From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: "No Easy Battle" 
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 09:05:30 +1200


Friends -

I am forwarding this to the postcolonial list just to provide subscribers
with one more point of view on what will happen in the long term.  If this
article has appeared on poco before, I apologize for the redundancy.

Margaret Trawick



No Easy Battle
2000 GMT, 010914
Summary  In the wake of this week's terrorist attacks in the United States,
the U.S. government is trying to decide how it can defeat its new style of
enemy. The key to victory is finding the enemy's center of gravity, or what
enables it to operate, and destroying it. But what has worked for the U.S.
military in the past may not be enough this time around.

Analysis
The foundation of any successful military operation is defining and
attacking the enemy's center of gravity: the capacity that enables it to
operate. A war effort that does not successfully define the enemy's center
of gravity, or lacks the ability to decisively incapacitate it, is doomed to
failure. The center of gravity can be relatively easy to define, as was the
Iraqi command and control system, or relatively difficult to define, as was
Vietnam's discovery of America's unwillingness to indefinitely absorb
casualties. In either case, identifying the adversary's center of gravity is
the key to victory.In the wake of this week's terrorist attacks in the
United States, this question is now being discussed in the highest reaches
of the American government. The issue, from a military standpoint, is not
one of moral responsibility or legal culpability. Rather, it is what will be
required to render the enemy incapable of functioning as an effective force.
Put differently, what is the most efficient means of destroying the enemy's
will to resist?This is an extraordinarily difficult process in this case
because it is not clear who the enemy is. Two schools of thought are
emerging though. One argues that the attackers are essentially agents of
some foreign government that enables them to operate. Therefore, by either
defeating or dissuading this government from continuing to support the
attackers, they will be rendered ineffective and the threat will end.Such a
scenario is extremely attractive for the United States. Posing the conflict
as one between nation-states plays to American strength in waging
conventional war. A nation-state can be negotiated with, bombed or invaded.
If a nation-state is identified as the attackers' center of gravity, then it
can by some level of exertion be destroyed. There is now an inherent
interest within the U.S. government to define the center of gravity as Iraq
or Afghanistan or both. The United States knows how to wage such wars.The
second school of thought argues that the entity we are facing is instead an
amorphous, shifting collection of small groups, controlled in a dynamic and
unpredictable manner and deliberately without a clear geographical locus.
The components of the organization can be in Afghanistan or Boston, in
Beirut or Paris. Its fundamental character is that it moves with near
invisibility around the globe, forming ad hoc groups with exquisite patience
and care for strikes against its enemies.This is a group, therefore, that
has been deliberately constructed not to provide its enemies with a center
of gravity. Its diffusion is designed to make it difficult to kill with any
certainty. The founders of this group studied the history of underground
movements and determined that their greatest weakness is what was thought to
be their strength: tight control from the center. That central control, the
key to the Leninist model, provided decisive guidance but presented enemies
with a focal point that, if smashed, rendered the organization helpless.
This model of underground movement accepts inefficiency -- there are long
pauses between actions -- in return for both security, as penetration is
difficult, and survivability, as it does not provide its enemies with a
definable point against which to strike.This model is much less attractive
to American military planners because it does not play to American
capabilities. It is impervious to the type of warfare the United States
prefers, which is what one might call wholesale warfare. It instead demands
a retail sort of warfare, in which the fighting level comprises very small
unit operations, the geographic scale is potentially global and the time
frame is extensive and indeterminate. It is a conflict that does lend itself
to intelligence technology, but it ultimately turns on patience, subtlety
and secrecy, none of which are America's strong suits.It is therefore
completely understandable that the United States is trying to redefine the
conflict in terms of nation-states, and there is also substantial precedent
for it as well. The precursor terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s
were far from self-contained entities. All received support in various ways
from Soviet and Eastern European intelligence services, as well as from
North Korea, Libya, Syria and others. From training to false passports, they
were highly dependent on nation-states for their operation.It is therefore
reasonable to assume the case is the same with these new attackers. It would
follow that if their source of operational support were destroyed, they
would cease to function. A bombing campaign or invasion would then solve the
problem. The issue is to determine which country is supplying the support
and act.There is no doubt the entity that attacked the United States got
support from state intelligence services. Some of that support might well
have been officially sanctioned while some might have been provided by a
political faction or sympathetic individuals. But although for the attackers
state support is necessary and desirable, it is not clear that destroying
involved states would disable the perpetrators.One of the principles of the
attackers appears to be redundancy, not in the sense of backup systems, but
in the sense that each group contains all support systems. In the same
sense, it appears possible that they have constructed relationships in such
a way that although they depend on state backing, they are not dependent on
the support of any particular state.An interesting development arising in
the aftermath is the multitude of states accused of providing support to the
attackers: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Algeria and Syria, among
others, have all been suggested. All of them could have been involved in
some way or another, with the result being dozens of nations providing
intentional or unintentional support. The attackers even appear to have
drawn support from the United States itself, as some of the suspected
hijackers reportedly received flight training from U.S. schools. The
attackers have organized themselves to be parasitic. They are able to attach
themselves to virtually any country that has a large enough Arab or Islamic
community for them to disappear into or at least go unnoticed within.
Drawing on funds acquired from one or many sources, they are able to extract
resources wherever they are and continue operating.If such is the case, then
even if Iraq or Afghanistan gave assistance, they are still not necessarily
the attackers' center of gravity. Destroying the government or military
might of these countries may be morally just or even required, but it will
not render the enemy incapable of continuing operations against the United
States. It is therefore not clear that a conventional war with countries
that deliberately aided the culprits will achieve military victory. The
ability of the attackers to draw sustenance from a wide array of willing and
unwilling hosts may render them impervious to the defeat of a supporting
country. The military must systematically attack an organization that tries
very hard not to have a systematic structure that can be attacked. In order
for this war to succeed, the key capability will not be primarily military
force but highly refined, real-time intelligence about the behavior of a
small number of individuals. But as the events of the last few days have
shown, this is not a strength of the American intelligence community. And
that is the ultimate dilemma for policymakers. If the kind of war we can
wage well won't do the job, and we lack the confidence in our expertise to
wage the kind of war we need to conduct, then what is to be done? The easy
answer -- to fight the battle we fight best -- may not be the right answer,
or it may be only part of the solution.

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