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Wobbly and Myopic aren't great alternatives

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

John Lehman, former SecNav under Ronald Reagan, runs a thoughtful op-ed in today’s Washington Post in which he concludes that despite some successes in the GWOT

In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

While there are some points on which Lehman is right, there is much on which he is either wrong or his opinions are open to criticism.

Read on.

Lehman was without doubt the most significant Secretary of the Navy since… well perhaps ever. He understood maritime strategy and the role sea power plays in projecting national power. He moved aside the stultifying influence that was Hyman Rickover in his dotage and fought ferociously for a 600 ship Navy, that number now hovers around 280. He brought four battleships out of mothballs and it took the Navy hierarchy nearly 20 years to kill off those magnificent men-of-war. Admittedly his concept for raids by carrier battlegroups on heavily defended Soviet naval facilities like the Kolyma Peninsula in the event of war tended towards farfetched but the Soviets took the threat seriously.

Perhaps the low point of Lehman’s public life was his service on the discredited 9/11 Commission. His defense of Jamie Gorelick as a commission member was shameful.

"Jamie Gorelick has made a very good contribution and she's one of the really savvy, nonpartisan of the bipartisan members," Lehman said.

His first error is misstating the problem:

The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

This is not a particularly exotic opinion but his refusal to acknowledge the immense flaws in his thesis statement fundamentally undermines his argument.

As I’ve argued many times the civilized world has carried out wars against behaviors and tactics in the past. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century there was a concerted war against piracy. Indeed, the rise of piracy has a lot to contribute to understanding the current war on terror. Later European nations with the aid of the United States waged a war on the slave trade. What is instructive is that piracy and the slave trade still exist but they do so at a severely reduced level than at their heyday.

Perhaps because I’m a Catholic and have grown accustomed to non-Catholics telling me what I believe I find it disturbing when non-Muslims, especially non-theologians, set out to define this war in religious terms. Lehman’s conflation of Wahabbi based terrorism and the use of terror by the Iranian regime to further longstanding Persian interests is just wrong.

The war against terror has included markedly secular states, like Libya, cooperation in suppressing ethnically based terror groups like the Tamil Tigers, and fighting narco-terrorists in Columbia. To focus on radical Islamic groups is simply wrongheaded as it has been demonstrated that these groups exchange personnel and share equipment.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. […] As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

I am in some agreement with Lehman on this issue but I would submit that a series of ill-advised court decisions rather than governmental action has contributed to this attitude. The problem is less the FBI than the federal courts. Having said that, when one looks at the number of arrests and convictions for terrorism related offenses in the US one cannot help but think that Lehman’s criticism of the FBI is overstated.

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well.

Here I would part company with Lehman. Like the overwhelming majority of the 9/11 Commission’s findings and recommendations this one is simply detached from reality. It ignored the very real concerns of Defense, the largest contributor of intelligence personnel and funds, that its priority of support to the combatant commanders could be met and it ignored the needs of other intelligence agencies, like those in State and Energy. While I am agnostic on how the ODNI structure will turn out I have seen some positive trends, like CIA changing its focus from analysis to HUMINT.

The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.

Agreed. I would note that Lehman omits here the breaking of the AQ Khan network and the deathrow conversion of Qaddafi.

[The Afghan campaign] was a brilliantly executed operation in which all our armed forces and CIA operatives combined in a ruthlessly efficient victory. In the succeeding years, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been able to regroup, rebuild and re-attack because they enjoy a secure sanctuary largely free from attack within the border areas of Pakistan.

…

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was proved right in his keeping the initial invasion force small and agile, but desperately wrong in disbanding all Iraqi security forces and civil service with no plan to fill the resulting vacuum. Certainly it is hard now to understand the logic of that decision.

…

This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.

A mixed bag. Yes remnants of the Taliban have reconstituted along the Afghan-Pakistan border but to expect this would not happen misunderstands the nature of the Taliban movement, the nature of Afghan society, and Afghan political history. Al-Qaeda is present along that frontier but the extent to which they are actually a problem is arguable. They seem to have refrained from conducting operations into Afghanistan and are more focused on overthrowing the Musharraf regime.

