RAND Review
Message from the Editor
A former U.S. Army captain who served with Special Forces in the Dominican Republic and then in Vietnam, who founded the RAND Corporation’s terrorism research program in 1972, and who worked for nine years as deputy chairman of one of the world’s largest private investigative and security consulting firms, Brian Michael Jenkins has had ample opportunity to observe crime and conflict from multiple vantage points. His experiences make him uniquely qualified to assess America’s current approach to terrorists and other enemies. He finds it “obsolete.”
Despite the fact that the Cold War ended more than ten years ago, that a gang of hijackers dramatically demonstrated the destructiveness of new modes of conflict more than two years ago, and that U.S. troops are dying daily at the hands of those who wield far less military might, we in the United States continue to view our enemies through the “narrow bores” of our traditional military capabilities, Jenkins writes. We have adapted incrementally, and we remain powerful, but the transformations necessary in our planning and doing have been impeded by the lack of transformation in our thinking.
Jenkins would be the first to admit that many of his arguments have been made before, at least in piecemeal fashion, by other authors at RAND and elsewhere, especially since Sept. 11, 2001. He believes, however, that the message has yet to sink in that the new threats to national security represent not just temporary aberrations but fundamental changes in the ecology of conflict.
The root of his concern is neither any single U.S. administration nor any single component of our national security structure but rather an accretion of outmoded habits of thought that pervade throughout the structure. Jenkins contends that we in America must reconsider our planning scenarios, reorganize our forces for rapid adaptation to new situations, reorient our intelligence efforts so that we can “get smart fast,” and revivify our international alliances—but that each of these requirements presupposes that we first rethink our assumptions.
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