The Washington Post had a piece today where, as usual, I agree on the symptoms and disagree on the diagnosis of the root-cause problem. As always, I will argue that treating the symptoms will not solve the problem. As always, I will argue that we need to keep on moving "upstream" (or as the military may phrase it in an unfortunate way, "left of boom.")
As with the US entire "health care system", the focus on incredibly ingenious ways to repair damage after it occurs, or to intercept incoming attacks has the result of pulling attention way from "upstream" efforts to prevent disease in the first place, or to resolve the social conditions that make people want to attack us in the first place.
I would say that the right place to intercept the missile is in the heart of the missile-builder, before it is built.
In fact, every other approach is "leaky", like trying to stop the tide with a really strong column of rock. It will simply "go around". If the anger remains and, through a miracle of technology we manage to block weapon type "A", then the people doing the attack will simply pivot in place and turn to weapon type "B". We will always be playing catch-up. It is never possible to "get ahead of the curve" that way. Ever. For any amount of money. Ever.
I don't want to list alternative technologies here. But there are many. If people are that motivated that they are willing to commit suicide, they can simply drive cars into crowded sidewalks. If we ban cars they could hurl themselves from high windows onto crowded sidewalks. Etc. There is no way to stop that level of anger and commitment with "walls" or "surveillance." Sure, we could prohibit public transit, lock everyone in their homes, and brick up all our windows. Then we lose because we've lost the society we were trying to save.
Maybe, they are not attacking us because of the reasons we all assume are obvious. Maybe they are not evil, and not spawn of the devil, and not driven by insane envy, but they have some legitimate issue that "upper management" (ie, the US) is being block-headed and refusing to listen to or hear.
Maybe we think their picture of us comes from well-trained military carrying out orders within rules-of-engagement, and their actual picture of us comes from out-of-control contract mercenaries who shoot on whim and who knows what else? Rape on whim? Pillage on whim? When you have no constraints and no rules, what holds back such behavior?
Maybe, to Iraqi's, the face of the US is the lack of jobs, lack of electricity, cholera, lack of health care, lack of all the stability that lets the kids go to school and dad go to work.
This is not a treatise on what the problem is. It's a suggestion that, whatever we think the problem is, we're almost certainly wrong because we've closed our ears to listening closely and trying honestly to hear what the fighting is all about, aside from "He hit me back first!" We're on a trail generated by "They're evil, end of story, here help me reload this thing."
Maybe that thought has the seeds of the path to a "solution" to IED's, to ending the war, and to not having to get engaged in yet another, and another after that, and another after that, and another after that, and another after that, and another after that, and another after that -- each one draining another $trillion from the social economy, from our crumbling infrastructure, decaying schools, closing manufacturing plants, falling dollar, etc.
I mean, that strategy defeated the USSR - let's have a spending contest on building nuclear weapons, we said, and both spent like crazy and they lost, and collapsed. So that's an effective strategy, it seems. Problem is, we're now on the receiving end of the same strategy. Terrorists spend $250,000 to attack the World Trade Cente, and as a result the US spends a trillion dollars on countermeasures and wars. A few more cycles of that, and we'll be the ones who are broke and collapsing. The view from Southeast Michigan this morning is that we're not that far from such a collapse already.
It's time to think through this problem more thoroughly, not so glibly, and think about moving at least another 5% of our efforts further upstream. For every $100 billion we spend on carrying out the war, can we please spend $5 billion on war-prevention studies?
That doesn't mean studying ways to "give up." It means studying ways that we can be, like our corporations, more innovative at finding ways to solve everyone's problems, instead of simply being dense and refusing to listen. Human beings have needs. Societies have needs. Cultures have needs. Somehow, somewhere, needs are not being met, and people are angry.
I don't think we need to give up territory. More likely we need to give up arrogance, and high-handedness, and an unexamined assumption that we're right about everything and the "they" of this week are wrong about everything.
Behind all this struggle and fighting, is there some legitimate issue that could be heard and addressed? Of all the things on the table, that is the one we ourselves have the most control over. That's the policy option we haven't tried yet -- listen to what they are saying, not what we keep leaping to stereotypes that they are saying.
I realize some people will find that unpalatable, as constituting "victory for them." Well, at this point, a lot of people are saying that the current "victory for us" sucks all around, to be crude. This endless loss of life is going nowhere. We need an actual exit strategy, not from some country, but from the grip of the mental arrogance that has locked us in a state where we refuse to discuss the problem.
