By Paul Mann
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 22 April 2002
Globalization and terrorism are blamed for making security risks multiply like weeds, but it does not necessarily follow that the world is up against the most dangerous overgrowth in centuries.
The variety and unpredictability of current military threats appear far greater than in Cold War days, an impression that took over in high military and intelligence circles long before Sept. 11.
But that impression suggests a lack of historical perspective to some outside experts.
''You could make the argument that Al Qaeda is quite similar to the anarchist movement of the second half of the 19th century in Europe, Russia and America, except that it has access to new tools,'' said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute. ''Like every other generation, we're overly impressed with the uniqueness of our own times.''
Kori Schake of National Defense University made a similar point. ''I hesitate to suggest that the U.S. is facing threats greater than at any other period in its history. That has to be proved, not simply asserted. [Unconventional] challenges, frightening as they are, do not represent a threat of the magnitude of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in the Cold War, or the threat of the British navy during President Washington's administration.''
Government is entirely correct about the multiplying risks posed by the tide of missiles, technologies and nonstate actors besieging the world, says Edward N. Luttwak, author of a new book, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. ''But there is a huge and obvious premise missing from those statements -- there is no great struggle now among the great powers.''
Were there such a rivalry, lesser threats would be disregarded, Luttwak contends. ''We would simply accept them as irritants that you do nothing about, like [Libyan leader Moammar] Qaddafi during the Cold War, who was a minor irritant [in the context] of the great military, ideological, political and intelligence struggle with the Soviets.''
As for today, Luttwak added: ''Dangerous as he is, Osama bin Laden is still trivial compared to a great powers race, in which the strategic balance is extremely delicate because of the possibility of a catastrophic war with nuclear weapons. We are living in a blessed period of history when there is no great enemy to thrust all other threats out of the limelight.''
These views are the subject of strenuous counter-arguments that attempt to pinpoint historical nuance. Neil C. Livingstone, a longtime authority on terrorism and security threats, agrees that terrorism of a sort is as old as the Bible. David used asymmetrical means against Goliath. Jewish nationalists struck with zeal at the Roman Empire's occupying legions in the eastern Mediterranean.
Livingstone also noted that leading historians trace the beginnings of modern terrorism and totalitarianism to the French Revolution's Jacobin excesses under Robespierre in the early 1790s.
Today's terrorism has its roots in the 1954-62 Algerian War, Livingstone said in an interview, when as many as one million Muslim Algerians and 80,000 French soldiers and civilians were killed in particularly savage fighting in Algeria's successful bid for independence from metropolitan France.
Yet, despite this historical continuity, he emphasized, ''we know there are times in the chronological evolution of terrorism when it becomes different; it changes both its face and its nature at certain thresholds. The [Reign of] Terror ran out of control under Robespierre, and that was a new threshold. Middle East terrorism arose in the late 1960s, when Fatah [a principal Palestinian faction] sought to put little devices into water pipelines and blow them up, water being a scarce resource'' in the region.
The terrorist threshold of the 21st century is the advent of mega-death, claims Livingstone, chief of GlobalOptions, an international crisis management company headquartered here. Like other security specialists, he noted that in the 1990s, the number of terrorist incidents fell, but death tolls soared.
From now on, he warned, ''anyone with a grudge is going to have readily at their fingertips the knowledge to create instruments of violence and even mass destruction. The fundamental change in the nature of terrorism will come simply from its magnitude alone.''
Other international threats, such as failed states and vicious ethnic wars, present military challenges as daunting as terrorism, noted Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. ''Remember, terror is not an 'ism,' not an ideology like communism. It's a tactic, an ancient tactic, an instrument of conflict. What is new is that terrorism has a reach today that it never had before, a global reach. It can ride the back of the Web, advanced communications and immense financial flows from Sudan to the Philippines, from Australia to banks in Florida. We need new tools against these ancient tactics -- cyber offense and defense information systems, and global cooperation among all nations dealing with the threat. The anarchists of the 19th century [constituted] a European-wide movement, and Europe's governments cooperated with each other in police information and intelligence.''
THE CHAIRMAN of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, believes World War II resembles the war on terrorism, despite significant differences between them. ''There is at least one key lesson to be remembered,'' he told Congress recently. ''During World War II, the services showed a remarkable capacity to learn from the experience. At the beginning of the war, they faced conditions they had not prepared for, but managed to adapt themselves in the midst of the fight, and within a short time had established an extraordinary degree of teamwork and combat efficiency. We face a similar task today -- to defeat multiple enemies who are capable of striking us with asymmetric means from locations around the world. Winning this new global war will require us to exhibit the same flexibility in adapting to changing conditions.''
