While I identify with retired CIA analysts Goldcamps’ patriotic passion and historical interests we differ in perspective. Their 22 June editorial in the Sierra Vista (AZ) Herald contains recycled recitations of out-moded WW II concepts and commonly quoted plattitudes of today’s threats. He errs combining the two in several important ways. Mr. Goldcamp’s exhortation to conduct kinetic operations against current threats like Marshall, Eisenhower and Patton did WW II is ill-advised at best. President Reagan knew how to fight a “cold” war without angering allies, bankrupting our nation or wasting our most precious resource.
The Cold War was no World War III. Not by a long shot (pardon the pun). Such an egregious error in comparison may explain the CIA’s failure to listen to Cuban exiles regarding the Bay of Pigs and high-ranking Russians regarding the imminent fall of the Soviet Union. It also exhibits a gross ignorance of the Levels of Conflict, what causes them, and how to correctly fight each. Rather than “key hole” cubicle analysis, looking at the world through a deeper and wider lens reveals most of the world’s wars throughout history were low-intensity conflicts. The Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual would have – should have- been the bible for our adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact it was published three months before Pearl Harbor doomed it to joint obscurity. Army intelligence at Ft. Huachuca has never used Mattis’ and Petraeus’ plagiarized FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency Manual.
America’s military interventions after Korea can be best characterized as a drunken Cyclops vomiting money. The V.C. called U.S. troops “thunder legs” for their aimless “search and destroy” operations. Those leaders who correctly identified the population bull’s eye of counterinsurgency combat operations were ignored and labeled “loose cannons.” Sir Robert K. Thompson, author of Defeating Communist Insurgency, left Vietnam in disgust because “Westy” -choosing to fight his counterinsurgency like the last world war – wouldn’t listen to him. The war dragged on and casualties mounted for years as a result. The RAND team commissioned to discover “what made the V.C. tick” told Kissinger they were nationalists and would never quit fighting. He replied “What difference does it make?” The Yale cheerleader didn’t bother asking his father (who had the most accurate world view of any recent president) before invading what his father knew was “a bitterly divided country.” The State Department refused to respond to several viable offers from high ranking Iraqi’s with very close access to Sadam Hussein to remove him from office. Instead, most of them were murdered and we got Vietnam Part II. Iraq’s current status was a forgone conclusion the minute the U.S. invaded Iraq. We tried fighting Third World insurgents like WW II – despite knowing better. It didn’t work. It will never work.
If the Goldcamps’ bibliography contained a broader world lens they would know Sun Tsu’s strategies of “ensuring victory before engaging the enemy”, “don’t use a hammer to kill a fly on your own forehead”, and several renowned 20th Century counter-guerrilla experts’ “to ensure success one must first have the moral high ground with the indigenous population.” With the exception of Grenada under Reagan, America hasn’t had the strategic moral high ground since Korea.
Contrary to Goldcamps’ cheerleading, fighting America’s current threats is about shedding institutional parochialism, national ethnocentrism and an addiction to throwing money and bulk weight at foreign policy. As the adage says “To a carpenter every problem can be fixed with a hammer” – except when the wood is rotten with termites. Proportionately and cumulatively speaking, 9/11 could be compared to the Black September attack during the ’72 Olympics in Munich, Germany and the continuous attacks since then experienced by Israel. Because its’ physical survival depends on non-politically sanitized/gerrymandered intelligence, the Israeli government fights with a scalpel – not a sledgehammer. It took almost eight years for the Mossad to kill every Black September terrorist but one. And they did it without invading one country. Subsequent invasions into Lebanon and Palestinean neighborhoods were necessitated by acquiescing to U.N. restrictions and exhaustive but futile diplomacy with an intransigent PLO and Hamas.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Clinton and Bush sublimated the role of the Chief of Counterterrorism to that of third-tier spokesman for the real-time intelligence of the CIA’s bin Laden cell. Why they did so is never explained. The godson of the Saudi King could have been killed within one or two years before 9/11 instead of waiting for a politically opportune time to do so. FDR famously – and ominously- said “There are no such things as coincidences in politics.”
It’s past time American politicians, generals – and analysts- gave up their golden sledgehammer and learned to use a scalpel.
