As important as it may be to wipe out infrastructure like Al Qaeda's, the behind-the-scenes work of building up the global capacity to fight terrorism will determine the success of a war declared barely six months ago. "In many ways, our most important impact is going to be in helping to build the capability of nations around the world to confront this threat," says Frank Taylor, the State Department's head of counterterrorism. "We will close the seams in which these groups operate – and by that I don't just mean the physical places, but the cracks where intelligence isn't shared and [where] countries don't cooperate." That means much of the work against terrorism will come through such less-telegenic campaigns as enhanced intelligence work, information sharing, and checks on financial operations.
No matter how good the military arm is, without intelligence to direct it, it has nowhere to go. The reason Shah-i-Kot looked so quagmirish is because they didn't know the details of what they were fighting and had to thrash around trying to find the enemy. Someone's assembling all these bits and pieces of information we've been picking up in the past six months - more than we've ever had before, by orders of magnitude - into a detailed picture. The overview conforms to what we knew before in most cases, but with the detail cleared up they can do better prioritization. I'd bet that's why Yemen and Somalia have dropped from being areas of real concern to being side jobs. We might even see the "ground forces" used in the war shift from soldiers to cops.I always wondered why we didn't use MP brigades to do the Balkans pacification bit, rather than 82nd AB troopers who never met a stranger they didn't want to shoot. This would be a great way of using the Americorps volunteers also.
But seriously, the role of the military is being radically redefined, and the current recruiting goals are indicative of this: the Army asked for a growth of less than 10% to fight this war and the other services are less than 5%. Where the money is being spent is not on numbers of personnel, but on the infrastructure to support short term but very violent interactions with national enemies. About the only country I could see occupying for an extended period of time is Iraq, and that would be solely due to the fact that de Baathizing the political infrastructure there is going to require another MacArthur treatment. The rest of the military is spending heavily on intelligence and logistics, and only to a limited extent on upgrading weapons systems.
Posted by Tom Roberts 3/16/2002 1:55:14 PM Draining the ba'ath is going to be similar to getting the mafia out of Sicily.
I sure hope the CIA is spending a lot of money building up its covert ops end, because a lot of the targets they're coming up with aren't going to be comfortable to go after with miliary resources.
Posted by Fred 3/17/2002 12:13:34 PM |