Air University Review, March-April 1984
WE have embarked upon one of the most difficult and complex periods of change the world has ever witnessed. In the space of a generation, science and technology are reshaping our lives, our work, our leisure time, and perhaps the very nature of societal organization and human values. Whereas the television revolution of the 1950s brought instantaneous information and experience to the American public, the computers of today permit us to collect, collate, and process that information with blinding speed, increasing the base of human knowledge at an exponential rate and expanding the boundaries of our consciousness. The science of robotics, once relegated to the pages of science fiction, holds out the promise of freeing mankind from the drudgery of physical labor. Instantaneous communications and jet travel have compressed time and space in a way unimaginable only a few years ago. Satellites are probing the heavens, and for the first time in human history, man has burst free from the parochialism of this planet.
But while we marvel at the rapidity of this change and revel in the satisfaction of new discoveries, they also carry a price. The satellites spinning overhead look down on a troubled world overflowing with conflict: Lebanon, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chad, Iran-Iraq, Namibia, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Peru, Ethiopia, Kampuchea, and Mozambique impose reality on our new vision of the future. "Political violence is spreading around the globe as seldom before," writes Flora Lewis.1 Simply put, our ability to produce change has outrun our ability to control it. Change has been accompanied by dislocation and upheaval. Old tensions have been exacerbated and new resentments created. The bleak winds of conflict are blowing across the political landscape, fanned by a prolonged global recession, which has brought progress in much of the developing world to a standstill, and the inexorable pressures of population growth, which have consumed new wealth as rapidly as it has been created. In the opinion of Charles William Maynes, the Third World is being "demodernized." Investment projects are lying idle, children are not being taught, disease is spreading, beggars are filling the streets from which they have been absent for decades, people are looting food shops, and the middle class is being destroyed by bankruptcy and high interest rates."2 According to some estimates, excluding China, there are more than one-half billion unemployed or underemployed people in the developing world.
The Third World faces a debt crisis so severe that it could conceivably spawn dozens of revolutions and even topple the financial structure of the Western world. And if unfulfilled expectations and economic mismanagement have turned much of the developing world into a "hothouse of conflict" capable of spilling over and engulfing the industrial West, the West is plagued by its own sources of potential conflict. The changes being wrought by technology and the shift from industrial to information economies in many Western nations are producing disillusionment, alienation, and resentment among those left behind during the transformation. Urban nomads and squatters battle police in Berlin and other European cities; crime is turning whole sectors of some major cities into wastelands; and unemployed college graduates have sought to strike back at the societies they blame for their condition by joining terrorist groups in Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and other Western countries. Separatist movements in the United States (Puerto Rico), France, Yugoslavia, Spain, and the United Kingdom attempt to win converts by blaming economic and other inequities on the tyranny of the majority population and asserting that all will be better if only the minority controls its own destiny.
While the growth of new sources of conflict represents a serious and rising challenge to the West, the Soviet Union, beset by a ponderous and inefficient economy, sees in this discord an opportunity to redress the enormous economic disadvantage it labors under vis-à-vis the West. Indeed, in nearly every respect but its military technology, the Soviet Union is, for all practical purposes, a developing country. Using terrorism and guerrilla insurgencies increasingly as a form of surrogate or proxy warfare, the Soviet Union and its allies have found a means of undermining the West, wearing it down, nibbling away at its peripheries, denying it the strategic materials and vital straits critical to its commerce. "The USSR," writes Ray S. Cline, "is still trying to see that the regions of the world where the international trading states get their resources continue to shrink as a result of the spread of Soviet control or influence."3 The West is on the defensive and its response cannot be halfhearted or indecisive without running grave risks. Yet there is a serious and growing gulf between the wars this nation is prepared to fight and those it is most likely to fight during the coming decades (or those that the American public and its politicians are likely to sanction).
