[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 110-174]
LESSONS FOR COUNTERING AL QA'IDA AND THE WAY AHEAD
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
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TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
ADAM SMITH, Washington, Chairman
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
JIM COOPER, Tennessee JOHN KLINE, Minnesota
JIM MARSHALL, Georgia THELMA DRAKE, Virginia
MARK E. UDALL, Colorado K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
BRAD ELLSWORTH, Indiana JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania
KATHY CASTOR, Florida
Bill Natter, Professional Staff Member
Alex Kugajevsky, Professional Staff Member
Andrew Tabler, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
----------
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2008
Page
Hearing:
Thursday, September 18, 2008, Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida
and the Way Ahead.............................................. 1
Appendix:
Thursday, September 18, 2008..................................... 33
----------
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
LESSONS FOR COUNTERING AL QA'IDA AND THE WAY AHEAD
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Smith, Hon. Adam, a Representative from Washington, Chairman,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee 1
Thornberry, Hon. Mac, a Representative from Texas, Ranking
Member, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee................................................... 2
WITNESSES
Arquilla, Dr. John, Professor, Department of Defense Analysis,
Naval Postgraduate School, Author of ``Worst Enemy: The
Reluctant Transformation of the American Military''............ 9
Jones, Dr. Seth G., Political Scientist, RAND Corporation, Author
of ``How Terrorist Groups End'' and ``Counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan''.................................................. 3
Scheuer, Dr. Michael F., Senior Fellow, Jamestown Foundation,
Author of ``Through Our Enemies' Eyes,'' ``Imperial Hubris''
and ``Marching Toward Hell''................................... 5
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Arquilla, Dr. John........................................... 61
Jones, Dr. Seth G............................................ 38
Scheuer, Dr. Michael F....................................... 56
Smith, Hon. Adam............................................. 37
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.]
LESSONS FOR COUNTERING AL QA'IDA
AND THE WAY AHEAD
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities
Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, September 18, 2008.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in
room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Smith
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ADAM SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
WASHINGTON, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Smith. Good morning. We will call the subcommittee
meeting to order. I thank Members and witnesses for being here
today. I will start with an opening statement and turn it over
to Mr. Thornberry for any opening remarks and then go directly
to our witnesses.
Thank you all for joining us this morning. I really look
forward to the testimony this morning. We have a very
distinguished and thoughtful panel on the issues around
counterterrorism and how the struggle against al Qa'ida and
violent extremists is going, the various component pieces of
that struggle, certainly within the military, how we are doing,
what is going on with the various pieces that the military is
responsible for. And I think there are several issues that are
going to be very interesting to hear about.
We have really become very focused on a counterinsurgency
counterterrorism strategy. Are we building a military to
accommodate that strategy in terms of the training, in terms of
the hardware, in terms of the very way the military is
structured? How can we do a better job of that to respond to
what is clearly going to be the fight we face now and for the
foreseeable future?
Those are some very significant issues that I think our
witnesses can help us address. I do think there is a lot that
we are doing right. I myself and many on the subcommittee have
had the opportunity to go around the world and tour some of our
special operators to see what Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC) has been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think on
the direct action piece we have made a lot of correct
decisions. The fusion cells that have been developed to bring
together all the various elements, both of the military and of
the intelligence community and elsewhere, to make sure that
everybody has the best information possible to find, fix and
finish on the targets that we are trying to find, the high-
value targets, has been very successful. Certainly it has been
very successful in Iraq and other parts of the world as well.
And I really applaud our special operators and the military for
the job they are doing there.
The areas where this subcommittee thinks we can do better
and do more work on is on the indirect piece and also on
strategic communications, the indirect piece being more classic
counterinsurgency, stopping insurgencies before they take hold.
Right now the best model for that, in terms of what we are
doing here in the U.S., I believe, is in the southern
Philippines where we have successfully worked with the
Philippine Government, with the locals in the southern islands
to build up their capabilities by, through and with working
with them, not having the U.S. take the lead but in training
the local folks to counter the insurgency and also providing
the proper development in those communities to stop the
insurgency before it takes hold, to basically make the local
citizens happy with their environments so they are less willing
to follow an insurgency. I think that model needs to be
replicated and used across the broader spectrum of the theaters
that we face insurgencies in.
And lastly is on the strategic communications piece.
Because at the end of the day, this is an ideological struggle
as much, if not more, than it is a military struggle. We can do
a very effective job of direct action of identifying the top
violent extremists, the top leaders and al Qa'ida in the
Taliban, in the insurgencies in Iraq, in capturing or killing
them and thereby destabilizing their efforts. But if more
continue to be created, if more terrorists, if more insurgents
are generated, then we will simply be fighting on a treadmill
that is going faster and faster and we won't get there.
We have to win the broader ideological war, to stop
radicalization before it occurs, and I believe we need to do a
better job of figuring out precisely what our message needs to
be and who to work with our various partners in the world to
make sure that that message gets out consistently and
effectively.
I know Mr. Thornberry has done a lot of work in this area,
has been very focused on it, and I appreciate his efforts on
that.
Those are some of the issues. Certainly there are more. Our
witnesses will touch on those. To give us an idea going
forward, you know, as we look to a new Administration, to a new
Congress, what is our best and wisest counterterrorism strategy
and what do we need to do to get there. I am very much looking
forward to the testimony of our witnesses. And with that, I
will turn it over to Mr. Thornberry for any opening remarks he
has.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith can be found in the
Appendix on page 37.]
STATEMENT OF HON. MAC THORNBERRY, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS,
RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND
CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And first I would
like to say I appreciate the subject of this hearing. Too often
in Congress we review and criticize what has been done in the
past rather than try to learn lessons from the past to help
light the way for what should be done in the future. And that
is what this hearing, and I hope others, is all about. Because
however you feel about how we got here, we are where we are.
And the question is, now what? And that, as you said, is for a
new Administration and new Congress to help navigate.
Now we have a very different situation in Iraq than we have
had in some time. As somebody said on television recently, the
strategy has been wildly successful beyond what anybody
expected. And yet we have al Qa'ida regrouping in an area of
the world that is not really governed by any sovereign nation.
Yesterday we got reminders again that al Qa'ida or related
groups are still intent on attacking U.S. interests and
embassies throughout the world. So the situation is changing,
and yet I do believe there are lessons to be learned that help
light the way ahead.
You have assembled a group of diverse and interesting
witnesses. I have read their testimony, and I have read books
from each of them in the past. I am not sure I fully agree with
what any of them say completely, but that is what makes for an
interesting hearing. I know they will have interesting and
provocative things to say. So I look forward to the exchange
and their testimony.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much. I will introduce the panel
first. Then we will go left to right, starting with Dr. Jones.
First on the panel is Dr. Seth Jones, who has done a number of
things but most recently with the RAND study on
counterterrorism, how terrorist groups end, basically doing an
exhaustive analysis of, I think, well over 600 terrorist groups
that have been around since the late 1960's and examining how
you defeat them, how you ultimately win. Very much looking
forward to the testimony. I have read the study. I think it
raises some very, very interesting issues and look forward to
hearing what you have to say on that.
Then we have Dr. Michael Scheuer, who spent 22 years in the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and has also written
extensively on radical Islam, how we are combating it and where
we are not succeeding and some ideas for how to go about doing
that. I look forward to his testimony.
And then Dr. Arquilla, who has also written extensively on
military transformation, and most recently in ``Worst Enemy:
The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military,'' a book
which I am actually reading right now and find fascinating. It
is a great history, and I think lays out well some of the
battles, whenever you are trying to make change within any
military but specifically within the United States military to
accommodate, to basically recognize emerging threats and change
to meet them.
I look forward to all your testimony, and we will start
with Dr. Jones.
STATEMENT OF DR. SETH G. JONES, POLITICAL SCIENTIST, RAND
CORPORATION, AUTHOR OF ``HOW TERRORIST GROUPS END'' AND
``COUNTERINSURGENCY IN AFGHANISTAN''
Dr. Jones. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you
very much, members of the subcommittee. I will keep my comments
very brief and lay out in general the results of the study we
looked at.
What was particularly interesting for us in doing this work
was seven years after the September 11 attacks we found it
striking that neither in the policy community nor in the
government community there has been very little work on how
groups historically have ended. We found that a little
troubling in trying to design an effective counterterrorism
strategy without having any sense of historically, for example,
how groups have ended in the past.
So what we did is then we compiled a list of about 648
groups since 1968. We looked at a range of factors that could
have contributed to the end of those groups that ended. And
what we found was there are two major reasons how terrorist
groups have historically ended.
One is what we call groups deciding to adopt nonviolent
tactics and join the political process. There are a range of
groups, the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) in El
Salvador, which have reached a negotiated settlement with the
government. Second, we found slightly less from a percentage
standpoint but quite significant what you might call
clandestine operations, local police and intelligence agencies,
in some cases Special Forces arresting or killing key members
of the group. We found other instruments less useful as the
primary instrument in the defeat of terrorist organizations,
whether it was large numbers of military forces, economic
instruments, in some cases the victory of terrorist groups.
And again, in any counterterrorist strategy, what is clear
is there are a number of instruments that will be used. What we
looked at was which of these--in any counterterrorism campaign,
one has to prioritize. What we found again is a couple of
things. One is the maximization of what we call clandestine
operations, use of intelligence assets and special operations
assets, leveraging local actors; that is, minimizing large U.S.
military footprint on the ground and maximizing local efforts.
What we found when we looked at some of the data was, when we
looked at some of the early successes against al Qa'ida in
Pakistan, we found the most successful efforts tended to be
clandestine operations with CIA, in some cases the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or U.S. military working with
local Pakistani police and intelligence agencies in capturing
or killing key members of the organization. Even when we looked
pretty carefully at the Iraqi case most recently in places like
Anbar, we found the most successful efforts not maximizing U.S.
boots on the ground but, in the Anbar case, taking advantage of
animosity against al Qa'ida in Iraq, supporting Sunnis, massing
in the Ramadi police force, for example, and then providing
support, placing tanks around the house of sheikhs, maximizing
CIA assistance to some of the troops on the ground. And again
the Anbar success, I think, was primarily one that you would
call unconventional or surrogate warfare, not in maximizing
U.S. forces on the ground.