Adaptability is at a premium because today's military threats are considered more protean than ever. It is the constantly changing character of the security picture that conveys the impression that military threats are unprecedented in number and scope.
From Kabul and Port-au-Prince to Pristina and Mogadishu, defense analysts see a trend toward urban warfare and urban peacekeeping that they expect to endure in the decades ahead. Conventional military doctrine calls for steering clear of urban combat, with its notoriously high casualty rates in wartime and its rabbit warren risks in peacetime.
Yet, as the 1990s came to a close, the U.S. Marine Corps alone was involved in urban operations in 237 of its last 250 deployments.
Terrorists, insurgents and nonstate actors consider urban operations a near-perfect way to neutralize U.S. military superiority, according to a Rand study.
This is what lies behind the call by Myers and others for new, urban-style weapons technologies: highly miniaturized missiles and drones, variable-effect ''dial-a-yield'' munitions, multipurpose robots, and precise, low-yield airborne support weapons that could be used by aircraft in urban enclaves, a tactic Israel has used in its counterterrorist offensive in occupied Palestinian territories.
Increasingly, specialized technologies will have to be custom tailored to permit precision engagement of the enemy. They will have to be effective within the extremely short firing ranges imposed by long canyons of skyscrapers or dense thickets of urban alleys and housing. One option is exceptionally agile, fiber-optic missiles, able to sustain high-g turns. These might serve as gunner-controlled surgical strike weapons.
Robots large and small might be used as reconnaissance probes inside city buildings, and put to work neutralizing booby-traps and mines.
If international threat assessments are correct, city combat eventually will encompass the complete spectrum of military action, from small-unit operations and large-scale warfare to terrorist mass murder with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
The broadening scope of urban warfare is being fed as much by demographic trends as the advantages of unconventional attack that stateless adversaries can employ against Western technological might. By 2015, 85% of the world population may be located in urban areas.
This has generated widespread calls to broaden the whole conception of national security to include psychological, political, economic and other factors. A lengthy reform manifesto, ''Reforging the Sword,'' put out by the private Center for Defense Information (CDI), sums up the case this way: ''Military power, which over the last 60 years has been the dominant element in U.S. international relations, must be recast into its essentially supporting role as a complement and backup to the political, economic, social and informational components of national security.''
Hand-in-hand with the drive for a broader conception of security goes a parallel emphasis on coalition-building and multilateral efforts, like those set up by the U.S. to overthrow the renegade government in Afghanistan. The effects of globalization are thought to make collective defense paramount. ''The implications of the globalization of information and financial flows for nation-states are further eroding the freedom of states to act with little or no regard for others,'' the CDI analysis concluded.
When U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld strode into a congressional hearing room in February to report on the allied victory over the Taliban, he began by saying, ''We built coalitions.''
The time is over when powerful nation-states have a monopoly on the use of force, Schake underscored. The end of that monopoly, like the impact of globalization, accentuates the need for multilateral defense. What she called the ''democratization'' of communications and other advanced technologies has lowered the thresholds for accumulating the money and means required to inflict mass murder. Technology's prolific spread heightens the amorphous character of world threats.
Accordingly, terrorism and urban warfare present aggressors with an inexhaustible number of targets for indiscriminate carnage, from the Louvre to Disney World, from Algiers to Jakarta, from food production and chemical storage facilities to the Centers for Disease Control and world banks.
In The War Against Terrorism, a book written 20 years ago, Livingstone asserted, ''There is no question that the perpetrators of low-level violence have not even begun to explore the opportunities available to them, as technology and fast-paced urban development provide an ever-expanding array of new and more inviting targets.''
TERRORISTS KNOW they must constantly strive for new heights of horror, because society has become so inured to the routinization of violence in the mass media, Livingstone wrote then. He quoted Dostoevski: '''Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything.''' He is also the animal who forgets. During the brief age of the superpowers in the second half of the 20th century, Thompson pointed out, ''we thought we had a clear idea from year to year of what we should be planning for in defense, and we don't feel that way now. We thought we understood our adversary [the Soviet Union] and our military requirements. But if you think back -- to the North Korean invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, the Tet offensive and the Beirut barracks bombing -- we were kind of fooling ourselves about how predictable the world really was.''
------------------------
Citation: Paul Mann. "Modern Military Threats: Not All They Might Seem?" Aviation Week & Space Technology, 22 April 2002.
Original URL: http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_military.jsp?view=story&id=news/mtror0419.xml
------------------------