Terror calls for new strategies, experts say

By Michael Kilian | Washington Bureau

September 13, 2001

WASHINGTON - This week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have ushered in a new era of warfare for which American defense may be poorly prepared.

"The American people need to know we're facing a different enemy than we have ever faced," President Bush said Wednesday. "This enemy hides in shadows and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover."

Many defense experts feel that, despite and perhaps because of the country's overwhelming superiority in conventional and nuclear arms, the deadliest threat the U.S. now faces is what materialized Tuesday morning in the skies over New York and Washington.

Handful of fanatics

Thousands of lives apparently were lost, the nation's tallest twin buildings were demolished and its military nerve center was badly damaged.

Yet the adversary was not a modernized, high-technology foe competing with the U.S. in military hardware but a handful of fanatics who reportedly initiated their operation armed with nothing more deadly than knives and box cutters.

"The principal lesson of the gulf war is that adversaries who want to confront us in the future won't be stupid enough to do it in a head-on, conventional military manner," said Michele Flournoy, former deputy assistant defense secretary for strategy and threat reduction. "They'll come at us with asymmetric [unconventional] approaches, and the primary example of that is terrorism. They will try to find a way to bring the battlefield home to Americans."

"Terrorism has risen to the level of a strategic threat," said Daniel Benjamin, former director for transnational threats at the White House National Security Council. "We face opponents who believe that terrorism is not about creating the maximum psychological effect but creating carnage--creating bloodshed--and that changes the nature of the threat and that changes the response that America must produce."

A similar point was made in a recent paper by Marine Corps Lt. Col. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. of the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. In it, he warned that "asymmetric" terrorist attacks provide an enemy with the means to employ its strengths against America's greatest vulnerabilities-- including its civilian population, infrastructure, communications and information networks and financial centers--without fear of immediate and direct retribution.

Benjamin said the situation called for rethinking our military preparedness and strategy along new lines that confront the terrorist threat and its causes.

More than military response

"We can't meet it solely in a military response," he said. "We need to recognize that what we're up against is not simply an army in the field but ideas and a world of discontent. We need a short-term strategy to deal with the immediate threat of this network. We need a long-term strategy to deal with the phenomenon of radical Islam and an enormous number of people who identify their own discontents with America."

Benjamin said defense thinking and resources should be expanded to deal with conventional threats and the threat of domestic terrorism.

Flournoy called for at least reallocating the defense budget and making the anti-terrorist effort a combined assault involving a wide variety of government agencies.

"We've been so focused on missile defense," she said. "What something like this brings home is that homeland defense is a very wide range of missions, from missile defense to air defense to border security to counterterrorism to critical infrastructure protection. . . . The responses to these threats do not naturally reside in the Defense Department budget. They reside in law-enforcement budgets, federal aviation budgets, customs budgets and the Coast Guard budget. This is not a Department of Defense problem alone."

She said the Defense Department itself is probably one of the biggest obstacles to reconfiguring to meet the new threat.

"If we're really going to deal with this head on, we have to fundamentally change some of the ways we operate," she said. "That notion has met with some resistance in parts of the services who feel they are made less relevant by these kinds of threats. . . . Some of these concepts are threatening to people and to the traditional ways we've done business and the way we structure the military."