So just to conclude, again in the cases that we looked at,
what we found was both in the U.S. experience and in the
experience of how terrorist groups have ended, we found two
major reasons. First was a political settlement that we found
that was most likely to be successful when a group has very
minimal aims. With the current situation against al Qa'ida,
they do not have minimal aims. They are searching to overthrow
multiple regimes. Therefore, a political settlement in our view
is simply not possible, especially with key members of the
group.
That pushes us then towards much more clandestine
operations rather than the overt use of military force, and we
argue that that strategy has actually--when it has been used,
has been more successful in places like Anbar or even in the
Pakistani or Afghan case in 2001 and 2002.
I would be pleased to take additional questions and answers
on this. But I am going to conclude my remarks. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Jones can be found in the
Appendix on page 38.]
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Dr. Scheuer.
STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL F. SCHEUER, SENIOR FELLOW, JAMESTOWN
FOUNDATION, AUTHOR OF ``THROUGH OUR ENEMIES' EYES,'' ``IMPERIAL
HUBRIS'' AND ``MARCHING TOWARD HELL''
Dr. Scheuer. Good morning, gentlemen. Mr. Chairman, thank
you for asking me today. I will just briefly read my statement.
There is no better way to summarize the current position of
al Qa'ida and its allies than to quote the words President
Lincoln wrote in 1864. ``Distrust the union's growing strength
even after three years of increasingly bloody war with the
confederacy.'' In his annual message to Congress of 6 December,
1864, Mr. Lincoln, in words that Osama bin Laden could use
today, told the Congress that ``The most important fact remains
demonstrated, that we have more men now than we had when the
war began, that we are not exhausted, nor in the process of
exhaustion, that we are gaining strength and may, if need be,
maintain this contest indefinitely.''
As America enters the eighth autumn of the war, the reality
of a vital and undefeated Islamist enemy is apparent, and the
reason for this fact likewise lies in plain sight. The
government of the United States continues to fight an Islamist
terrorist enemy in al Qa'ida and its allies that does not exist
in the form Washington portrays, is not motivated by the
factors Washington ascribes to it, and it will not be defeated
by the military forces and political tools Washington has
deployed against it.
Neither al Qa'ida nor its main allies, for example, are
terrorist groups. They are insurgent organizations modeled on
the Islamist groups that defeated the Red Army in Afghanistan
in 1989. In comparison to their forbearers, al Qa'ida and its
allies are larger, more sophisticated, better led and funded,
more geographically dispersed, and more technologically
proficient. All of these attributes make them radically
different from any violent group that the United States
Government has previously crammed into its definition of
terrorist organizations.
Perhaps the clearest but largely ignored sign that America
is not confronting a terrorist group like the Japanese Red Army
or geriatric Palestinian group like the Palestinian Front for
the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), lies in
the area of leadership succession. Since 2001, Americans have
been able to flip on the radio almost any morning and learn
that another al Qa'ida number two, number three or number four
leader has been killed or captured in Afghanistan, Iraq or some
other place. In addition, the CIA's tremendously successful
rendition program has removed a sizable number of al Qa'ida
leaders from the battlefield. And yet despite these successes,
Admiral McConnell and General Hayden have accurately said that
al Qa'ida is as lethal and cohesive as ever and pose as a clear
and present danger to the continental United States.
How can this be so? Well, there are several reasons. But a
major one is that al Qa'ida is an insurgent group that because
it always faces a far more powerful enemy puts enormous time
and resources into succession planning. When a senior al Qa'ida
leader is captured or killed, a trained understudy takes his
place and the organization proceeds. The new leader may not be
as good as his predecessor but neither is he green and he soon
gets fully up to mark with on-the-job experience.
No terrorist organization could have absorbed the
punishment the United States has inflicted on al Qa'ida since
1996 and survived. Indeed, this amount of punishment would have
destroyed any organization the U.S. Government has accurately
defined as a terrorist group.
It is best to think of al Qa'ida as we often think of
Lebanese Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers. It and they are
powerful insurgent groups which are able to absorb enormous
punishment from nation-state militaries and continue to thrive
and attack. And al Qa'ida is more powerful and dangerous than
either. Because unlike Hezbollah and the Tamils, bin Laden's
organization has no return address against which the United
States can deliver a devastating blow. And if I may say
parenthetically, recent statements from the State Department,
the White House, and some congressional offices claiming that
Hezbollah is more of a threat to America than al Qa'ida are
inaccurate. Perhaps deliberately so. Such remarks are made by
those who want to have a war with Iran, those who slavishly
make Israel's agenda their own or those who have both
attributes.
Hezbollah is not an imminent threat to the United States
unless Washington and/or Israel launch an attack on Iran. Then,
however, it would pose a substantial domestic threat because
our open borders have made it impossible for law enforcement
agencies at any level of government to know the number and
location of Hezbollah operatives in this country at any given
time.
To go on, long before 9/11 and certainly since, the U.S.
Government under both parties has refused to accept that the
main motivation of al Qa'ida and its allies and the main source
of their appeal among Muslims is their perception that U.S.
foreign policy is a deliberate attack on their faith and on its
followers. From our enemies' perspective, therefore, this is
preeminently a religious war, notwithstanding the blather to
the contrary by Western politicians, academics, policymakers
and pundits. And sadly for Americans, the Islamist leaders,
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the others have left
U.S. officials with no excuse for failing to understand the
Mujahideen's motivation. Not since General Giap and Ho Chi Minh
has America had an enemy that has so fully, frankly and
consistently explained his motivation for waging war against
the United States. And yet the U.S. Government has been and is
led by men and women from both parties who ignore the
Islamists' words and in essence tell Americans to ignore what
they say and listen only to us. It might well be suggested that
for a group of powerful individuals who have been reliably
unable to differentiate between Shias and Sunnis that this is a
lot to ask Americans to accept on trust.
What factors then are not among the main motivations of our
Islamist enemies? First, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and
the lack of positive future prospects are not major drivers of
Islamist violence against the United States and its allies. The
resurrection of Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes to conduct a
contemporary and endlessly expensive new deal in the Islamic
world would at best produced Mujahideen with better teeth and
excellent postwar employment prospects.
Hatred for America's liberties, freedoms, elections, women
in the workplace and after work pitchers of Budweiser do not
motivate our Islamist enemies. They would have none of these
things in their country, but they likewise would be unable to
attract fighters ready to die in a campaign to destroy
Anheuser-Busch or to terminate the practice of early
presidential primaries in Iowa.
A universal desire to establish a worldwide caliphate
governed by what many Republican and Democratic leaders, as
well as the many U.S. citizens more interested in Israel's
survival than America's, like to call Islamofascism also is not
a main motivator of our Islamist enemies. The caliphate is
indeed a goal of bin Laden and most Islamist leaders because
God has said the world will eventually be entirely Muslim. But
they know that its attainment will not occur in their or their
great-great-grandson's lifetime, just as Christians know that a
world in which all would love thy neighbor and turn the other
cheek is light-years over the horizon.
This said, it is correct to say that the world is rife with
Islamofascists, but they are almost all the allies of the
United States and ruling such countries as Egypt, Kuwait, the
United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and as we soon shall see in
Iraq.
To return to where we began, the main motivation of our
Islamist enemies is U.S. foreign policy and its impact in the
Muslim world. And the strongest such motivators are the
following: U.S. and Western exploitation of Muslim energy
resources, the U.S. and Western military and civilian presence
on the Arabian Peninsula, unqualified U.S. support for Israel,
U.S. support for other powers that oppress Muslims, especially
China, India and Russia, the U.S. military presence in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries, and U.S. support
for the police states that govern much of the Arab and Islamic
world.
Because Washington applies an inappropriate definition to
America's Islamist enemies, terrorists versus insurgents, and
deliberately misrepresents their motivation, freedom-haters
vice policy-haters, it is not surprising that the military and
political tools with which Washington is waging war are
failing.
In the starkest terms, U.S. policymakers mistakenly believe
that the war they are fighting is something of a super law
enforcement struggle in which, as we have heard from all
Presidents over two decades, America will prevail by bringing
our enemies to justice one man at a time. This is both lunacy
and self-defeating. There are far too many of the enemy, and
their numbers are growing, to capture or kill one at a time.
As effective as U.S. Special Forces operations and the
CIA's rendition program have been and will be, neither is a war
winner. Both entities are being worn out by overuse, both are
being weakened to steady losses to higher paying and less
dangerous jobs in private sector companies and neither can kill
the enemy at anything approaching adequate numbers.
Which leads us to what probably is the U.S. Government's
number one military problem: A steady stubborn refusal to
accept that war has not changed since Alexander and Caesar and
that it will not change; that the surest route to victory lies
in quickly and efficiently killing enough enemy fighters and
their supporters and destroying enough of the infrastructure of
both to make them see that the wages of attacking America
approach annihilation; and that U.S. Armed Forces are enlisted,
trained and armed to kill America's enemies and to secure our
country, not to bring democracy to foreigners who do not want
it, secularism to people who believe it is the road to hell,
and protection to both sides in an Arab-Israeli religious war
where the United States has no genuine interest at stake.
To define at this time the way ahead for the structure and
composition of U.S. forces in our current war against al Qa'ida
and its allies, therefore, is a very hard, if not nearly
impossible, task. But because Washington is fighting an enemy
whose motivation it willfully ignores, whose numbers it grossly
underestimates and whose ability to defeat or evade the tools
of war it has chosen to half-heartedly use, we should not be
too quick to decide that the current mix of U.S. forces is
inappropriate. We clearly are going to need conventional,
nuclear and Special Forces for this foreseeable future. China,
Russia and other nation states still potentially threaten the
United States in scenarios that would require large U.S.
conventional and nuclear capabilities for purposes of
deterrence or actual warfare.