The prospective battlefield of the next twenty years is more likely to be an urban wilderness of concrete and buildings, the tarmac of an international airport, or the swamps, jungles, and deserts of the Third World than the valleys and sweeping alluvial plains of Europe. And the threat of nuclear war, while always there, is still remote. The most plausible conflict scenario for the future is that of a continuous succession of hostage crises, peacekeeping actions, rescue missions, and counterinsurgency efforts, or what some have called the "low frontier" of warfare. Other names for it include subnational conflict, low-intensity warfare, and low-level violence. Much of it will have more in common with a "rumble" in an alley than with the clash of two armies on a battlefield. As Richard Clutterbuck has observed, old-style wars between conventional armies like the Iran-Iraq War, the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars, and the India-Pakistan conflict will still occur, but less frequently. In many respects, the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon may be a harbinger of things to come. The Israelis fought two enemies in Lebanon--the PLO and the Syrians--and each required a different strategy and a different type of warfare. The result was a war without form or shape, of shifting fronts and tactics, an improvised war that was half counterinsurgency and half conventional.
In the predominantly rural nations of the developing world, governments will be challenged by guerrilla insurgencies, and in the more urbanized industrialized nations, by terrorism. The spectrum of conflict is expanding, and those who do not understand this fact do not understand their time. And just as our expansive technology has created new sources of potential conflict, so too has it made the complex, interdependent, industrialized nations of the West more vulnerable to the emerging new conflict patterns of the modern age.
Ironically, our technology has made conventional warfare, not to mention nuclear war, too costly, too impractical, too destructive. Should a conventional conflict break out in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, there is no assurance that it could be contained; the fear has always been that the side which is losing will ultimately feel compelled to escalate the conflict into a nuclear confrontation. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare, on the other hand, possess none of these disadvantages. They tend to be cheap modes of conflict, easily contained in most circumstances and requiring neither a high degree of sophistication nor extensive training. And should the patron nation decide that a particular conflict no longer serves its purposes, it can--with relative ease in most situations--simply cut its losses and get out.
In years past, terrorism and guerrilla warfare tended to be characteristic of the early stages of any conflict; the ability to engage in guerrilla warfare usually meant the abandonment of most acts of terrorism, just as the ability to field a conventional army generally witnessed the abandonment of guerrilla warfare. However, today terrorism and guerrilla warfare increasingly are becoming effective forms of combat themselves, and conflicts often never graduate to more conventional stages. During the Vietnam conflict, for example, the North Vietnamese, reacting to the growing capability of the ARVN to wage conventional war, placed new emphasis on guerrilla warfare.4 Certainly, for the purposes of the Soviet Union and its allies, terrorism and guerrilla warfare represent an effective, low-cost strategy for challenging the West and scoring gains in the Third World.
Terrorism, as we all know, does not involve traditional armies and tactics. The terrorist wears no standard uniform and often is organized without regard to military rank, although the terrorists' organizational structure may be quite rigid. The West Points and Sandhursts of terrorism are the streets of Beirut, the university campuses of Europe, and the training camps in Libya, the Soviet Union, South Yemen, the East bloc countries, and Cuba. The textbooks used by terrorists are Soviet and American field manuals, plus underground "bibles" like Carlos Marighella's "Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla" and the Red Brigades handbook, which are xeroxed and reproduced in dozens of variations and passed from group to group.
Terrorism differs significantly from other forms of warfare in some notable respects. The most obvious difference is that, whereas traditional warfare is most often institutionalized violence, perpetrated by state upon state, and therefore has a badge of legitimacy attached, terrorism is nonstate violence, committed by nonstate actors making war on the state or upon other nonstate groups, and, as such, is usually regarded as illegitimate violence. Evidence of this distinction can be found in the U.S. legal system. U.S. statutes do not identify "terrorism" as either a crime or an act of war. Rather, acts of terrorism are punished under existing statutes dealing with murder, arson, bombings, extortion, air piracy, and so on. In recent years, Puerto Rican FALN and Black Liberation Army terrorists have proclaimed themselves as "political prisoners" and demanded to be treated as "prisoners of war," with international supervision of their trials and incarceration and special prisons, but to date their demands have fallen on deaf ears.
