White House Unveils Retooled Plan to Hunt al-Qaida by Kimberly Dozier, Associated Press. BLUF: "The United States will push ahead with more targeted drone strikes and special operations raids and fewer costly land battles like Iraq and Afghanistan in the continuing war against al-Qaida, according to a new national counterterrorism strategy unveiled Wednesday."
Comments
The reality is we can downsize a few organizations if we get away from maintaining occupation forces. Our primary DOD CT folks at the national level have done a great job at adapting and reorganizing for the CT fight, while other DOD organizations have adapted for the COIN fight, which is arguably detrimental to our national interests in more ways than one (reduced combat skills, excessively expensive way to wage war, leads some policy makers to think this is the proper way of using the military to achieve our objectives, etc.)
One area we may have invest more in is our intelligence structure. We need to expand our ability to focus on terrorists and their supporters globally with a similiar (not equal to) level of fidelity that we enjoy in the AFG-PAK region. Figuring out how to do that intelligently without bloating already huge bureaucratic organizations will be a challenge. It will require redesign and development of new processes, hopefully before we throw more money at intell. Our intelligence fight also needs to be effective and "sustainable economically.".
Another area we need to consider is how to evaluate risk, and when the time presents itself being willing to take high risk missions if they're worth it. Maybe the raid to kill UBL has finally gotten us past a line in the sand that we refused to cross in the past based on self generated scenarios that we were scared to death of. A lot of those scenarios were partly driven by some in the PAO field(so I agree downsize, reorganize and retrain this field immediately), who pretend to be experts on how the home and foreign audiences will react. Based on their track record most couldn't get a job with an advertising firm, because they consistantly misread these audiences.
As for respect, the world will respect us more when we conduct operations that are largely defensive in nature (so and so is trying to kill Americans, or funding those who are, and the host nation wouldn't act so we did). The stated objectives are understandable and it leaves little room for the conspiracy theories that both OIF and OEF-A have generated, and just as importantly these operations will only be in the headlines for a couple of weeks at most and after we do enough of them over time they won't be that exciting to the media. Most importantly though America will be safer (not safe) and we will no longer fall in the AQ trap of bleeding ourselves dry economically with our current approach in Afghanistan and former approach in Iraq. What some people aren't comfortable with is the lack of a permanent solution, but since a permanent solution is a false hope to begin with in regards to terrorism, what we need is both a sustainable and workable solution.
""Our best offense won't always be deploying large armies abroad, but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us," Brennan said at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.""
It is about time that we transition away from using the military for trying to transform nations socially and politically in the elusive goal of denying safehaven. I also think it is refreshing that we will start backing off our counter-ideology efforts (which have not been working) and instead mechanically focus on AQ and like minded groups. This is what counterterrorism should be. Obviously, State and USAID (and others) will have different roles. While Russ Howard is a respected mentor, he has it wrong this time. Nations won't distrust or lose faith in us because we will no longer practice hubris (which also destabilizing their economies), rather they will regain respect for our practical and sustainable approach to defense.
In reality this is nothing new, we were doing this prior to 9/11, though the political will to conduct strikes was obviously limited then. That obviously changed since 9/11, and the will to act unilaterally has been reinforced by the fact that after years of assistance and pleading some states will not act to target terrorists in their territory. OIF and OEF-A were both effective initially, but when they both changed from a military mission to a missionary mission where we were trying to transform a nation and its values we not only lost our momentum, but our way and started confusing COIN with CT. There will be reasons to conduct COIN the future, but hopefully not in response to terrorist attacks.