In addition, our dependence on foreign oil suppliers means
that there are places in the world, such as Saudi Arabia's
eastern province or the Gulf of Guinea-Niger Delta region,
where interventions requiring the use of large conventional
forces could quickly and unexpectedly arise. At this point in
our history, it would be most unwise not to maintain the bulk
of the U.S. military in conventional form.
We should also learn from the military experiences of the
Clinton and Bush Administrations. These have proven that
Special Forces operations and CIA covert action programs cannot
win wars, conventional or irregular. Those entities remain
today what they historically have been, powerful and
indispensable adjuncts to overall U.S. war-making capabilities.
As noted, the Clinton and Bush Administrations have ignored
history and are wearing out both the Special Forces and the CIA
in wars in which America is barely holding its own. In
Afghanistan and, as General Petraeus and General Odierno
reminded us this week in Iraq, a move to expand the size and
use of Special Forces and the CIA special covert action forces
will simply give us more excellently trained, extraordinarily
capable and wonderfully lethal units that still will be unable
to win wars for America.
The wars in America's future will require conventional
forces, Special Forces, and a strong and covert action-capable
CIA. The appropriate precise and affordable mix of those forces
is beyond my skill and knowledge base to determine. There does,
however, seem to be an increasing danger that too many
resources will be put into building forces designed to fight
irregular wars which are conflicts where even successful
Special Forces and CIA operations have already proven
insufficient to deliver a definitive victory, which of course
must be the sole goal America pursues when it goes to war.
This is in no way meant to denigrate the men and women who
lead and staff those forces. It is simply to say that despite
their courageous and frequently successful efforts, al Qa'ida
is fully meeting the constituent goals of its strategy for
driving the United States as far as possible out of the Muslim
world. Those are to help lead the United States to bankruptcy,
to force the spread of U.S. military and intelligence forces to
the point where they lack flexibility and reserves, and to
cause a deterioration in domestic political cohesion, as did
the North Vietnamese.
And no matter what the mix of U.S. military and
intelligence forces is ultimately decided upon, their ability
to bring victory will depend on U.S. politicians mustering the
moral courage to tell Americans that their Armed Forces are
built for the annihilating America's enemies. The very fact
that we are meeting here today on the eve of the eighth autumn
of this war is largely the result of the lack of political will
in both parties to unleash the historically unprecedented
military power American taxpayers have sacrificed to pay for
over many decades.
Finally, it is worth considering whether it might be
smarter, cheaper and less bloody to change the failed foreign
policies that have brought war with al Qa'ida and its Islamist
enemies. Rather than maintaining those war-motivating policies
as divine writ and building an ever-larger military to fight
the ever-expanding wars that writ produces, energy self-
sufficiency, a fixed and even obdurate determination to stay
out of other people's religious wars and a much more narrowly
defined set of genuine U.S. national interests would require
far less frequent resort to war and would be much more
consonant with the timelessly wise foreign policy goals of our
country's Founding Fathers.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Scheuer can be found in the
Appendix on page 56.]
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Dr. Arquilla.
STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN ARQUILLA, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF
DEFENSE ANALYSIS, NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL, AUTHOR OF ``WORST
ENEMY: THE RELUCTANT TRANSFORMATION OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY''
Dr. Arquilla. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, committee members. I
am grateful for your invitation to be with you today, and I am
honored to serve on this panel with these two remarkable
scholars whose work proves once again that writing is
fundamentally an act of courage.
I am going to try to convince you in a few moments here to
take networks seriously. I think that is one of the words we
have used a lot since 9/11, and I don't think we have acted
enough on our understanding of the rise of networks. In fact, I
would put it this way: The war we are in now is the first great
armed conflict between nations and networks. And the
fundamental dynamic of our time, unlike the Cold War where it
was an arms race, the fundamental dynamic is now an
organizational race to build networks.
We haven't defeated our enemy because they have continued
to build their networks. They have made them looser, more
distributed, more cleverly designed. We, in turn, have at the
organizational level been creating great new institutions. The
Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence would be two examples of organizational
change on our part. I would say we are behind in the
organizational race. There are some important points that I
will get to in a few moments that we have shown an interest in
organizational redesign, but not very often. I think Mr. Smith
has already pointed out some of the Special Operations and
intelligence assets that are bringing together people.
The classic network concept is small pieces loosely joined.
Lots and lots of little units of action, not a lot of central
control, and a great deal of coordination. That is why we are
having such a hard time against the terrorists. It is their
form of organization. I am here to suggest that we get in that
organizational race.
If there were any other reason to consider this seriously,
I think all of them would pale next to the simple fact that our
war on terror has become terror's war on us over the past seven
years. How many acts of significant terror were there in 2007,
in 2006? According to our own State Department statistics, in
excess of 10,000. How many were there in 2001, even counting
the events of September until the end of the year? A few
hundred. And any way you slice this, there has been a
staggering increase. And the curious irony of course is that
most of the acts of terror in the world are in the places where
we have deployed most of our Armed Forces, which suggests also
that maybe we need to be thinking about getting into the
organizational race as a military as well. Maybe we could be
using these forces differently.
And so my few remarks here, I am going to suggest to you
that the networks have proven their ability to stay on their
feet, to absorb our heavy and traditional blows. And I think
the problem here is actually something Mr. Smith raised
earlier. We are actually taking an indirect approach in this
war, not in terms of the tactics. Tactics can be indirect,
working with Green Berets or direct with columns or tanks. But
they can be strategically indirect. We have tried to go after
networks by attacking other nations. That means the networks
get to slip our punches. We can invade in Iraq or another
member of an axis of evil, and that won't even muss the hair of
the networks.
So in that respect I would suggest we need to move back to
more direct means; that is, go straight after the network. How
would you do this? How would you do this with an American
military whose fundamental problem is one of scaling? We are a
military of a few large units. We have a few divisions. A
handful of brigades. And even with the changes made today to
the brigade combat team or the brigade unit of action, we are
talking about going in the last 7 years from about 33 of these
7 years ago to around 50 today to maybe 100 in the next few
years.
What is the real power of a network? It is the small pieces
loosely joined. Look what 19 attackers did on 9/11. And later
that same autumn, that first autumn of war that Mike speaks of,
just 11 Special Forces, A-teams drove the Taliban and al Qa'ida
out of power. Two thousand and one was a remarkable year for
networks. Our enemy has taken lessons from that. I think we run
the risk of forgetting even our recent history, much less our
earlier history.
And so I am going to suggest that there is a pressing need
for us to take networks seriously, particularly in the areas of
organization and doctrine. How would you move the military we
have away from the few and the large to the many and the small?
The simple way would be to take the brigade word out. Just
combat teams, units of action. Don't put ``brigade'' in front
of it. We are fundamentally brigadist in future, and that
guarantees that we are always going to have small numbers of
units of action.
What are we doing in Iraq, where I do think it has been
recognized things are indeed much better than they were? That
is fundamentally a network story. We created lots of small
pieces loosely joined in these more than 100 outposts in the
country. And how many are there? Is it a brigade? No. It is
usually a platoon, about 40 to 50 soldiers. And they make the
Iraqis they are with fight a lot better, and they make the
people living nearby more willing to provide intelligence. This
is the way ahead. The outpost.
And also the other part of networking is social, the
outreach. All 23 tribes in Anbar Province signed up to work
with us when this offered was made. And what this says of
course is that war is not just a numbers game. We didn't need
five additional brigades to do that. Even today with all these
outposts and all this outreach going on, only five percent of
the troops in country are in those outposts. We always had
plenty enough to do this.
And this is true in Afghanistan as well, by the way, where
I think things went off the rails when we became more
centralized. Why, for example is, is there a Burger King in
Bagram? I want to know that. I just had a nephew come back from
there. He is a Marine colonel at Central Command (CENTCOM), a
strategic planner for Afghanistan. He said, there is a lot of
kit in Bagram. I said, well, how about the Seventh Special
Forces group with which I work? And he said, where are they? Do
you mean the Seventh Marines? I said no. See, that is the
organizational problem, small pieces loosely joined. We have an
organizational problem in Afghanistan where the conventional
forces don't even talk with the Special Forces, much less the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, overlapping,
interlocking, all the words you associate with traditional
bureaucratic gridlock. It is out in the field.
Okay. So my story is, if you take networks seriously, you
are going to reorganize. You are going to use tactics that are
more similar to the opponent's. That is, you are going to
strike here, there, everywhere from every direction by
surprise, yes. We can still engage in surprise attacks if we
operate in this fashion. And the hunter networks that I began
to lobby for--I guess ``lobby'' is not the right word to use
here--that I began to advocate four years ago. I guess Bob
Woodward has said publicly----
Mr. Smith. I think, Dr. Arquilla, I think actually
``lobby'' and ``advocate'' kind of mean the same thing. It is
just that ``lobby'' has a bad connotation, but ``lobby'' is
okay.
Dr. Arquilla. Thank you, sir. I feel better.
Four years ago I said we need to build these small teams
and set them loose. And actually I am meeting with some of
those team members a little later today and I am so proud of
what they have done. They show we can wage network warfare. We
can have these small pieces loosely joined. And they can win.
And I think the lesson for this time, this Information Age
is the opposite one of the lesson for military affairs from the
Industrial Age. In the age of mass production, you wanted big,
big units. You wanted lots of numbers, you were going to have a
lot of attrition. So you needed to have things replaced and
keep a steady flow. You wanted the liberty ship to come off the
flow, off the waves every 36 hours. In the Information Age, it
is all about connectivity. That is where the power comes from.
So I would move our military to a much more networked
structure, have this doctrine of the hunter networks that are
out there doing so much good. And what is the big objection to
it that I face when I take the Metro a few stops the other way?
The big objection is, well, wait a minute, there might be
another World War II come along. Maybe it will be World War
III. And this fear of the return of conventional war I think is
the central obstruction to the way ahead here.