Secondly, according to Mao Tse-tung, the essence of war is to preserve oneself and annihilate the enemy. Terrorism, by contrast, is above all else a political act designed not necessarily to destroy the enemy but to demoralize him or to force him to overreact and thus create the conditions for a general revolt or revolution. Often the goal of terrorism is not to overthrow a particular state or political system, even if that were possible, but rather to intimidate the enemy, to make a political statement, or to call attention to a particular problem or cause. And unlike conventional warfare, where self-preservation is essential to success, the terrorist may achieve his purpose most effectively through his willingness to give up his own life for the cause, although the number of terrorists actually willing to undertake a suicide mission is still relatively small.
Another characteristic that sets terrorism apart from other forms of warfare is that traditional warfare is far more destructive than terrorism, consistent with the aim of the terrorist not necessarily to destroy but to communicate. Relatively few lives have been lost to terrorism in the twentieth century--only a few thousand during the last decade--whereas conventional warfare has claimed millions of victims during the same time frame. It is this lack of destructiveness and expense that accounts for some of the growth of terrorism. It is easier to mount a terrorist attack on an unsuspecting business or an unguarded aircraft than to engage in conventional warfare. The equipment of terrorism is very inexpensive compared to the hardware and materiel needed to engage in conventional warfare (or even guerrilla warfare). As Brian Jenkins has observed, terrorism is warfare "without territory, waged without armies as we know them. It is warfare that is not territorially limited; sporadic 'battles' may take place worldwide. It is warfare without neutrals, and with few or no civilian innocent bystanders."5
Guerrilla warfare, by contrast, generally attracts far less publicity than terrorism, largely because its battles are not waged in the media capitals of the West but in the countrysides of the chiefly rural nations of the developing world, far from the prying eye of the television camera. And while guerrilla warfare certainly incorporates various elements of terrorism, it also embodies features of conventional warfare: most often its targets have military value, it is generally waged on a larger scale than terrorism, and many of its tactics have much in common with traditional concepts of warfare. Guerrilla warfare perhaps differs most from terrorism in the fact that guerrillas, to be at all successful, must have a reasonable level of support from the people, "the sea in which they swim." Terrorists, on the other hand, need not have any public support whatsoever: they can melt back into the population of a large city without anyone being the wiser.
Neither our political nor our military establishments are properly attuned to these new realities of conflict. We have not responded to the changing spectrum of war as rapidly or as thoroughly as the gravity of the threat demands. Instead, the U.S. low-level or unconventional war capability has always been regarded as something like a stepchild within the defense structure, involving more improvisation than science. Our war-making capability is still designed primarily to fight general wars in Europe rather than to engage successfully in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. As a result of this preoccupation with conventional warfare, the United States has enjoyed few military successes in tire postwar period in the area of low-intensity or unconventional warfare. Past failures of U.S. hostage rescue attempts, in contrast to the successes enjoyed by Israel, Great Britain, and West Germany, are symptomatic of this deficiency. As Harvey J. McGeorge has noted:
In the past four decades the United States has mounted several large-scale attempts to rescue hostages. During these attempts scores of American lives were lost and tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment expended. Yet not a single hostage was returned to friendly hands as a result of these rescue efforts.6
McGeorge reviews the failures of intelligence, organization, command decisions, and preparation during the Iran rescue attempt, the Son Tay raid, the Mayaguez incident, and the abortive Task Force Baum, which sought to liberate 1500 POWs in German-held territory near the end of the Second World War. All 1500 POWs who were freed, plus 293 members of the 294-man rescue unit, were killed or captured as they tried to reach Allied lines.7 While information concerning the more recent Grenada rescue operation seems encouraging, it is doubtful that this episode marks the beginning of a new emphasis in U.S. defense policy.
This criticism of the U.S. special operations record is not to suggest that the military is entirely to blame for these failures or for the lack of U.S. success in Vietnam. Quite the contrary. Indeed, the real sources of the problem are probably both the U.S. political establishment, which defines the missions for our armed forces, and the American public, which is inherently fickle in its support and backing of anything less than a so-called popular war.
