Mac-Coleman

18 December 2011 –

Expanding on my 15 December entry: we must fight a war against radical, jihadist Islam’s proponents. We must build a better grand strategy, one that would use our military instrument of national power, in close conjunction with our economic, internal political, and external diplomatic instruments, to defeat those who would attack U.S. territory and interests and try to subvert our constitutional form of government. We must win this war and keep our country safe from such threats. Unlike so many of the conflicts we have entered in the last several decades, this conflict does pose a major threat to U.S. security. This war should not be captured in soundbites like “expanding democracy,” or “pursuing important U.S. interests.” The soundbites should reflect danger to U.S. streets, malls, and homes and to U.S. sovereignty.

That said, our nation has increasingly capable weapons and intelligence collection equipment with which to prosecute this or any war. We have killed Al Qaeda operatives and leaders using the heat, ballast, and frag of standard explosives; but, those explosives were delivered on incredibly accurate missiles fired from drones flown by pilots sitting as far as satellite communications and the curvature of the earth will allow them to be from the actual battlefield. The main reason we are using more drones to prosecute the war against jihadist terrorists now than we did in 2008, is because we finally have more of them. Four years ago, we didn’t have all that many, probably less than one hundred in the inventory. Now, we have hundreds, and they are deployed on a well-established logistics network. I applaud the President’s policies to use such appropriate and available weaponry to send our enemies to Hell with alacrity. He is reaping the benefits of decisions made by his predecessor to build and deploy these sophisticated weapons in the numbers we have now. Thank you, Presidents Bush and Obama.

The same is true for the intelligence collection, collation, analysis, and subsequent decision-making that prepare the battlefield for the killers. Without such capability, we might as well go back to fighting each other with swords and pikes when our armies happen to stumble upon each other. For some time, it has been a truism that if a target creates heat, moves, talks, or emits electrons in any way, we can eventually pinpoint it so that the heat, blast, and frag guys can do their job. Never in the history of world has a country had such incredible weapons and the Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) to use them with. This generation of video game players may never appreciate how far the art of intelligence preparation of the battlefield and warfare has progressed in one generation.

The enemy also uses the new technology and concepts as well as anybody. They may not have the same weapons, but they do have extensive intelligence collection networks and use the world-wide net of instantaneous data and communication processing and transfer to be credible and lethal opponents in this new age of warfare. They often control the initiative and tempo of the conflict, making our C3I effort a difficult one. It is indeed a game of spy vs spy with rules for us and few rules for them.

We can win this war because, if we properly prosecute the war, the initiative and tempo will switch to our control, just as it did when we mobilized for hot and cold wars against totalitarian movements of the 20^th century. The the lonely roads in Yemen and the caves of Afghanistan are only the obvious battlefield. We must strike the more decisive blows in the economic boardrooms and laboratories of western businesses and entrepreneurs. From such politically friendly sources, economically viable replacements for oil and natural gas can emerge. Their use will wither the Islamic economic base of South Asia, the Middle East, and the Maghreb that fuels the jihadists’ engines. Can we do this? Yes, we can. But, it will require that U.S. government stop addicting businesses on the subsidies of economically unviable “green” energy and let them pursue the real economic bonanza: increased energy production in the United States and North America and the eventual replacement of oil and natural gas with another equally friendly source. Unless we create and vigorously pursue a legitimate national strategy that includes the effective use of all our instruments of national power, our victories will be tactical only, and the control of the timing and tempo of the war will continue to reside with the flexible, stateless, ideologically driven enemy.

Since we have not chosen to isolate and defang our enemies economically and diplomatically, people from all political camps lament loudly our tactical failures and try to find other ways for us to be decisive without changing our faulty strategy. With this limited thinking, some on the right say that it is difficult to isolate our jihadist enemies and destroy them militarily because our hands are tied by our not looking at the entire world, including the United States, as a theater of war. Some on the left are limited by their fixation on eliminating the use of military mechanisms to execute “due process” in capturing or killing the bad guys and aggressively look for ways to take the entire process out of military hands and to handle it as a domestic, criminal matter, under civilian court systems. Ouch! Without a clear strategy, everybody is swinging in the dark.

One danger here is that as the French would say it, les extremes se touchent. The extreme ends of the political spectrum are curving around to join on a single, bad solution: regular use by state and local police agencies of advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology within the United States. The right would be placated because this world-wide war could be prosecuted everywhere, with information collected in the U.S. shared with the military, of course. The left would be satisfied because the “war” would now be a local, criminal matter with the military no longer in charge. Does this sound crazy? Not to a career intelligence puke who understands the temptation for corruption that always exists in the opportunity to amass, collate, and use information about anybody. Reading other people’s mail is an incredible rush.

How tempting is it to convince yourself that you are doing something patriotic and noble by using existing technology that can detect munitions, drugs, weapons, facial characteristics, or body temperature on a person from five thousand feet above the street and then instantaneously transmitting that information to a decision-maker who can arrest or attack that person based on collating that information with other information collected by previous, equally catholic collection techniques? Dress it up any way your political bent tells you to; but, you will have a deliberate abuse of power unknown in the history of totalitarianism. The end of the political spectrum that governs at the moment would be irrelevant because such power will always corrupt the state into totalitarianism.

Is this an overreaction? Ask yourself that when you now get spam from a company whose e-mail advertisement you opened and quickly deleted without responding. Ask yourself that when you hear advertisements on the radio that sell a company’s ability to fix your computer remotely, on WI-FI even, by entering its operating system through the internet and altering, deleting, and adding programs. Ask yourself that when you see the cameras in the mall, on the main intersection near your apartment, and in all businesses. Ask yourself that when the new car you just bought transmits to a satellite where you are, how fast you are going, and what your predicted route will be, based on previous vehicle use. Ask yourself that when you are wanded then frisked then run through a fancy imaging machine at the airport before you take off. When you deplane, you then pass through a control point where a camera records your facial features and compares them to a data base of potential bad guys. If the technology exists, someone will try to figure out a way to use it to control you. Some due process, heh?

I am concerned that we are not fighting this war with the proper strategy and instruments of national power. Because of that, the results of the war may well mimic what the enemy wanted to do anyway. Who would be controlling us then? Would it matter?