And all I will say is I think there are two ways of dealing
with this problem that make sense. There is one that doesn't,
which is just to grow the Special Forces. I think that is a bad
idea because it will have quality assurance problems for the
Special Forces, and it will drain off good troops from the rest
of the military. You need to think about the military elite as
a laboratory for the whole Armed Forces. That is, they are
doing something that is very cutting edge. We don't want
everybody to be Special Forces, but we want people increasingly
to be able to do special things. And that is what is going on
in Iraq. It is what can go on in Afghanistan. It can be done
without putting more masses, more numbers in play.
So how do you deal with the World War II threat? Two
sensible ways. One is rebalancing, if I can--is that a word? If
it is not, I will make it up. How would you rebalance this
force? Right now most of the active force is full of people who
do conventional things, tanks, artillery, et cetera. The
reserves on the other hand are full of lots of people who have
the irregular sorts of skills needed in counterinsurgency and
counterterrorism, including a lot of special operations,
psychological operations specialists, civil affairs folks. At
one time in Iraq, about half our troops were reservists. Let's
move the people with their specialties into a smaller active
force and move the traditional fighters into a reserve where,
by the way, we are going to save all sorts of money doing that,
and we will make ourselves more able to fight the wars that are
actually out there.
There are over two dozen wars going on in the world today.
How many of them are conventional wars? None. Except when we do
conventional things. So we would be prepared with rebalancing
if World War II ever came back.
The second solution is this: Bet that the network will make
mincemeat of a traditional massed force. The million man North
Korean Army. I would much rather have 100 small units of action
backed by American air power taking them down, channelizing
their movements in the mountain passes and destroying them
rather than having a repeat of the Korean War fought 57, 58
years ago, which is a bloody stalemate. I don't think you need
to respond to a conventional threat in a conventional way; that
is, if you take networks seriously.
I want to beg your indulgence for just one little moment
here to read from something about our forces 250 years ago just
to prove that we can do military transformation. We began that
great struggle against the French empire in North America,
losing a lot of conventional battles. By the end of the war,
the British hierarchy was convinced, you know, these bush
fighters have something going for them. We need to do irregular
things. And so they marched to Montreal in the last campaigns,
the year after the fall of Quebec.
Fred Anderson writes in the Crucible of War: ``This was no
conventional army. Its tactics had undergone a transformation
in America. For three years the redcoats had been firing at
marks and were now accustomed to aiming rather than merely
leveling their muskets at the enemy. Forces included fewer
grenadiers, many more light infantry, whole battalions of
little wiry men able to move quickly through the woods and
ranger companies to make the raids and reconnaissance
patrols.''
Now we need the little wiry men and women who will traverse
the world and tear apart these terror networks node by node,
cell by cell.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Arquilla can be found in the
Appendix on page 61.]
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that
testimony. Very interesting. Not all in agreement, which makes
for an interesting discussion. We are going to stick to the
five-minute rule on questions. I will start. And even as I
announce that rule, it is going to be difficult to get the
question out and much less the answer.
But Dr. Scheuer, I was interested in your comments. At
first blush, I didn't agree with a fair number of them. But I
know you know far more about this than I do. So I wanted to
explore some of those aspects of it.
First, as far as the conventional aspect of the warfare,
you seem to be arguing that the enemy is out there. We know
what they want. They basically think that we are waging war on
Islam and they are fighting back. So we need basically to go
out, find them and kill them. And it is going to take a
conventional structure to do that. I guess a couple things that
I am puzzled about in that analysis is, number one, al Qa'ida
and the various groups who were affiliated with them don't mass
in a conventional way. Where do we go in the world to have a
conventional war with al Qa'ida? They seem to fit a model more
closely to my mind with what Dr. Arquilla is saying. So I don't
see where we send a couple of brigades to go up against them.
It doesn't seem to work that way. It does seem like much more
of an irregular battle.
And as far as our foreign policy is concerned, as you
mentioned, they have both political and religious goals. I
think, you know, it is not just that they think we are waging a
war on Islam. They want to establish a specific type of
government and society. And they think we are getting in the
way of them establishing that. And the specific type of state
society that they are establishing I think is a profound threat
to us in and of itself. The Taliban-style government. I don't
think we can simply pull back and say, as long as they are not
messing with us and simply forming these states it is okay. It
is not.
And I guess the last question is, on ideology, as you
mentioned, you know, we killed the two, three, and four. And I
totally agree with what you said on them not being a terrorist
network, that they are an insurgent group. But it seems to me
that we do have to focus a little bit on what makes people
follow this ideology. Certainly there are the hard core, the
hard core. They are there. They have developed it, but why are
they finding suicide bombers? Why are they able to just go
through northwest Pakistan? And I read an article, basically
they got people who have got no prospects, no hopes and say
hey, strap this on. We will take care of your family. You will
go to heaven.
It seems to me that defeating the ideology does require
some of this more, if you will, muddle-headed thinking about
poverty and ideology and why do they follow them. That is three
areas. I took half the time. We will hopefully come back to it.
I want to make sure I give you time to touch on those three
questions.
Dr. Scheuer. Conventional forces certainly can't be used in
every occasion. But we unnecessarily were not prepared for 9/
11, were unable to move any amount of forces that would make
any difference to Afghanistan in time to keep the enemy from
going to Iran, going to Pakistan, going further into the Gulf.
You have to use the military forces you have when you have
them. The absurdity of sending a few hundred Special Forces and
a few hundred CIA officers to conquer and hold someplace that
is bigger than Texas is a piece of madness.
Mr. Smith. But that wasn't because we didn't have the
conventional forces. It was because we couldn't move them fast
enough.
Dr. Scheuer. Sir?
Mr. Smith. It wasn't because we didn't have the
conventional forces. It was because we couldn't move them fast
enough.
Dr. Scheuer. It was because the Pentagon had failed
immeasurably in not preparing for a war that had been declared
on us in 1996 and repeated again in 1998. But that does not in
itself prove that conventional force won't be of tremendous
use. We seem tremendously border challenged. The only way to
control Afghanistan and build the democracy that people think
can be built there is to close the border with Pakistan. It is
the only way to do it. And you are not going to do that with
Special Forces and CIA people.
What we are talking about here is this return to law
enforcement, Special Forces and CIA, which is exactly what we
did under the Clinton Administration. And by 1997 it was very
clear that that combination of forces could not cope with what
al Qa'ida was producing.
On the point of ideology, sir, the way to gut the ideology
of the enemy is to disengage from the Middle East as far as we
can and let them kill each other, because that is where the
problem is, within Islamic civilization and not against us. It
sort of hurts our ego to realize that we are not the main enemy
here. We are the people that are in the way of letting the
enemy get at his main enemy, the Saudis, the Mubaraks, the
Israelis.
Mr. Smith. I don't think that is an ego issue. I think that
is a legitimate concern about, you know, how do we interact--
forget the oil for the moment. If you have a Taliban-style
state, as you do to some degree in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in
Jordan, in Iraq, if basically the Middle East is taken over by
that, then I think the concern is, number one, they won't be
satisfied with that. And I think there is every reason to
believe that is the case. If you read what they write.
Dr. Scheuer. Well, that basically, sir, is a racist kind of
an approach to things. Because to assume that they are going to
become a caliphate of 1.4 billion Muslim automatons is to just
simply ignore the fact that Islamic culture is as fractured, as
diverse as we are.
Mr. Smith. But I don't think al Qa'ida represents Islamic
culture. But I am talking about if they actually controlled
those governments.
Dr. Scheuer. Well, first of all, sir, Afghanistan was much
more stable under the Taliban. And the second point I would
make is who cares what happens in Afghanistan once we take care
of the terrorist problem? And you say, move the question away
from oil. And the fact is, we can't. We have no possibility to
change or have options in the Middle East as long as we are
dependent on oil. We are going to be continuing to support the
Saudi tyranny.
Mr. Smith. On that point, I agree with you completely and
certainly the policy needs to change.
Dr. Scheuer. And regarding Iran, sir, Iran of course is
more democratic and more participatory in any sense than any of
our allies are in the Middle East. So the common wisdom is
sometimes not quite cogent.
Mr. Smith. I see the ideology that Iran houses, or Iran
has, is more of a threat broadly than that, just personally.
But I will yield to Mr. Thornberry, and I will try to come back
when we are done.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Jones, I was
interested in a lot of things in your study. One of the
factors--one of the things that you found which I don't recall
being in your written testimony was that after studying 648
groups, there are 244 of them still going and another 136 that
splintered and are still conducting terrorism. So if you take
the whole universe of the terrorist groups you studied, 59
percent are still terrorists. And so then what you narrow down
to is the roughly 40 percent that have gone away. Why did they
go away? And that is where you get the policing and
intelligence and other factors. Have I got that about right?
Dr. Jones. That is correct, yes.
Mr. Thornberry. So maybe I might read that and think, well,
the terrorist groups that went away maybe were the easiest to
get rid of. The tougher ones are in the 60 percent that are
still conducting terrorist operations.
Dr. Jones. Well, that would I think be incorrect in one
sense because we did actually look separately at all the groups
together. And actually we found in most cases when groups
continued to exist it was the wrong strategy that was used. So
with some of the smaller groups we found that have continued to
exist, they have often been targeted by large military forces.
We found in general groups that continue to exist, in looking
at why they continue to exist, there are a range of factors.
One of the biggest actually is wrong strategy.
Mr. Thornberry. You said--I acknowledged I think in your
testimony--that a political settlement with al Qa'ida is not
happening. Policing troubles me when I think about al Qa'ida
Central in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),
which is essentially ungoverned by any country, including
Pakistan. Would you agree that the policing and intelligence is
something you know that takes some time, particularly when you
are in a tribal setting? It is a particularly difficult area
with which to use these factors that you identified as the most
successful.
Dr. Jones. I would say after--I have spent three different
periods in 2008 on the border, on the Afghan-Pakistani border
with U.S. forces. I would say the biggest problem is not the
capacity of local police and intelligence forces on the ground
on the Pakistani side because there have been efforts to build
up the--through coalition support funds, for example, Frontier
Corps, which is the paramilitary force on the ground. The
biggest challenge of this strategy in general is the will of
these agencies because they view al Qa'ida and many of the
militant groups--their objectives are very different from ours.
