Let’s Just Blame the Tools!
When a gap analysis is polluted by alternatives assessment, the planning environment is terraformed allowing the cliche “when you are a hammer everything looks like a nail” to triumph. For instance, US Strategies to battle violence in the Middle East over the past 20 years are easily tied to “tools” in our military arsenal. When specific threats generate enough national or political interest, how long is it before the strategic discourse begins recommending manned airstrikes, drone usage, or special operations? Someone is sure to raise the stakes a little and even recommend sending ground troops in.
But really, this just a byproduct of an unprepared government and uneducated citizenship. Looking back to the mid 1990s we see a nation de-escalating from the cold war — a time when our military had basically been hitting the gym hard for 30+ years. Our military might was unprecedented; our National Security Policy was MAD (really, it was quite disturbing), a no holds bar response to thermonuclear aggression and backed by an arsenal comparable to the finger of God. As soon as our MAD counterpart collapsed, the US was introduced to new type of adversary — one more analogous to a dog with fleas versus the dog eat dog world we had grown accustomed to.
The turn of the century’s “new” enemy had a better strategy against our values of freedom, democracy, liberty for all – which easily out “sound-bited” the evil communism. Terrorism’s initial strike did serve to unite a country; even the world supported our views and actions, but retaliation responses and sentiments seldom last. Combined with a military might designed for a symmetrical war, it did not take long for the US response to look like overkill — plagued with clumsy, slow, and inefficient CONOPS and mission creep.
I do believe the response was truly self preservation driven. However, it has been over 13 years since that fateful day; the US has had enough time to study the response, create new “tools,” and get smarter about when to use the hammer. Are we witnessing a more educated response to terrorism? ISIS alone is testing our resolve, how are we matching up?
There is still a lingering effect of our initial response at the turn of the century. When one goes “in for a penny,” there is a certain amount of obligatory “bad money” that needs to be used to chase it. By interjecting ourselves in conflict, we know there will always be a need for continued support, self-interest aspects to manage, and promises to make good on. The US must also be deliberate about actions to support “values based” complications. As long as the US truly believes and supports global human rights, we cannot sit on the sideline and watch crimes against humanity unfold — such as the images we see being posted on social media from ISIS.
At some point, it’s time to just put the hammer away for a while and shift to a new type of building material! How do we go about doing that? We first must completely understand the gap, and then assess all options at closing it, regardless of current capabilities. It sounds intuitive but is often a difficult exercise primarily because of personal or social biases. How different would the business world look if Xerox had realized the utility of the mouse or if Kodak had adopted the digital camera.
Is there some new way of addressing the Terrorism issue of the 21st century or am I just pontificating about a wonderful yet unrealistic world? Well, we have resorted to airstrikes again for ISIS, are they working? It appears the answer to that is more contextually based, but the recommendations set forth here go beyond that. The ISIS example is most likely another scenario where we have invested too much to ignore a military response, but could we have made deliberate investments earlier to the development cycle to keep ISIS from even becoming a threat? Are we doing it to potential future terrorist organizations now?
As a world power and leader, our strategy should always be to understand the gap first, identify plausible solutions, and set a clear path forward based on a societal return on investment. This is not limited to the terrorism mission space, the the war on [insert your issue here] should follow a similar approach. How well do you think we are doing on the “War on Drugs”? What if I told you, as a country, we have already spent over 1 Trillion dollars on drug enforcement over the past 40 years? Are we sure we understand the issue, addressed every option, and know the finish line? It is very hard to stop throwing good money after bad when you have already invested in the hammer…