I simple disagree that using the Iraqi army as a security force was ever possible or, if it were possible, it was anything but a profoundly bad idea. As to our ability to deter our enemies disintegrating, that is an easily rebuttable presumption. We have few enemies today who would wish to challenge us. Our air and naval forces are essentially operating at a peacetime schedule. . Korea doesn’t need US ground forces and in the unlikely event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan it is hard to see what role US infantry would play. If we look at potential hotspots which would need an infusion of US ground troops we find n=1, that is, Iran With the infrastructure we’ve developed to support operations in Afghanistan and Iraq it is hard to see how we are disadvantaged here.

This brings us to the third front, the strategic-political. The jihadist regime in Iran feels no reservation about flaunting its policy to go nuclear, and it unleashed Hezbollah, its client terrorist organization, to attack Israel. In Somalia a jihadist group has seized control of the government. In Pakistan, Islamists are becoming more powerful, and attacks within India are increasing. Governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan are under increasing Islamist pressure.

Simply a misstatement of facts. Labeling the Tehran regime as jihadist hides their true nature and objectives. Somalia is an issue. So is a lot of sub-Saharan Africa. We can’t forget that al-Qaeda choose to bomb out embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. As to the “increasing Islamist pressure” it may be true, but all Islamists aren’t the same. Confusing political parties with deep roots in tribal culture with parties dedicated to the overthrow of a state with al-Qaeda does nothing to define the scope of the problem. But one has to ask, it we are bogged down in Iraq what does Lehman propose we do in the laundry list of other countries he lists? He doesn’t say.

In the Pacific, North Korea now feels free to rattle its missile sabers, firing seven on America's Independence Day. China is rapidly building its 600-ship navy to fill the military vacuum that we are creating in the Pacific as our fleet shrinks well below critical mass. Not one of these states believes that we can undertake any credible additional military operations while we are bogged down in Iraq.

What any of this has to do with his thesis on whether or not we are winning the war on terror is anyone’s guess. The jury is still out on the effects of the North Korean missile tests. As their longest range missiles failed one is hard pressed to state that this move strengthened their hand. And is it isn’t like North Korea hasn’t blown launched missiles, blown up the South Korean cabinet, attempted to kill the president of South Korea twice, and hacked US officers to death in the Demilitarized Zone.

China is in the process of building a limited capability blue water navy. But it seems that their building of that navy would be taking place with or without the GWOT. True, our Navy is too small, but again it isn’t like this happened overnight. The idea of a 600-ship Navy disappeared with the dissolution of the USSR.

As to what these two countries believe, I don’t know. I’m real sure Lehman doesn’t know either. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that not a lot of people in the governments of those two countries know what they believe in this regard.

So I think Lehman is more Chicken Little than Cassandra here. My view would be that we have taken a lot of steps, if not all possible steps, to reduce the probability of an attack on the United States and its interests abroad. We have brought into the GWOT countries who ordinarily would be our rivals, Russia and China, for instance. We have forced at least one bad actor, Libya, to cease its dealings with terrorists. By going after terrorism rather than “jihadists” we’ve been able to get nations who would be reluctant to help us, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc, to use the GWOT to cooperate. In my view, the reason there has been an outbreak of violence in some of these countries is not because the terrorists are stronger but rather because the governments have simply stopped placating the terrorists.

As to Iraq limiting our strategic flexibility, maybe true or maybe not so true. Had the invasion of Iraq not occurred it is easy to imagine Lehman chastising the administration for leaving Saddam in power and the inevitable collapse of the UN sanctions regime.

The points Lehman makes about the way in which our force projection capability has atrophied are correct but whether or not they reflect upon our ability to win the GWOT is arguable.

This is, like the war against piracy, is going to be a long war. There will not be an end to terrorism or terrorists but we can reduce them to the point where they do not control nations, they cannot operate freely across international frontiers, and we can prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. We can, eventually, reduce them to a police problem and I would contend that great strides have been made in that direction.