I just finished reading William Linds latest article on what our “Grand Strategy” on the war on terror should be and I have to say that I agree with most of it. I don’t agree with some of his reasoning and his views on how we should treat china and israel but I am fundamentally in favor of most of it. It seems to fit perfectly with what Leonard Peikoff said we should have done after 9/11…if only we had.
I recommend you read the article to understand his arguments better:
http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_strategic_defense.htm
Lind starts of by saying that Bush and Kerry and just about everyone all have a bad plan on fighting the war on terror because its offensive.
The thing is that I don’t think what Lind advocates is offensive war, it is very offensive but he is confusing what our LONG TERM foreign policy SHOULD BE even if there wasn’t a war on terror at all, i.e free trade, disconnecting ourselves from places of “disorder” or as I see it,countries that don’t protect individual rights and are unfree.
What does Colonel Boyd’s definition of grand strategy mean in such a world? It means America’s grand strategy should seek to connect our country with as many centers and sources of order as possible, while isolating us from as many centers and sources of disorder as possible. This is the only reasonable chance of preserving something called the “United States” in a 21st century dominated by Fourth Generation war. And, as we will see, it leads toward a. defensive, not offensive, military strategy.
What do we mean by centers and sources of order? First, places where the state still stands. The state arose to bring order, and in portions of the world it continues to do so. While the crisis of legitimacy of the state is universal, that does not mean it will everywhere reach catastrophic proportions. Those places where the state endures not simply as an empty form will remain centers of (relative) order. America is already connected to those places in a wide variety of ways and should strive to remain so. Actions such as the war in Iraq that tend to isolate us from successful states run counter to our interests.
One of the primary centers of disorder in the 21st century will be failed states—areas where the state has either disappeared or become simply one more criminal gang among many. Current examples include much of Africa, Somalia, Mesopotamia (following America’s destruction of the Iraqi state), Afghanistan, parts of the former Soviet Union, and the West Bank of the Jordan River. These areas represent the future for much of the world. Just as some cultures are likely to be centers of order, others will be centers or sources of disorder.
If you replace the word “order”, as Lind uses it, with the words freedom and individual rights you will start to see that if we had a foreign policy that connected us to more free countries, through trade for example, and isolated the countries with no order(dictatorships and unfree countries in general) we would start to isolate our enemy’s. And by no fact of coincidence the more free the country the more"order" it has.
And next Lind goes on to explain why we should isolate these countries:
This brings us to the next question: what do we mean by “connect” and “isolate”? Connection is easy enough to understand. Goods money, people, and ideas all flow freely with minimal barriers. Americans view those to whom we are connected as friends, extending help in times of need and also asking for and receiving assistance, including in war. Commercially, we buy their products and sometimes they even buy ours.
“Isolate” is more difficult to understand, in part because in the lexicon of the present foreign-policy establishment, “isolationism” is a term of opprobrium. But as America learned on Sept. 11, a Fourth Generation world will be a place where our physical security will depend on our ability and willingness to isolate ourselves from certain forces.
What isolation means will vary from case to case, but in some situations it will require actions that appear harsh by current standards. For example, we may find it necessary to prohibit people from certain places from entering the U.S. We may need to profile on a variety of bases, including religious belief and ethnic origin. Isolation may also inflict hardships on Americans, as when we must avoid becoming dependent on imports such as Middle Eastern oil.
In general, isolation will mean minimizing contacts that involve flows of people, money, materials, and new primary loyalties, such as religions and ideologies, into the United States. Flows in the other direction will generally be less dangerous, except for the fact that one-way relationships are difficult to sustain. They tend to become reciprocal, which means importing danger. Americans will require a newfound self-discipline in a Fourth Generation world, realizing they cannot have it all (and have it cheaply) without creating serious threats to America’s homeland security.
How does this isolate the enemy, which in our strategy means centers and sources of disorder, from other independent power centers? Here, our proposed grand strategy works indirectly, in a way John Boyd might appreciate. To use one of his favorite expressions, it folds the enemy back on himself.
As the offensive strategy of the Bush administration has demonstrated, when we choose to engage centers and sources of disorder, attacking them militarily or demanding reforms inconsistent with their cultures, we provide an external threat against which they can unite. Conversely, if we isolate ourselves from them, we will help them focus on and thus accentuate their internal contradictions. This is a classic case of inaction being a form of action.
The Islamic world offers an example. Islam mandates jihad against all non-Islamics, which means Islam will always be a threat to the U.S. But Islam itself is also riven with internal conflicts. Those internal conflicts are now minimized because Islamics can call for unity against an external threat. Even so, internal conflicts persist: many Shi’ite Iraqis blame car bombings in Shi’ite areas on Wahhabi Muslims.
In Terror’s Mask: Insurgency Within Islam, Michael Vlahos argues that what we are seeing in the Islamic world today follows an age-old pattern. Purist elements arise that accuse existing Islamic governments of straying from Islam; that pure Islam cannot govern; attempting to make things work, they also become corrupt; and new purist elements gather to bring about their overthrow. This cycle could work to America’s advantage if she isolated herself from it, because it focuses Islamic energies inward. As Boyd would say, it tends to fold Islam back on itself.