Here's excerpts from the article, on IED's or "Improvised Explosive Devices" (emphasis in bold added)
"The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces"
By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A01
To the extent that the United States is not winning militarily in Iraq, the roadside bomb, which as of Sept. 22 had killed or wounded 21,200 Americans, is both a proximate cause and a metaphor for the miscalculation and improvisation that have characterized the war.
The battle against this weapon has been a fitful struggle to regain the initiative -- a relentless cycle of measure, countermeasure and counter-countermeasure -- not only by discovering or neutralizing hidden bombs, the so-called fight at the roadside, but also by trying to identify and destroy the shadowy network of financiers, strategists, bombmakers and emplacers who have formed at least 160 insurgent cells in Iraq, according to a senior Defense Department official. But... the IED remains "the single most effective weapon against our deployed forces," as the Pentagon acknowledged this year.
As early as 2003, Army officers spoke of shifting the counter-IED effort "left of boom" by disrupting insurgent cells before bombs are built and planted. Yet U.S. efforts have focused overwhelmingly on "right of boom"-- by mitigating the effects of a bomb blast with heavier armor, sturdier vehicles and better trauma care -- or on the boom itself, by spending, for example, more than $3 billion on 14 types of electronic jammers that sometimes also jammed the radios of friendly forces.
For years the counter-IED effort was defensive, reactive and ultimately inadequate, driven initially by a presumption that IEDs were a passing nuisance in a short war, and then by an abiding faith that science would solve the problem.
"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."
[Comment - note that the boundary on planning horizon doesn't extend even further upstream, to ask why this conflict ever arose in the first place. Conflict avoidance, not by weakness, but by aggressive resolution of issues before they come to shooting, isn't even on their list of options. - "Use your fists, not your words" seems to be the lesson they learned in school. RWS]
The costly and frustrating struggle against a weapon barely on the horizon of military planners before the war in Iraq provides a unique lens for examining what some Pentagon officials now call the Long War, and for understanding how the easy victory of 2003 became the morass of 2007.
This introduction and the four-part narrative that follows are drawn from more than 140 interviews with military and congressional officials, contractors, scientists, and defense analysts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington and elsewhere. [ snip]
Yet bombs continued to detonate, and soldiers kept dying. "The numbers," one Army colonel said, "are astonishing."
Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive devices that are simple, cheap and deadly ...- that have prompted dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.
"Insurgents have shown a cycle of adaptation that is short relative to the ability of U.S. forces to develop and field IED countermeasures," a National Academy of Sciences paper concluded earlier this year. An American electrical engineer who has worked in Baghdad for more than two years was blunter: "I never really feel like I'm ahead of the game."
The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.
"We all drank the Kool-Aid," said a retired Army officer who worked on counter-IED issues for three years. "We believed, and Congress was guilty as well, that because the United States was the technology powerhouse, the solution to this problem would come from science. That attitude was 'All we have to do is throw technology at it and the problem will go away.' . . . The day we lose a war it will be to guys with spears and loincloths, because they're not tied to technology. And we're kind of close to being there."
Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, "The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons."
***
"The IED is the enemy's artillery system. "What's different is the trajectory. Three 152mm rounds underneath a tank, which will blow a hole in it, are artillery rounds. But they didn't come through three-dimensional space in a parabolic trajectory. They came through a social trajectory and a social network in the community."
The lack of success in combating IEDs has left some military officials deeply pessimistic about the future. "Hell, we're getting our ass kicked," said a senior officer at U.S. Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're watching warfare that's centuries old being played out in a modern context and we're all confused about it. The toys and trappings have changed, but asymmetric fighting, and ambush, and deceiving and outwitting your opponent, and using the strengths of your opponent against him, are ancient."
But few military strategists doubt that Iraq's future depends on reducing IED attacks of all sorts. "If you can't stop vehicle-borne IEDs from being detonated in public spaces, you can't build a stable society," a Navy analyst said.
And there is another mostly unspoken fear. ... the question occupying many defense specialists is whether the roadside bomb inevitably will appear in the United States in significant numbers. "It's one thing to have bombs going off in Baghdad, but it will be quite another thing when guys with vests full of explosives start blowing themselves up in Washington," said the Navy analyst. "That has all sorts of repercussions, for the economy, for civil liberties."
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