So I think the problem we find is not that there are
insufficient groups on the ground, intelligence and police
forces, like the Frontier Corps and Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI). The problem ends up being they may not want
in some cases to target many of the groups we do, including the
Taliban. I think that is actually the bigger challenge.
Mr. Thornberry. Sure. The groups on the ground are
sympathetic to them, yeah, which is why they are there.
Dr. Arquilla, let me--number one, thanks to you, I have
taken networks seriously for some time, and I appreciate your
work in that area. But one statement that you make troubles me
a little bit. You talk about the problematic notion of waging a
war of ideas. Dr. Jones talks about counterterrorism as much
about hearts and minds as it is about policing and
intelligence. It seems to me you are saying that this war of
ideas stuff doesn't really matter. He has a different view. Can
you explain your opinion and then maybe he will have a chance
to briefly answer?
Dr. Arquilla. Thanks. That is a good question. I think the
context of my use of this is that instead of a war of ideas
about Islam, we need to have a war of ideas about the idea of
war. And I have got at least one of you to take networks
seriously, that war is underway.
My concern is this about the so-called war of ideas. War is
a very bad metaphor in the ideological area. You want to
convince people, you want to persuade. War conjures up notions
of coercion or the hard sell. We had someone at public
diplomacy who was trying to sell democracy the same way that
you would sell dog food, which I guess is what she did at some
point in her career. And I think the war of ideas is
problematic in terms of trying to deal with zealots and at
least as I see statistics, about five percent of the Muslim
world takes the al Qa'ida message pretty seriously. Those folks
you are not going to get at with a hearts and minds campaign.
You are going to get at them with a hunter network.
But I think there is another problem with our war of ideas.
We want to support democracy and yet as Dr. Scheuer has noted,
we support all kinds of authoritarianism very comfortably in
the Muslim world. So consistency is a very, very big problem
for us.
Another problem with strategic communications is the whole
idea that your actions communicate, not just what you say, and
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and again the support for
authoritarian regimes, those are actions that the enemy reads
very closely and the general public reads very closely.
Finally, on this point, taking it away from the war
metaphor to something more communicative in nature, listening
is a huge part of communications, and I fear that we have done
far too little of this, and I know that you have had a long
interest in David Ronfeldt's and my work in this area of
information strategy. And so respectfully I suggest that the
war metaphor--I do believe that the war against al Qa'ida is a
real war. They believe it. We had better believe it. I am also
worried that the notion of a long war is--that is the wrong
war. If we let them stand on their feet long enough, they will
get weapons of mass destruction. So let's build networks, hunt
them down.
Many of the things Dr. Jones suggests can work, probably
would with some elements. That is the other thing. People say,
well, you can't negotiate with networks. Sure you can. They
have all kinds of small pieces loosely joined. You can use
salami tactics against them. But please, in this ideological
area let's stop talking about a war against these folks. Let's
have a discussion, a debate. Let's be consistent. Let's conform
our actions to our beliefs and our declaratory statements. And
above all, let's listen because sometimes there is a guide to
good policy change in what others are saying.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Ellsworth.
Mr. Ellsworth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you,
gentlemen, for being here. It is a fascinating hearing. You
have probably--I assume you have all watched this body over the
last couple of years, the votes we have taken fund goals to get
out of Iraq, Afghanistan. I would be curious. If you switched
chairs with us, where would you go from here? What would you--
as briefly as you can sum it up, all three of you, your
recommendations to the Congress on how--if you were the
decider, and I hate to use that term, how would you forge
forward with our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Dr.
Arquilla, if you want to start, we will go the other way.
Dr. Arquilla. I would be happy to. There is a third way in
Iraq, if one can still use terms like a third way. Don't just
leave. Don't do what we have just done, which is basically stay
the course. Right, 8,000 troops out is not the answer.
If I am on your side of the table, what I say is, is you
can make dramatic reductions. As I said, only a tiny proportion
of the forces in country are actually in those outposts. That
is what made things work overnight. Another colleague of mine,
a Marine major in the audience here, was telling me about his
two tours in Iraq. First time in 2006, helicopter pilot
evacuating the wounded. People with their legs blown off every
day. Second time through after the Awakening started, the
outpost and outreach, he was bringing in German businessmen
with briefcases to meet with sheikhs. So an overnight change.
That is not the result of five more brigades. It is a result of
the Awakening. You don't need war as a numbers game.
It is true in Iraq and it is true in Afghanistan. Build
more outposts, do more outreach. Play offense, too. Not just
the defensive laydown of the outposts and working with the
local forces who are a lot better with even small groups of our
forces. Build more of these hunter networks that are out there.
They are making a huge, huge difference in Iraq, around the
world. And despite all the news you hear from Afghanistan, I am
a little closer to this. We are doing some very remarkable
things, particularly in the western part of Afghanistan.
So that is my idea. Draw down, but I wouldn't--you know
there is a red and blue story here. To get the red side of the
house to buy into this, I think what you have to acknowledge is
that you don't simply announce a date when you leave. The enemy
will declare victory. If there is one terrorist left, he will
hold up his AK-47 and say, we won. That is strategic
communications. So keep some forces there for an indefinite
period with no timeline. That is the political compromise.
I don't know why you all don't see it as a perfect storm.
We all want troops out as much as we all can possibly have them
out. But we don't want chaos in the wake of our departure. So
let's not leave. Let's not take everybody out. Let's keep some
force, and I think the network gives us that possibility.
Mr. Ellsworth. Dr. Scheuer, would you like to----
Dr. Scheuer. I am kind of a bear of simple brain or bear of
small brain. I think the truth is the place to start if you
wanted to do anything. And the truth is that, with respect, our
political leaders have been less than frank with the American
people for 20 or more years. If this war was about our freedoms
and our democracies and women in the workplace and all those
things, this would be a minor nuisance. Lethal nuisance but a
minor one. This is about exactly what we do in the Muslim
world. And none of that said means that what we do is wrong. It
is simply standing back and saying, what is motivating, what is
going on? Even someone who is I think as misleading as John
Esposito on the nature and threat from jihad has published, I
think, a very useful book that shows in the Muslim community
around the world maybe 5 percent would pick up guns in support
of al Qa'ida, but 80 percent of the Muslim world, Arab and the
rest, believe that our foreign policy is an attack on Islam.
And with that kind of support base, we are not in for a long
war. We are in for an eternal war.
And so I think that what I would try to do is just simply
lay out for the American people, you know, here is the cause.
If we want to maintain those policies, that is fine, that is
our prerogative. But at least if there was a discussion, sir,
we would be on the same page. Right now we have stuffed a very
busy, very worried electorate with nonsense. They say, oh, they
hate the fact my daughter goes to university. She is going to
go. We are going to fight. That is not the way to proceed in
this war.
Mr. Ellsworth. Thank you very much. Do we have time, Mr.
Chairman, for----
Mr. Smith. Sorry. Dr. Jones has 15 seconds. But I will give
him a little more. Go ahead.
Dr. Jones. I will try to be really brief. One needs to ask
the question, what has been effective so far? There have been
pockets of effectiveness. I think the answer, going back to my
testimony, is what has been most effective I think is the
leveraging of local forces on the ground. This discussion
sometimes--we have done it already in this testimony--of small
numbers of U.S. forces or large numbers of U.S. forces, there
is a second part of the equation which is a local element on
the ground which is fundamental. I would say we learned
successfully in the 2001 period which force took Kabul on the
ground with local Northern Alliance forces, which forces on the
ground took Anbar? It was local Sunni forces. I think the steps
forward are to increasingly ask questions like, with the
brigade and battalion going into Afghanistan, are they going to
be doing direct operations or embedding and partnering with
local forces on the ground? This is a fundamental question.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Saxton.
Mr. Saxton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have a question for Dr. Jones and Dr. Arquilla. And,
actually, Dr. Jones's last answer is a great segue into this
question.
As we have heard today, to change the military is a tough
job. There have been some changes made on the fringe. Dr.
Arquilla may be able to remind me of the fellow's name who
wrote the book, ``Transition Under Fire.'' I can't remember his
name. It was a retired colonel. And he was basically talking
about the brigade combat team change, which has been effected
to a large degree, but that was like pulling teeth to get that
done. And we haven't, obviously, gone far enough.
So based on what you have seen, Dr. Jones and Dr. Arquilla,
of the changes that we have made to date and what you think the
future looks like in terms of changes that we need to make, how
would we go forward on a step-by-step basis to create a more
effective counterinsurgency organization?
Dr. Jones. I think, quite simply, probably the best
illustration is to look at the Marine operations in Fallujah in
2004 and Marine operations in Anbar province in 2006, 2007, and
2008. The issue is some of the training--which, in my view, was
not sufficient enough--training that went into incoming Marine
forces into Iraq to think and work with local actors was
fundamental in the shift in approach from direct combat
operations in Fallujah against an enemy, to embedding and
working with local forces in Anbar in the 2006, 2007, and 2008
period.
So I would say what becomes fundamental is during the
training process, the education process, including in places
like Carlisle, how much of the training and education is going
into understanding working with local actors on the ground.
There is a mindset that is fundamentally different. The mindset
of a counterinsurgency operation is different from combat.
So when units prepare to deploy to places like Afghanistan,
when Marine units or Army units, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne,
how much are they being trained to go into an unconventional
environment and to work and embed with locals? I think we have
gone in some direction, in this sense, but clearly not enough.
Dr. Arquilla. The U.S. military has a long relationship
with irregular warfare. I mentioned the French and Indian War.
We won the Revolution because of an ability to engage in
insurgent operations that exhausted the British. We fought
Native Americans for most of the 19th century, a lot of
irregular warfare, a lot of lessons there. The best soldiers in
the Civil War were irregulars.
Then we became a great industrial power, and all this
irregular capacity began to fall into the background. We had a
little harder time in the Philippines. We had a hard time,
scratching our heads as to what to do in a number of Central
American interventions, in Haiti as well. And by the time
Vietnam came along, we decided to try to solve the problem
with, quote, ``big units'' rather than the small special
approach that we used that had been working.
