Author: George Friedman
Publication: www.stratfor.com
Date: September 13, 2001
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.)