"After the disasters of the loss of Vietnam and the collapse of the Nixon presidency," writes Ray S. Cline, "the U.S. began to drift almost aimlessly in its strategic thinking."8 Today we need to rethink our military and intelligence needs from the standpoint of the historic changes that are occurring in the nature and shape of contemporary conflict. The security of the United States and the rest of the Western world requires a restructuring of our war-making capability that will place new emphasis on our ability to fight a succession of limited wars and to project power into the Third World.
But before this shifting of emphasis can occur, there needs to be a change in the world view of U.S. policymakers and the American public, along with their recognition that what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the nation and our American way of life. To sustain our nation over time, we must exploit the vulnerabilities of those who would destroy it; and our doing so may require efforts to influence the internal events of other countries. However, without strong policy direction from Washington and requisite public support, based on a clear perception of the costs associated both with involvement and uninvolvement, it will be impossible for the United States to adapt successfully to the changing conflict environment.
Indeed, there is an inevitable political dimension to limited warfare, which shapes both the nature of the conflict and the response. The scale of a nation's response to any challenge is an inherently political decision, and a democracy like the United States ultimately requires the acquiescence, if not the approval, of the people.9
Yet the American people are confused by Central America and Lebanon. They are not sure why we are there and what we hope to accomplish by our involvement. Recent polls on American attitudes toward U.S. involvement in Central America found that while 64 percent of those polled felt that the situation in Central America is a threat to the security of the United States,10 only 24 percent favored the introduction of more advisors and only 21 percent believed those advisors should be permitted to enter combat areas.11 Such results demonstrate the confusion characterizing U.S. public perceptions where global events are concerned and are indicative of a loss of our national will to act even when our own security is threatened. This phenomenon of ambiguity is perhaps the most damaging legacy of Vietnam.
As Clausewitz observed, warfare is, in its most elemental sense, nothing but a trial of strength.12 As a rule, conflicts will be won by the side with superior resources. Superior strategy and tactics will delay an inevitable conclusion, but only temporarily. However, the side possessing superior resources must be prepared to apply them from the onset of the conflict until victory has been secured.
Unfortunately, the post-World War II history of low-level conflicts reveals that in nearly every instance there was a prolonged, incremental buildup, followed by a long war of stalemate and attrition. Ultimately the side that was prepared to hold on the longest, that had the most clearly defined sense of purpose, prevailed. As evidence of this national purpose, one need only recall Ho Chi Minh's boast that they would fight ten years, twenty years, thirty years or more, whatever it took, to prevail in Vietnam. Today, by contrast, the American public and U.S. policymakers will not accept wars of attrition; they will tolerate only short wars, and then only if there are no heavy combat losses. Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., USA, has written of the "repugnance of the American people toward a war of attrition," noting that "all of America's previous wars were fought in the heat of passion. " In his view, "Vietnam was fought in cold blood, and that was intolerable to the American people."13
There seems to be a lack of recognition in this country that police actions, peacekeeping missions, and counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations are all part of the same long, continuous war, a war composed of many small, often nameless battles of varying duration in dozens of different venues against an unchanging enemy and its proxies and surrogates. Today the death of more than 250 Marines in Lebanon--while a tragedy--produces a firestorm of controversy and ultimately the withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeeping forces. Similarly, the introduction of 55 U.S. military advisors in El Salvador provokes a great outcry in the Congress and the media; yet there may be as many as 3000 Eastern bloc military advisors in Nicaragua, a fact that is largely ignored. The Soviet Union pours ten times as much military aid into Nicaragua and Cuba as the United States provides to all Latin America, yet it is our country and not the Soviet Union that is accused repeatedly of "propping up unpopular military regimes" in the region. In contrast, the French sent 500 "crack troops" labeled "advisors" to Chad and then moved them to the front and hardly elicited a yawn. Within days, the force was greatly expanded and all pretense dropped that the men were advisors. In the political environment of the United States today, such an action would be virtually impossible.