As Lind explains and as we all know the middle east is impotent and the only reason it has any “power” is because of its connections with the West,but what would happen if we cut them off? They would be isolated and they would focus inward and start fighting each other.
This is the same policy we should have had against the soviet union, communism would have collapsed all by itself if we had just isolated them.
So when it does become time to attack a country how would we do it and under what conditions?
Within this context, one of the first implications of our recommended grand strategy is that America’s current military strategy—a strong strategic offensive coupled with a weak tactical offensive—is wrong. Strategically, we are launching military attacks on perceived opponents worldwide, or at least, threatening to do so, under a doctrine of preventive war. But tactically, our attacks are weak because it is relatively easy for our real enemies, non-state forces, to sidestep them.
Both Afghanistan arid Iraq provide examples. America took the strategic military offensive, invading both countries. But in Afghanistan, on the tactical level, both al-Qa’ida and the Taliban survived our attempts to destroy them and are now coming back. The reason they could do so is that our Second Generation armed forces fight by putting firepower on targets, and Fourth Generation forces are very good at making themselves untargetable. Even in Operation Anaconda, when al-Qa’ida stood and fought, the inability of the Second Generation American Army to fight a battle of encirclement (something that is central to Third Generation tactics) allowed the enemy to escape with small losses.
The situation in Iraq is similar. For the most part, the Iraqi armed forces did not contest our advance to Baghdad. Whether that was part of their strategy is not yet known. But the result was to leave those forces alive and armed to serve as a basis for a guerrilla war. The non-state forces that are emerging from the wreckage of the Iraqi state are proving to be as untargetable as those in Afghanistan.
Instead of a strategic military offensive coupled with a weak tactical offensive, our grand strategy would urge a strategic military defensive coupled with a powerful strategic and tactical counteroffensive. In simple terms, this means we would leave centers and sources of disorder alone militarily (and in other ways) unless they attacked us. But if they attacked us, our response would be Roman, which is to say annihilating.
The challenge facing an annihilating counterstroke is not theoretical but practical: how do we accomplish it? There may be some instances in which our Second Generation armed forces can do it, for example by carpet bombing from B-52s. Should we ever succeed in transitioning the American armed services to the Third Generation, more options would open up, such as large-scale battles of encirclement.. But in some cases, unconventional weapons will have to be employed.
When that is the case, it will be imperative that the employment of unconventional weapons follows instantly after a successful attack on the United States. As Machiavelli would understand, such a reaction must appear to be a "spasm” on our part, not a calculated act. In 1914, had Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia within 48 hours of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, she might well have gotten away with it. While the world, in shock over the 9/11 attack, might have accepted an apparent American spasm with unconventional weapons, it also might have objected that any first use of such weapons would be the end of efforts to stop the proliferation ot weapons of mass destruction.
And I agree with this point completely, if we had attacked Iran for example right after 9/11 Americans and the world would have supported us completely, and it would have been the right response just like Leonard Peikoff recommended in an interview with Prodos.com:
Peikoff:Now, there’s only one proper response. Once I get this in, I’ll have finished my declaration. There’s only one proper response. You have to pick out the worst of the terrorist-sponsoring governments, not individual terrorists – to hell with bin Laden – and declare war on it. And then, by declaring war, you go there and bomb out the government; destroy the government, the civil authority, and take over those countries. And the two that have to be done are Afghanistan and Iran. Neither alone is enough. That combination will absolutely end terrorism and the threat of terrorism in this country.
It will cost us very little, because if we credibly threaten this, they would lay down their arms right now. The point is that nobody believes the United States, now. Nobody. Therefore, what we need is to take the strongest armament that we possess and tell those countries: “You’ve got seven days to get rid of the military, to disarm entirely, have the government resign, to have a peaceful pro-Western government installed, to uproot all the terrorists and jail them; raze and destroy all your terrorist training facilities – seven days. If at that time it’s not done, your capital is going to be blown back into the Stone Age, both Tehran, Kabul.” If that’s not enough, turn the whole country back to the Stone Age.
And believe me, if we dropped one bomb with that degree of righteousness, that’s the end. Every single person in the Mideast would bow down and say, “Leave the United States alone.” That includes the Palestinians. It would be the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because the Palestinians only get their supply from this stream of terrorists. That’s my solution. That’s the only solution, and any other solution, in my opinion, is simply immoral.
And read this part from Lind, almost the same thing.
A defensive military strategy that includes an annihilating counterattack is consistent with our grand strategy of isolating centers and sources of disorder while folding them back on themselves, yet it runs no danger of being perceived as weakness on our part. On the contrary, it both demonstrates and demands more strength of will than is currently evident in the Washington establishment, in either political party.
Now there are parts where i disagree with Lind but they are minor and they are do to the fact that he’s a pragmatist and a paleo-conservative, but fundamentally i think he is RIGHT ON.