To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign Against Terrorism

To Prevail is a compendium of works by eminent scholars and practitioners who stress the importance of understanding the distinct changes in the threat to U.S. security, and debunk the myths created and circulated by the ignorant and uninformed. Historically, we have viewed the threat to our national security as being associated with a government, linear in development, in accordance with well-understood rules of engagement, and an enemy whose tactics, weapons, and assets were relatively easy to detect and recognize. There are a number of identifiable security threats-drug trafficking, terrorism, proliferation of WMD-which constitute a `clear and present danger'. As long as human discontent, and/or greed exist, fanatics and killers will be globally recruited. By using 9/11 as a reason, `causas-belli' to target not just the terrorists themselves but countries that harbor them, the Bush administration has created a major precedent. This does not amount to a foreign policy of carte blanche; but it does mean that the United States and other Western countries can coerce belligerents and rogue states to crack down on terrorists, or take other preemptive action. That's the new order of things. The intelligence community, which has gone into a lamentable decline since the Carter administration, is primarily deficient in handling the new world order in special operations personnel, linguists, and operators/analysts with in-country experience due to an over reliance on technological surveillance. A more effective approach to the intelligence challenges would be an amalgam of people and technology. The new paradigm for intelligence operations should be: · Strategy · Individual self-generated motivation · High core operating competencies · A leader-based microculture · Improve and strengthen military & law enforcement capabilities