The obvious question that must be asked is whether the United States is capable of fighting and winning limited wars and of engaging successfully in low-level military operations. The answer is clear. The United States will never win a war fought daily in the U.S. media or on the floor of Congress, where members attempt to micromanage conflicts and second-guess administrative policymakers rather than making overall, broad policy and leaving the implementation of that policy to the executive branch. The conflict in Southeast Asia serves as clear indication of the hazards associated with too much publicity, as does the current U.S. involvement in Central America and Lebanon. In some respects, the success of the U.S. intervention in Grenada may be attributable to the fact that the media were excluded until the operation was all but complete.
The "dirty little conflicts" of our time are not pretty, but they are critical to Western security, and if we abrogate our ability to engage in low-level conflict, we lose our capability to check Soviet expansion and maintain a world order compatible with our national interests and security.
Unlike Henry Kissinger, who has maintained that limited war admits of no purely military solutions but instead is part of a test of wills designed ultimately to forge a political outcome,14 I hold that not only can limited wars and other low-level conflicts be won but that by winning such conflicts over time we can prevail in our strategic competition with the U.S.S.R. Indeed, the loss of one country to communism should serve as an impetus for us to take back another country. The main elements of such a policy are as follows:
Within the framework of these policy elements, a number of specific observations and recommendations can be advanced with respect to intelligence, elite units, national policies, and allocation of defense resources for counterinsurgency.
intelligence
Good intelligence provides the first line of defense against terrorism and is perhaps the most critical tool in successful counterinsurgency operations. It was, after all, good intelligence that permitted authorities to apprehend the terrorists in both Rome and Kenya who were preparing to shoot down jetliners with Soviet-made heat-seeking missiles. The terrorist or guerrilla has the advantage of being able to choose the time and the place of his attack from an almost infinite universe of options, together with the mode of attack; it is almost impossible for those on the defensive to secure every potential target, to anticipate every weapon and set of tactics, and to be prepared 24 hours a day for an attack that may never come. While static defense is critical to any counterinsurgency operation, those who try to protect every asset and every potential target are likely to spread their forces too thin, consistent with the old adage that "he who is everywhere is nowhere." Good intelligence will go a long way toward eliminating the inherent advantage possessed by terrorists and guerrillas.
Thus, the work going on to rebuild this nation's intelligence establishment after the trauma of Vietnam and congressional inquiries into the conduct of intelligence activities must be encouraged. The paramilitary capability of the Central Intelligence Agency must be restored. Congress must reform its oversight procedures to narrow the consultation requirements imposed on the intelligence establishment.
elite units
Elite military units have always provoked a fair amount of controversy. Some opponents argue that such units tend to be romanticized and are antithetical to democratic traditions and notions of a citizen army. Other grievances include the problem of controlling elite units, in view of the fact that the existence of elite units often circumvents the normal chain of command.16 Objectors also point out, for example, that the Marine Corps has no elite units (although it could be argued that the Marine Corps is itself an elite unit) because such units have a tendency to siphon off the best men, to the detriment of the Marine Corps in general. Nevertheless, elite units are useful when it comes to fighting terrorism. Such units can undertake extremely hazardous missions that require a high degree of skill, training, and possibly even government disavowal. They also serve as laboratories for new weapons and tactics, a useful function in the constantly changing terrorist environment But most importantly, they act as counterweights against the complacency that often overtakes many military organizations and produces paralysis when action is most needed. Indeed, the hallmark of successful counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations is flexibility.
In this connection, more emphasis needs to be placed on developing and honing U.S. counterterrorist forces, such as those first deployed by the Delta team in Iran. The mission, however, of elite multipurpose Delta-type units needs to be narrowed and made more explicit. Today such units are supposed to carry out antiterrorist operations, such as rescuing hostages, and to engage in conventional military operations including intervention in foreign conflicts, the protection of critical assets anywhere in the world, and rapid deployment to repel aggression. The sole function of such units, however, should be to combat terrorism, and to this end they should be trained and equipped far differently than more conventional forces.
