Analysis
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell formulated the nation's immediate response to the Sept. 11 suicide attacks in Washington, D.C., and New York City. The response consisted of two parts: first, that the United States would respond militarily, and second, that the United States would respond in the context of a coalition.
In other words, Powell was trying to bring the situation back to familiar territory, using the Gulf War and the Cold War as the paradigm for any military action.
Given American grand strategy, the resort to coalition warfare is natural and logical. A fundamental question exists, however, concerning the type of warfare it will be.
In STRATFOR's view, the essential characteristic of a war against Islamic militants suspected of involvement in the attacks cannot be conventional.
Air and missile attacks have proven ineffective in the past. Moreover, they project an air of weakness because the United States employs means that do not risk many lives or resources. A long-term air campaign is a possibility -- but against a country such as Afghanistan, the targets available do not support such a campaign, nor is it clear where the air bases for waging such a war would be based. Finally, a conventional invasion of Afghanistan is out of the question. There are no bases in place and nowhere to build up the force, and the logistical requirements would be nightmarish.
A conventional ground attack against any or all of the potential host countries could not be undertaken in any reasonable amount of time nor at any reasonable cost. Indeed, the host country might be overwhelmed while the attackers escaped and relocated.
To destroy terrorist cells requires the United States to rely heavily on covert operations in conjunction with an air campaign. The paradigm for this comes from Israel, which combines air attacks on enemy facilities with a global covert campaign designed to disrupt and destroy enemy capabilities. It is our expectation that the United States will ultimately have to choose this as at least a major option.
Covert operations and coalition warfare entail built-in tension. Covert operations are inherently political: A coalition has divergent political interests that can be extremely difficult to reconcile. Consider intelligence-sharing, for example. Indian intelligence would want the United States to focus on India while Russian intelligence would want a focus on the Chechen connection, and Israeli intelligence would focus on the Palestinians. Each coalition member would likely use its intelligence input on a daily basis to shape the war to suit its own interests.
The other side of the equation is the historic desire of the United States to carefully control the distribution of intelligence through both technical and human means. Control of these resources has enhanced U.S. power in the past. The United States is unlikely to throw open its intelligence products to a coalition as broad as the one that Powell envisions.
If the Sept. 11 strikes give rise to a covert war built around the Israeli paradigm from the 1970s, it will become, first and foremost, an intelligence war. Intelligence will be the key weapon and the most valuable resource. Whoever controls the net assessment controls the prosecution of the war. Because the United States has weaknesses when it comes to human intelligence, it will depend on -- and be vulnerable to --other sources that are controlled by other governments with different interests. It will, in turn, use its technical intelligence to shape the behavior of its coalition partners.
Coalition warfare and covert operations do not coexist easily. The political cover that a coalition provides is obviously desirable, but it is not clear that it can be operationalized easily. Therefore, one danger is that the United States could wage an ineffective covert war. The other danger is that the war will be shaped to fit within the capabilities of a coalition. Those capabilities may suit conventional warfare, but we very much doubt they will suit the kind of war that will have to be waged.
(George Friedman is the founder
and chariman of STRATFOR.)