush’s “global war on terrorism” is unfocused and more public relations than national security strategy. This has been blogged around a bit earlier in the year, but if you haven’t read Dr. Jeffrey Record’s strategy paper from the Strategic Studies Institute, I recommend it highly. The study deconstructs the global war on terrorism (GWOT) in detail, analyzing the appropriateness of both goals and tactics. What’s amazing about the paper, of course, is that it’s not from a liberal think tank or an anti-war author. Dr. Jeffrey Record is a Professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the US Air Force’s Air War College, and a Visiting Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College. The SSI is the “Army’s think tank for the analysis of national security policy and military strategy.”
Obviously, Dr. Record’s analysis of the GWOT should carry some weight.
Record’s major premise is that the GWOT (and the National Security Strategy upon which the GWOT is based) conflates a number of distinct types of threats into a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. Furthermore, the Administration’s strategy for the GWOT assumes that all types of terrorist threats are equally important, and that nation-states can be dealt with using the same tactics as transnational, territory-less groups such as al-Qaeda. As a result, the GWOT is accomplishing little, and is both fiscally and militarily unsustainable.
The paper is exhaustive in its analysis, which I won’t repeat here, but the conclusions are important as we go forward into the third year of America’s unfocused war on “terrorism” in general. By conflating many different threats into the same public relations campaign, the Administration has created an unrealistic, un-winnable quest. A specific campaign against al-Qaeda should be the focus of the GWOT along with real advances in homeland security, along with immediate re-engagement of the international community in Iraq and any future efforts. We should recognize that nation-states (i.e., “rogue” states) are deterrable in ways that free-floating international groups are not, and that in many cases deterrence works perfectly well. To quote Dr. Record: “The GWOT as it has so far been defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over too many ends.”
It’s too late for the Bush administration to admit they’re wrong and take another path. Even if Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz could be made to understand the issues, Karl Rove is busy trying to get his man re-elected in November, and admitting that three years and most of a trillion dollars was wasted due to lack of clear thinking would be suicide.
So I would suggest that Democratic supporters read Dr. Record’s paper as a means of arming ourselves for a discussion concerning the Democratic platform. Whether it’s Kerry or somebody else, a Democrat in the White House is going to need to start thinking along these lines if their efforts to fix the mistakes of 2001-2004 are going to be more than simply window-dressing.