The vast majority of U.S. military equipment is still designed for the rigors and requirements of conventional warfare and of ten must he modified for use in counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations. "Fifty percent of all the equipment used in Vietnam by the Special Forces," observed one former Green Beret, "was civilian equipment." West Germany's GSG9 (Grenzschutzgruppe 9) uses the most advanced antiterrorist equipment in the world, including special communications and tracking equipment, lightweight state-of-the-art body armor, specially prepared Mercedes Benz and Porsche pursuit automobiles, custom-built French helicopters, and advanced weaponry, such as the MP5K submachine gun and the Mauser 66 sniper rifle. Attention to detail extends even to the unit's clothing and shoes, which are designed not to have any zippers, buttons, or other hard surfaces that might reveal a unit member's presence (crawling along the fuselage of a hostage aircraft, for example). The unit's computers contain the interior configurations of almost any aircraft that might be seized by terrorists, as well as blueprints of major buildings and other facilities that might come under attack. The unit trains on full-scale mockups of potential targets, and as many redundancies as possible are built into each operation. When the GSG9 retook a captured Lufthansa jetliner from terrorists at Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1977, two simultaneous distractions were used to gain a momentary advantage over the terrorists. Three British thunderflash grenades were set off near the plane, and a bonfire was lit behind a sand dune in the distance. It turned out that the bonfire was the superior tactic, since the thunderflash grenades generated too much smoke.
Fighting terrorism requires units characterized by leanness, mobility, and tactics that emphasize subtlety and surgical precision. Foreign language skills and cultural knowledge are needed so that antiterrorist units can operate undercover on foreign territory and design operations fully consistent with local habits, conditions, and dialects.
U.S. national policies
U.S. indecision in fighting terrorism, to some extent, results from concern that U.S. allies may find positive action offensive. War is the one activity where moderation is no virtue, yet many of our nation's leaders often seem more upset by abuses of human rights on the part of nations combating terrorist outbreaks than by the original terrorist outrages that precipitated the embattled government's reaction. I am not suggesting that the United States should prop up corrupt dictatorships, but I would argue for balance and objectivity in assessing conflict situations. Moreover, when the Congress, in 1975, curtailed U.S. training of foreign police forces, it set in motion a new wave of torture and human rights abuses. Any knowledgeable police or military official knows that torture is not an effective interrogation technique; more sophisticated methods exist today--methods not involving barbarity or defilement of human beings. But if foreign police and military units are denied knowledge of sophisticated techniques, inevitably they will resort to medieval cruelty and thus fuel the vicious cycle of human rights abuses.
The United States must help those confronting terrorist and insurgent assaults with proper training and equipment so as not to undermine popular support for legitimate governments. The 1983 Foreign Assistance Act contains general authority for the President to furnish "assistance to foreign countries in order to enhance the ability of their law enforcement personnel to deter terrorists and terrorist groups from engaging in international terrorist acts such as bombing, kidnapping, assassination, hostage taking, and hijacking."17 Provision is made in the program to ensure that the equipment and training are not used in ways detrimental to the advancement of human rights.
In keeping with this more enlightened attitude, it is time to correct such travesties as the refusal in early 1981 of an export license that would have permitted the shipment to Great Britain of twenty-five custom-made silencers for M-16s. In this case, "human rights advocates" at the Department of State demonstrated a profound ignorance of modern combat when they argued that such devices were solely assassination tools and would probably be "misused" by the British in Northern Ireland. As it turned out, when the Falklands crisis erupted, the British were compelled to use a pirated IRA silencer for their weapons, a wholly inferior product to the American-made silencer.
allocation of defense resources
By far the overwhelming share of the U.S. defense budget goes to sustain our nuclear deterrent and conventional war-making forces, despite the fact that low-intensity warfare is likely to dominate the future conflict landscape. A built-in bias exists within the military establishment and in the substructure of defense contractors against any substantial shif t of resources away from traditional procurement patterns. Such a shift would disrupt established careers and institutions based on a mastery of traditional warfare strategy, tactics, and logistics. This reluctance flies in the face of recent studies indicating that "brush-fire wars" are depleting America's military strength and that low-intensity conflicts, running the gamut from psychological warfare to countering Soviet-backed insurgencies and engaging in hi-tech antiterrorist activities, "will constitute the greatest challenge to the Army."18 Since low-intensity wars are likely to remain the chief wars of our time, the United States should allocate much more of its defense resources to developing a better capability in the area of counterinsurgency.
