RAND Review
Redefining the Enemy
The World Has Changed, But Our Mindset Has Not
War Beyond the Cold War
Firefighters retrieve bodies from a bombed passenger train in Madrid on March 11. Several explosions on trains killed 192 rush-hour commuters and wounded more than 1,400 in Spain’s worst terrorist attack ever. |
The U.S. armed forces today naturally continue to train for war with an enemy that could pose a direct military challenge—the potential "near-peers." The most frequently mentioned candidates are a powerful and hostile China or a revived revanchist Russia, although their need for stability and economic growth make war with either seem unlikely.
On the next tier down, in our hierarchy of standard planning scenarios, are regional powers like North Korea or potentially Iran. These countries now or may soon possess strategic weapons that could directly threaten U.S. territory.
But while looking toward enemies who might aspire to fight on our terms, the armed forces actually fight a very different set of battles: a bloody resistance movement in Iraq; a combination of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and warlords in Afghanistan; a worldwide manhunt for the leaders of al Qaeda. Then there are those conflicts that do not directly threaten our national security but require military force to rescue or protect American citizens, restore order, apprehend an accused war criminal or an indicted head of state, prevent ethnic cleansing, retaliate for acts of terrorism, or hunt for terrorist leaders.
Such operations account for most of the U.S. military interventions in the last quarter century: Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Philippines, Liberia, and now Haiti again. Future scenarios could see civil war in Iraq, collapse in Afghanistan, chaos in North Korea or post-Castro Cuba, a coup in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, U.S. hostages taken in Colombia, or possibly some disaster that causes a collapse in Mexico, sending a tidal wave of desperate refugees streaming north.
Often in such cases, we will be confronting petty tyrants and local warlords commanding inferior but vicious militias, engaged in ethnic or tribal conflict, or dedicated to war as a profitable enterprise, while hundreds of thousands of civilian victims clamor for protection. Our enemies will not be nations or armies but small groups of individuals or angry mobs. To respond to them will require adaptability and rapidly mobilized, specialized local knowledge.
In terms of intelligence, we need to be able to get smart fast. We need the capability for networked, multilateral threat analysis—comparable to "real-time intelligence on the battlefield"—to generate information that can be packaged and used quickly by a soldier in Afghanistan, a magistrate in France, a cop in Singapore, a Marine in Haiti. We do not yet have this capability.
Countering Proliferation
At one time I would have argued that there was a firebreak between weapons proliferation at the national level and potential terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. Historically, terrorists seldom sought mass casualties. Morality and self-image plus practical concerns about group cohesion, alienating perceived constituents, or provoking popular crackdowns constrained their violence.
As we have seen, however, these self-imposed constraints, which were never universal or immutable, eroded significantly in the last decade of the 20th century, especially among those inspired by religious ideologies, which, in their view, provided God’s mandate. Large-scale indiscriminate violence became more common, while some groups sought more exotic means of inflicting death and causing alarm.
Iraqi men cheer as an American Humvee burns. It came under attack during a shootout in the Iraqi town of Fallujah on March 25. |
A cult in Japan unleashed nerve gas in Tokyo’s subways, but not before it had experimented with biological weapons and made inquiries about the availability of nuclear weapons in Russia. The avatars of al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah have shown persistent interest in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Fortunately, their capabilities still trail their ambitions. We are most likely to see crude scenarios in which the psychological effects vastly exceed the actual casualties, but weapons of mass destruction have entered the terrorists’ imagination, if not yet their arsenal.
It is still wrong to conflate national proliferation efforts with terrorist ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Dictators of rogue states that acquire nuclear weapons seem unlikely to turn them over to uncontrolled terrorists except perhaps as part of an Armageddon defense. However, proliferation at the state level does indirectly facilitate terrorist acquisition through the spread of know-how and arsenals. Ironically, though, successfully shutting down weapons research may also promote underground proliferation. Rogue scientists, deprived of opportunities in national programs—as in Russia, Iraq, or Libya—may seek other profitable outlets for their expertise. While some scientists may seek compensation, others may look for revenge. This is the stuff of scary novels, but the distance between what we read on airplanes and what we read in intelligence estimates has narrowed.
The imperative to destroy weapons of mass destruction has been complicated by the trend toward smaller groups of adversaries—and by our responses to them. As a consequence of perceived U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq, it will now be very difficult to mobilize support for military intervention aimed at regime change for the stated purpose of neutralizing weapons of mass destruction. Preemption in the future may instead need to be aimed at specific facilities to be investigated or destroyed, specific shipments of material to be intercepted, or specific individuals to be targeted. To support these missions will place even greater demands on intelligence, accuracy, speed, and precision. Waiting too long to act will increase the threat; getting it wrong will further erode our already damaged credibility.
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