This is a long debate in the U.S. military. It is an
important debate. Militaries are--my book has ``reluctant
transformation'' in there because they are reluctant to change.
They have to be. They fight for the highest stakes: their own
lives, their country's honor, and maybe it is survival and the
quality of the life in the world system. So I respect this
reluctance.
But I do think we need to have this war of ideas about the
idea of war. We live in a time in which all the wars are
irregular. If you look back 60 years, you will find that
conventional wars are less than one in 20 of all the wars that
are fought. We have to have a capacity for this.
I would suggest we reach back to our own traditions, light
interesting units, the wiry little men traversing the
wildernesses of the world. That is something we have done
before, we can do again. The bonus here is I think creating
this new, this nimble, this networked force is also going to
allow us to wage the rare conventional war in an entirely new
manner that takes, truly, the military profession into an
information age. That is where we are on the cusp.
So I think the beginning is what we are seeing with these
small units, these outposts, these task forces, these hunter
networks. It is starting. And I think if we had a hearing on
this a few years from now, we would see that the progress is
even farther down the road. So I, sir, am something of an
optimistic on this subject.
Mr. Saxton. Dr. Arquilla, you said I think in your
testimony, and I may not have these words exactly right, you
said in your testimony that we don't need to grow the Special
Forces, but we need more special----
Dr. Arquilla. Everyone has to do more special things.
And the Special Forces are a laboratory. They have shown
that there are things you can do. Most of the hunter networks
come out of the Special Forces. But the best guy I know who was
in Samara in Iraq, who worked with the locals, had a small
unit, a company under his command and pacified an entire area,
reached out--I don't think I can say this without being
detained--but he reached out to some of the insurgent elements,
got them working with him. This is a tank officer with a degree
in animal husbandry from Texas A&M.
I work with these officers every day and have for a couple
decades now. They have the capacity to do this.
So I repeat, sir: I am an optimist. I want to see the whole
force able to do special things, not just try to wall irregular
warfare off into something that represents only three or four
percent of the total force.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Cooper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding
this hearing.
And thanks for each of the witnesses for your remarkable
expertise. I find discussions like this very helpful. I wish it
could be in a little more informal setting, perhaps around a
seminar table instead of this hierarchical approach.
Each of you has very interesting advice, but each of you
has now formally left government structure. So my main
question, I know Mr. Scheuer has had, particularly,
difficulties with his prior agencies. I loved it when
``Imperial Hubris'' came out and you were anonymous. But I am
interested in the ability of a government bureaucracy to
accommodate free-thinkers.
It seems to me that the number-one rule of war is to
understand the nature of the enemy, and yet that has been a
remarkably difficult and controversial role for some of our
previous government workers, without handicapping your career,
in some cases forcing you to leave government.
So if you would care to comment on that, I would appreciate
it.
Dr. Scheuer. Yes, sir. In my experience, at least at CIA,
it was a tremendously lively, intellectual place. And being
able to express your views was always one of the things that I
enjoyed about being there. I think the real problem is getting
the views above, say, the level of what would be a lieutenant
colonel or a colonel in the military.
I don't think there is a lack of brain power in the agency.
It is more or less an unwillingness to carry bad news to the
policymaker. And of course it just so happens that in the
Middle East there are so many sacrosanct things in the United
States Government that even facts are unacceptable, in some
ways. In my experience under both Administrations, Democrat and
Republican, the White House does not want to hear anything
negative about the Saudis or the Israelis. And so two major
players are off the board at any kind of an analysis you try to
do.
So, you know, I don't know exactly what the answer is. My
experience is limited to CIA. I found it a very challenging
place to work. I resigned not because of CIA, but because I
thought the 9/11 Commission had been a disaster for America by
not finding anyone responsible for anything. I regret every
day--or, at least I miss every day working there.
But I really think that the problem is that kind of mid-
level, upper-mid-level, and upper-level people who actually
carry the message to the President or to the Cabinet. You have
to have a very tough, thick skin, and you have to not want to
be the friend. You have to carry the bad news and say,
``Whatever you think, Mr. President, and ultimately it is up to
you. But whatever you think, your support for, say, Mr.
Mubarak's government is one of the main causes that rally
people to whatever negative anti-American force there is.'' And
until you get that through, the senior level of the government
is not even going to entertain that idea.
Mr. Cooper. Would either of you two gentlemen care to
comment?
Dr. Arquilla. I would just remind Mr. Cooper that I work
for the Navy. I am----
Mr. Cooper. Yeah, but you are in the Postgraduate School.
If there is a free-thinking part, presumably that would be it.
Dr. Arquilla. Well, look, I enjoy the protections of civil
service and tenure, but I have never felt the need to invoke
any of them. It is a very lively environment. As I said, I
spent a lot of time with a lot of our units in many places, and
I have to tell you, there is a great deal of ferment. What
boils down, when they come out at the end of the day and say,
okay, we can only pull 8,000 out, there is a lively debate
behind that. There is a big debate.
I used to work a little bit with General Wayne Downing, who
was a senior adviser to the President on counterterrorism.
Before the invasion of Iraq, there were huge debates about
whether to do it at all. If so, could we do it small and
special, Afghanistan-plus instead of Desert Storm-minus. These
are huge debates, and you never get to hear about them.
And I think it is an organizational problem. What does the
hierarchy do? It boils everything down to, here is this little
output at the end of the day: 8,000 troops. A network
approach--and I think this would be something that Congress and
both parties should support and the American people should
demand--is a sort of open airing of the ideas. In a network,
all the ideas are out there.
And I think, if there is one thing a National Security
Advisor could do, it would be, instead of boiling away all the
other options, to present them. There are a lot of fine
thinkers in the military; we call them today the iron majors,
the people in mid-career who, 10 years from now, are going to
have stars. One of the iron majors is in the audience here
listening this morning. Ten years from now, just where they are
going, there aren't any roads. This is going to get very, very
interesting.
And so I would just suggest that even in the official world
there is a lot of interesting debate. It is our organizational
structures that prevent that from bubbling up to the top.
Mr. Cooper. Dr. Arquilla, would you have a similar freedom
of speech if you were a line officer?
Dr. Arquilla. There are rules that are slightly more
restrictive but not entirely so. And I have had serving
officers working with me who have written articles. In fact,
one of them, he did a seminar with me last summer, wrote a
paper for it that was extremely challenging of the existing
structure of things. And that paper he submitted to one of the
leading strategic journals, Comparative Strategy, and it
appeared in the latest issue.
There is a lot of reluctance to do this, but there are
officers who stand up increasingly. The iron majors are
intimidated by nobody.
Mr. Cooper. Dr. Jones, do you have a comment?
Dr. Jones. I will just be very brief.
I still believe that in a war, in a counterterrorism effort
that is being fought, in most cases, in areas outside of the
United States there continues to be a fundamental ignorance of
the other cultures, including at top levels of the United
States Government. And that certainly is reflected in two ways:
Its efforts to counter this war of ideas by putting people on
places like Al-Jazeera that don't even speak Arabic for the
U.S. Government. I mean, what message are you sending to the
locals who are listening? It has to be translated because you
can't find a U.S. Government representative that can go on Al-
Jazeera that can speak Arabic. It also sometimes gets reflected
in trying to do everything ourselves rather than, in some
cases, working locally.
So I think there is a fundamental, and continues to be a
fundamental, ignorance of many of the countries that we operate
in among our government, whether it is speaking the languages,
understanding tribal networks, that in some cases has hampered
our response.
Mr. Cooper. Would RAND lose business if you pointed out how
backward and counterproductive many senior U.S. officials'
efforts are?
Dr. Jones. We have done this on institutions and generals.
So I think the answer is no.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. I think that actually concludes the
first round of questioning.
I want to ask Dr. Arquilla and probably Dr. Scheuer, as
well, you talked about the structure of the military. What I am
curious about, in terms of our budgetary choices, is the
systems that we have to pay for. And you seem to have a
slightly different take than Dr. Scheuer, who seems to see a
greater need for a conventional force. But a big-ticket part of
where we are spending a lot of our money and how we sort of
choose where to put our resources has to do with those systems.
And could both of you comment a little bit on, as you see
the structure of the military, what we need to buy, you know,
airplanes, ships, submarines, tanks, Strykers, you know, where
you think we should be putting our money; and, perhaps more
importantly, where we shouldn't be putting our money?
Dr. Arquilla. Well, I think we are a military of the few
and the large, right? We are planning on having 11 aircraft
carriers in perpetuity--Ford's, no less. Let's make sure we
associate it with the President and not the vehicle.
In any event, it seems to me that we are at a point now
where we, when including war spending, are going at it at about
$2 billion a day on defense. And from my own cursory review of
this, about 90 cents on every dollar goes for industrial-age
systems that just don't protect us anymore. So we are spending
more and more to get less and less security. And my concern is
that, as we look out upon the world, the investments others are
making are very intriguing and very troubling.
If I can stay with the naval example for a moment. We are
continuing to build super carriers, a handful of them. And, by
the way, their throughput, their capacity for flying planes is
about the same as it was 60 years ago. What is our possible
opponent in the future, a Chinese navy, doing? I guess they
call it the People's Liberation Army Navy, which is a curious
thing in its own right. They are not building carriers. They
say they are going to build one one day, but there is no sign
they are doing it. What are they building instead? Supersonic
antiship missiles, smart mines that can position themselves
right below the keel of a big ship and break its back. And
something called a supercavitation torpedo that creates a
bubble of air in front of it so that it can travel at hundreds
of knot. What is our defense against that? Nothing. We hope it
has poor guidance.
So we have a fundamental problem here where other smart
militaries that don't have the resources to burn that we do are
investing extremely skillfully in advanced technology. So we
keep investing in big conventional ticket items, which keeps us
in the conventional warfare world in a time of irregular war.
But the kicker to all this is that, if this big war comes
along, we are going to face others who have invested more
wisely in advanced technology.