In Central America today, according to some reports, we are repeating many of the mistakes of Vietnam. I shall mention only a short litany of the deficiencies of our current policies and offer a few suggestions on how to correct them.
MANY, both in this country and abroad, believe that the United States has lost what T. S. Eliot once called "the motive of action," which in the context of the modern world might be interpreted as the ability to perceive clearly our national interest and the will to take whatever steps are necessary to pursue it. Today, it is vital that the American public and our policymakers be educated about the realities of contemporary conflict and the need to fight little wars successfully in the hope that we can avoid big wars in the future. Only when all of us comprehend what is at stake will we as a nation be able to develop and maintain the clarity of vision and national consensus needed to underwrite a new policy that supports the application of force in low-level conflict situations. In this connection, we need to show the world that we can still win limited wars, and there is no better place to begin than in Central America.
Similarly, terrorists must be made to realize that they cannot strike at the United States and its citizens with impunity. While Soviet embassies and legations have escaped all but incidental violence in recent years, U.S. embassies have been attacked in dozens of countries, the most serious incidents involving the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the sacking and burning of our embassies in Libya and Pakistan, and the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. It is time toadopt policies that ensure swift and sure retribution against those who attack our citizens and property. If it is our destiny as a nation not to be loved, then surely it behooves us to be feared, at least by the purveyors of violence and chaos.
Washington, D.C.
Notes
1. Flora Lewis, "The Habit of War," New York Times, 13 September 1983.
2. Charles William Maynes, "If the Poor Countries Go Under, We'll Sink with Them," The Washington Post, 18 September 1983.
3. Ray S. Cline, World Power Trends and U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1980s (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1980), p. 150.
4. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1983), p. 172.
5. Brian Jenkins, "International Terrorism: A Balance Sheet," Survival, July-August 1975, p. 160.
6. Harvey J. McGeorge II, "Plan Carefully, Rehearse Thoroughly, Execute Violently," World Affairs, Summer 1983, pp. 1-2 (draft).
7. Ibid.
8. Cline, p. 199.
9. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, editors, Book 8, Chapter 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 585-94.
10. ABC News-Washington Post poll, reprinted in National Journal, 10 September 1983, p. 1862.
11. Gallup Organization poll, reprinted in National Journal, 10 September 1983, p. 1862.
12. Clausewitz, p. 96.
13. Summers, p. 37.
14. Henry Kissinger, "The Problems of Limited War," in The Use of Force, Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz, editors (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971).
15. Daniel Arnold, discussion in conjunction with a paper presented by Theodore G. Shackley entitled, "The Uses of Paramilitary Covert Action in the 1980's," reprinted in Intelligence Requirements for the 1980's: Covert Action, Roy Godson, editor (Washington: National Strategy Information Center, 1981), p. 160.
16. Eliot A. Cohan, Commandos and Politicians: Elite Miliiary Units in Modern Democracies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1978), p. 70.
17. U.S. Congress, Senate, 1983 Foreign Assistance Act, Chapter 8, p. 161,
18. Bob Dart, "Proxy Wars to be Challenge to U.S. Military Might, Study Says," Atlanta Journal, 20 April 1983.
Contributor
Neil C. Livingstone (Ph.D., Flethcher School of Law and Diplomacy) is Senior Vice President of Gray and Company, a public affairs/public relations firm in Washington, D.C. A frequent lecturer and consultant on terrorism and national security affairs, he is also President of the Institute on Terrorism and Subnational Conflict. Before entering the private sector, Dr. Livingstone served on Captiol Hill as assistant to Senator Stuart Symington and special assistant to Senator James B. Pearson. His many articles on terrorism and foreign policy have appeared in World Affairs, International Security Review, Strategic Review, and other journals. Dr Livingstone is author of The War against Terrorism (1982).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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