So I think we need--and, again, if I am on your side of the
table, I would call for a moratorium on these legacy systems.
Mr. Smith. And I am very much with you on that general
focus. The one counterargument that I have heard is, if we go
up in a big conventional war with China or Russia--which, by
the way, I think we should studiously work to avoid in terms of
our foreign policy. That, I think, the diplomacy there, make
partners, not enemies, out of the large powers, is absolutely
critical. If we do that, yes, the ships are not going to be
helpful for the reasons you just stated.
But the counterargument is, in the small world we live in,
when we need to get a force to Afghanistan, when we need to get
a force to Iraq, the carrier groups, you bring the carrier over
there, you bring the battleships over there, they can launch
cruise missiles, they can launch albeit a small numbers of
planes. How do you counter that argument?
Dr. Arquilla. Well, certainly you don't need aircraft
carriers to send Special Forces over. I know they did that in
Operation Enduring Freedom, which was like the biggest public
relations (PR) story ever. You don't need to send 11 A-teams by
an aircraft carrier. That is the world's most expensive taxi
service.
In terms of firing cruise missiles, any platform can do
that. It doesn't have to be an aircraft carrier. In terms of
aircraft, you have all kinds of other vessels that can launch
short takeoff or vertical takeoff and landing. You don't need a
super carrier to do that.
But also, the Air Force knows how to find these places. In
Operation Enduring Freedom, according to the Combined Air
Operations Center, they dropped three-fourths of all the
ordnance on the enemy. That is the right statistic.
So we don't have trouble doing aerial bombardment, missile
bombardment, or moving forces for the little side of things. So
I don't think the argument about the carriers needed in
irregular warfare is persuasive. And nor is it persuasive,
really, in the next big war against whomever it may be.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Dr. Scheuer, if you could take a stab at it.
Dr. Scheuer. Sir, thank you.
It is not really--I think probably Dr. Arquilla is exactly
right in the way we need to go, but the problem is there is a
great gap in the time from where we are to where we need to be.
And one of the legacy systems we have, in a sense, is a Cold
War mentality, that somehow the enemy is going to sit there and
wait for us to get there to kill them. And we will get our act
together after eight or nine years, and they will be there
waiting for us to do them in. And that is not the case.
So, to me, the big problem in what we buy and what we do is
not only that we buy systems that perhaps aren't useful--I
can't imagine, for example, buying the Raptor instead of a
ground support aircraft to help those people that are fighting
our wars elsewhere--but the whole idea that the enemy isn't
adaptable, doesn't have a timetable of his own, sir.
Whatever we are going to do to change, do it. Stop talking
about it, and do it. Because this is an enemy that is not
like--there is no stand-off between us and the Soviets anymore.
The bad guys are out there conniving and finding ways to get at
us. And so, to me, whatever we are going to do for structure,
get your best brains together and then move, because we can't
wait.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much.
Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. Thornberry. Fascinating discussion which would be
worthy of us pursuing. I want to go back to terrorism for just
a second.
Dr. Scheuer, you make a big deal that this is not
terrorism, this is insurgency. But Dr. Jones, in his study,
says that terrorism is the use of politically motivated
violence against noncombatants to cause intimidation or fear
among a target audience.
I am not sure I--I mean, it seems to me that applies. But,
secondly, I am not sure I understand why it matters, the
difference. Please explain why you think that distinction is so
important for us.
Dr. Scheuer. I think it matters because we have
underestimated the strength, durability and the resiliency of
the enemy. We still have Presidents or potential Presidents
telling us we are going to bring these people to justice one at
a time. Clearly, to my own particular instance, we leveled more
destruction on al Qa'ida between 1995 and 2001 than almost any
other group that I can think of, and yet 9/11 happened.
``Terrorism'' is a term that blinkers our ability to
perceive the enemy, because terrorists are by definition evil,
small in number, on the lunatic fringe, maybe the lunatic
fringe of the lunatic fringe, and somehow they are not a
credible threat; they are something that is like a bug, you
need to stamp it out. We have certainly failed to do that,
because they are not terrorists. You know, your definition you
just read of political violence could very well be applied to
the bombing of Tokyo, to which I have no objections; we won the
war.
But terrorism is just something that, to me anyway, was
dreamed up by U.S. policy and Western policymakers who didn't
want to respond to an act of war with our military but rather
wanted to goof around. You know, blowing up the United airliner
over Scotland wasn't a terrorist activity, it was an act of
war, and it should have been handled in that manner.
Mr. Thornberry. It seemed to me terrorism is a tactic
rather----
Dr. Scheuer. Sir, what I would say is one of the
detrimental things for the United States is the very smallest
number percentage of al Qa'ida are what we would call
``terrorists.'' They would call them their special forces. The
next biggest group are either their insurgents or their
insurgent trainers.
The biggest part of al Qa'ida is the logistics, finance,
safe haven part, and media part these days. So what we are
doing by focusing on the terrorist side of it is we are
attacking maybe one-twelfth of the organization, sir.
Mr. Thornberry. Dr. Arquilla, you gave specific
recommendations for how the military needs to be restructured
in small groups. One of the things that we have talked about a
lot over the last two years in this subcommittee is the need to
not just bring the military to this struggle but the whole
government.
Talk to me a little bit, if you can, about a government-
wide network, not just a military network, on these problems.
Dr. Arquilla. It is a brilliant idea. I think a government
networked approach to dealing with terrorism, irregular
warfare, the security questions of our time, would be one in
which the collective intelligence of all our soldiers and civil
servants and interested folks out in the country and commerce,
education, civil society, the best ideas would come forward.
One of the biggest insights about networks is when you bring a
collective intelligence together--that is, everyone is allowed
to weigh in their opinion--great ideas come forward.
If I can give you a little example, I don't know if any of
you play chess. I will be very brief about this. Go to
chessgames.com, and what you will find is a great player,
usually a former world champion, challenges the world, and
about 8,000 people sign up. They are a little network; they
have their own little page where they discuss and debate what
to do next. And the collective intelligence so far has beaten
every former world champion it has played.
And there are other experiments. In Japan, they had a
virtual manager for a minor league team for a while. Anybody in
the stands or watching or listening to the game could vote on:
send the runner to steal second, bunt here, do this or that.
The year they did that--it was a tech company that owned the
minor league team. The year they did that, they won their
division.
Now, I am not saying we do all of that, but my guess is
this: If we took a problem like Afghanistan, and instead of the
planning cell that my nephew commands, we took 100 officers and
we put them into 25 small teams and we paired them up with
State Department, intelligence, law enforcement, and maybe even
had a liaison officer from another country on it, just say,
okay, come up with some good ideas for how to deal with this,
my experience has always been that collective intelligence will
drive you to the best answer and it will do so most quickly.
I had a doctoral student at my school who just graduated,
another iron major, Major Todd Lewelling, who is now teaching
at the Air Force Academy, studied terrorist problems of
detecting a terrorist attack. We ran a controlled experiment
with dozens of teams; half were organized as hierarchies, half
as networks. The hierarchies had a commander, information
flowed up channels; the networks, everyone shared all the
information. Not only did the networks get to the right answer
about 30 percent more of the time, but they got to the right
answer more than 50 percent faster.
So I think there are structures. It is not a commission, it
is not a task force, there is no czars. At best, it is a
network administer. But, please, let's start doing this.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Cooper, did you have anything else you
wanted to add?
Mr. Cooper. There are many types of unconventional
warfare--electronic, take your pick. Would financial warfare
also be part of someone's arsenal?
For example, you take something like a sovereign wealth
fund of another nation or a more shadowy form of capital, even
short stocks, bet against America, alone or in groups, to take
down significant financial institutions by having such
massive----
Mr. Smith. I think we are capable of doing that all on our
own, apparently, so I think they probably don't want to get in
our way.
Mr. Cooper. But the traditional financial model is people
live in this country and they don't want to bet against it too
much. If they don't live here and in fact have deep hatred for
everything we stand for and they have got plenty of
petrodollars or other dollars, what keeps them, especially with
anonymous trading, from taking what would be ordinarily an
irrationally negative position but one that could be a self-
fulfilling prophecy if you have enough tens of billions of
dollars backing up that attack?
And one challenge we face in such an open society is
everything is transparent here. And sometimes we don't realize
the terrific leverage that, for example, a digital camera had
at Abu Ghraib.
So, you know, if we are going to be smarter and faster than
the enemy, don't we need to anticipate and at least be able to
react in a timely fashion to things that could well make sense?
And it is double destruction, because not only are they
able to do irreparable harm here, but they profit at the same
time.
So, I know you all are defense specialists, you are not
financial specialists. And the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) yesterday put back in the rule against naked
short-selling. But still, that is just a requirement that,
within three days, you show that you had at least temporary
possession of the stock or the bond. But that is about like
telling a murderer, ``Oh, yeah, show up with the bloody shirt
or the underwear.'' You know, this is three days later. This
is, for nonfinance people, this is a different area. But we are
such an open, vulnerable society in so many ways. We didn't
expect that airplanes could be gasoline bombs.
So, where is our red team to really outthink the enemy,
whether it is supercavitation or whether it is other things?
What group in the Pentagon or related to the Pentagon or in our
country is really giving hard, urgent thought to these
questions?
Dr. Scheuer. Mr. Cooper, I am certainly not capable, in
terms of answering the financial question. But I think the one
thing that we very often do is to ignore the expertise within
our own government. It is not a question of not having the
smart people. We have an extraordinary array of talented people
in the United States Government across the board. And not only
that, but in my experience now, since having resigned, you
asked earlier about freedom of speech and ideas that are
acceptable or unacceptable, I would say that within the U.S.
Government and military, the discussion is much more
independent and pointed than anything that goes on in the
Academy. I have taught now at university, and it is a much more
restricted degree of acceptability at the university than it
was at the CIA.
So, again, I think you have, in terms of brain power, you
have an enormous, wonderful mass of that within the United
States Government. It is just a matter of getting the solution
to the place and having it acceptable. Because some aspects of
a solution will not be maintaining the status quo.
Mr. Cooper. But, Dr. Scheuer, as you pointed out, there are
a couple problems. One, you have a bureaucratic master who is
reluctant to deliver bad news. Number two, some folks don't
want to deal with reality. They prefer a different view of the
world.
Dr. Scheuer. Yes, sir.
Mr. Cooper. Facts are not popular things with some
political leaders. We, sadly, have an informal rule on this
committee; we don't hear testimony from folks below the rank of
general, unless it is a Marine colonel. You know, the iron
majors are seldom, if ever, called to testify. That is crazy.
We need to correct that.
So how do we tap in--and I know networking is a great way
to do it, and I am all for that. But----
Dr. Scheuer. Sir, within my own personal experience, there
is nothing that the Agency worries more about than you guys
asking for someone to come up who has not got nine stars on his
shoulder. And, ultimately, the power of the Congress to get
whatever information it wants from whatever level, at least
within the CIA, was certainly within your purview, sir. If you
wanted to hear a General Schedule (GS-9) talk about what was
going on in Nigeria, you would get him. But you have to ask for
him.
Mr. Cooper. We haven't been able to be briefed on Sy
Hersh's article five weeks ago in The New Yorker on ground
troops in Iran. And that is already in The New Yorker magazine.
Dr. Scheuer. I don't know what the answer is then, sir. But
I know, you know, the brain power is there. How you get it--I
am afraid what is going to be needed to be done, frankly, on
all these things, whether it is a decision of the structure
about the military about getting the brains of the U.S.
Government up to talk to the leaders of the U.S. Government, is
going to be a disastrous attack within the United States.
Thousands and thousands of dead Americans will generate, at
last, some kind of frank debate about what we are doing and why
we are doing it.
Mr. Smith. I want to get to Mr. Saxton, but I think you
seek those people out, I mean, also. I guess I don't agree that
all of our leaders are blissfully and completely ignorant of
any thought, other than the generals. I just don't buy into
that. I personally go out, if I want to talk to lieutenants,
corporals, whatever, I go out to Fort Lewis and I talk to them,
I go to Iraq and I talk to them. We seek them out; we sit down
in our office in a variety of different ways. I guess we are
not all quite as dumb as it might be portrayed. We do get out
and seek out a diverse set of opinions.
Hearings are different, because there is a bunch of control
that comes down from the military and different places. But I,
for one, don't--as brilliant as I think the three of you are, I
don't rely solely on what you are talking to us about in this
hour and a half to form my opinions, and I don't think most
Members of Congress do either.
Mr. Saxton, do you have anything to add?
Mr. Saxton. I would just like to ask Dr. Arquilla one final
question.
I don't know how I have missed your book, Dr. Arquilla. It
is a fascinating title, ``Worst Enemy: The Reluctant
Transformation of the American Military.'' I will read it. But
it prompts me, the title prompts me to ask you a question about
the U.S. military.
You must have spent a fair amount of time thinking about
and having discussions about what makes it so hard to change
the military. I would just like to ask you, are there some
characteristics in the structure of the military and in the
practices of the military that make it difficult to change?
Dr. Arquilla. Yes, sir. And thanks for reading the book.
The title comes from a speech Donald Rumsfeld gave on
September 10, 2001, in the Pentagon in which he said that our
worst enemy is ourselves, and not the people but the processes,
I think was the phrasing he used. And I guess his memoir will
come out in one of these years. He very much is a network guy,
and he tried to break down a lot of the hierarchies to enforce
some kind of change.
And, you know, here is a steely Secretary of Defense who
had the full support for six years of a very bold Commander in
Chief, and yet, between the two of them, they couldn't move
that rock very far. And my experience over the past couple
decades suggests they tried to do it from the top down, and the
only way to make this kind of change happen is from within.
And I would say, so there is the institutional problem;
that is, I don't think a lot of people have taken networking
seriously. That is the real organizational insight of the time
we live in. And some folks are starting to get there. I know a
lot of mid-level officers, I know everybody who was in Anbar
during the Awakening is a believer in networks now, and the
Special Forces in the 7th group in Afghanistan believe that
now. And so that is going to spread.
But there is a larger cultural point about militaries
that--and I respect this very much, even though I am suggesting
that this is the time for change. And that is, think of the
stakes in what they do. How many professions are as physically
demanding, intellectually demanding, ethically and morally
demanding? And the consequences of wrong action are so great.
So I understand the risk-aversive point of view.
My only point and the reason I entered this debate is to
suggest that sometimes it is the failure to change that can
engender even greater risks. Think about the militaries of
1914, the first years of World War I. They were afraid to make
changes that might lose a war. Well, what they did is they sent
millions of soldiers off, shoulder to shoulder, marching
against artillery and machine guns, and millions died
needlessly. The risk of not changing was greater than the risk
of change, which they ultimately got to by 1917, 1918.
Well, that is where we are in this terror war that we find
ourselves in, this first struggle between nations and networks.
We are slowly ramping up. But I understand this reluctance. It
grows out of our institutions. But it also grows out of the
culture of a profession that is a very dangerous and demanding
one and for whom the stakes could not be possibly higher.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
I have one final question, getting back to the policy
issues that Dr. Scheuer raised and some others mentioned that I
think are perfectly legitimate when you look at what we are
fighting against in terms of violent extremists in the Muslim
world. I think the 5 percent, 80 percent figures probably are
right on. It is about 5 percent that sign up for al Qa'ida and
all they are talking about, but there is at least 80 percent
that are sympathetic to the notion that the West is hostile to
Islam and that our policies move that forward, and that is why
they find sympathy.
Just sort of imagining what the policy would be if we were
trying to address that, and my thinking about it is a touch
more complicated. Certainly Israel, Kashmir, our support for
oppressive regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are factors. But
when we put sanctions on Saddam Hussein, when we didn't support
that oppressive regime, that, too, had a major backlash against
us.
In Afghanistan, where I know you were very involved, the
rap after the Soviets were driven out was that we left, was
that we didn't stay. And I imagine if we had stayed, the rap
would have been we stayed and we are trying to manipulate. It
seems like we sort of get it both ways.
And I do think, at least most of the policymakers that I
talk to, are aware of the fact that that drives a good portion
of al Qa'ida's support and of the violent extremist support. I
guess what we struggle with is, what is the right policy?
You mentioned the Taliban, and how Afghanistan was more
stable under them. Very true. You know, we left it alone, and
al Qa'ida found a safe haven and launched 9/11 against us. So
just sort of staying away, in that instance, didn't seem to
work out too well.
So I guess the question isn't a lack of recognition that
our policies does drive some of this. The question is, at this
point, given 100 years of very questionable history, the
overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran back
in the 1950's, the post World War I, all of that, how do we
begin to repair that relationship with that portion of the
Muslim world that isn't buying into al Qa'ida but is looking
for some reason to believe that we don't mean harm to them?
Dr. Scheuer. You know, sir, I think the organizing concept
of the United States Government should be to protect the United
States and decide where we need to be at any particular time.
The idea that we abandoned Afghanistan is very popular
urban legend, but the exact opposite is the truth. We assembled
basically the same team, Mr. Khalilzad and the Brits and the
U.N., and tried to go in there in 1992 and put in the exactly
the same kind of government that is in there today. Mr.
Karzai's father was part of it.
Had we left the Afghans alone, more than likely they would
have found their own water. But we didn't. As soon as the
Soviets were gone and the communist regime was defeated, we
wanted--as Mr. Rumsfeld said in Iraq, any kind of government is
okay as long as it is not Islamic. So what we tried to do is to
put in a government that didn't include anyone who carried a
rifle.
So the idea that we abandoned Afghanistan, Lord wishes it
was true, but it wasn't. We tried to do what we are trying to
do there now. And it failed then; it will fail now.
I think there are places in the world where the United
States simply does not need to care what goes on if we arrange
our policy preferences.
Mr. Smith. Do you think Iraq and Afghanistan are two of
those places right now?
Dr. Scheuer. I think we don't have a single----
Mr. Smith. I don't mean that challenging. I am sincerely
interested.
Dr. Scheuer. In Afghanistan, if we had gone there and
destroyed what we could have of the Taliban and al Qa'ida and
let them escape, absolutely, we would have no more interest
there. We have as much chance of building a democracy there as
we have of building national socialism in Texas. It is never
going to happen. It is just foolishness, sir.
Mr. Smith. What should our role be, then, in those two
countries?
Dr. Scheuer. Certainly in Iraq, we should pray for somebody
to come back that is much like Saddam Hussein. Saddam was our
single most important ally in the war against al Qa'ida and its
networks. As long as he was in Kabul, that bottle was corked--
or in Baghdad, that bottle was corked. Those boys were staying
in southwest Asia.
Mr. Smith. But I thought our support for brutal dictators
in the Arab world was a big part of our problem.
Dr. Scheuer. Oh, it is a problem, sir. But this is not win
or lose. We have a bunch of lose-lose situations. But the enemy
who could attack us in the United States happened to be al
Qa'ida, not Saddam. And Saddam was hell on wheels when it came
to Islamists, except for the Palestinians, who weren't
attacking us.
Mr. Smith. I guess a simple question is, should we support
dictatorships in that part of the world or shouldn't we?
Dr. Scheuer. If we have that choice, sir, we have to decide
what is in America's interest. But right now we don't have that
choice. Because we have done nothing about oil in 35 years, we
have to support the tyrannies that run the Arab peninsula.
Because we have to have somebody who pretends they don't hate
the Israelis, we have to continue to bribe Mubarak and keep him
in power.
It is not an option of whether we are or not. That is where
we want to go; we want to have the option. But the problem we
have is we have no option, and we refuse to recognize that our
support for those governments drives much of what al Qa'ida is
about.
Mr. Smith. I have nothing further.
Mac, do you have anything?
Thank you very much. It was a fascinating, fascinating
discussion. I certainly want to stay in touch with all of you,
myself and on this committee. Thank you for spending time with
us this morning.
[Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
September 18, 2008
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September 18, 2008
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