America enters a new kind of war

As smoke poured from the charred west face of the Pentagon, and a lone American flag waved defiantly on the roof of the wounded fortress on the banks of the Potomac River, military leaders past and present said America's armed forces were in a new war that would require the biggest overhaul of forces, tactics, and philosophy since World War II. More money; more freedom of action for commanders; more anti-terrorist training; more human intelligence from inside the cells of terrorist groups; more high-tech weapons for anti-terrorist hit teams--all of these moved to the top of the must-have list for military leaders as they pondered the aftermath of the incineration of part of their headquarters. Shortly after Tuesday's terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Gen. Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and principal military adviser to the President, declared that American forces were "ready" to do whatever President Bush ordered them to do to avenge the most devastating attack on the nation since Pearl Harbor. But there was wide disagreement on this point in the professional military community, and retired generals with expertise in combating terrorism were among the critics. One such dissenter was Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, a former assistant vice chief of staff of the Army and a specialist in terrorist warfare. He told National Journal that the events of September 11 should drive an entire redesign of reserve forces so that military police, medics, and other specialists can better handle the consequences of terrorist attacks. Fundamental changes are also needed in the training of both active and reserve forces, Garner said, plus an upgrade in our ability to gather human intelligence from spies who can gain access to the inner circles of terrorist groups. Garner and other military leaders interviewed said the United States is now engaged in "asymmetric warfare," the name for conflicts in which the enemy will find chinks in America's armor and pierce them, rather than try to match the world's only superpower tank for tank, or plane for plane. "Unless we go back to World War II where we didn't care who we killed," Garner said, soldiers and Marines will have to be trained more intensively and broadly in the stealthy and dangerous skills of finding and killing terrorists who would do America harm. A combat veteran, Garner said that even with such training, there is a high probability that American men and women will be killed as they carry out anti-terrorist missions on the ground. Abhorrence within today's civilian leadership and general populace to taking casualties has to be addressed and changed, Garner said. A wide spectrum of other military officers, both active and retired, agreed. "The military has never been unwilling to take casualties where the casualties make sense," said retired Navy Adm. Leighton W. Smith, the former commander of NATO forces in Bosnia and other hot spots in the region where terrorism was a constant threat. He said it has been civilian leaders who have imposed the restraints and ordered burdensome precautions called "force protection" to minimize the chance of soldiers being injured or killed in the Balkans. "We're now in a war," where commanders should be given free rein to accomplish the mission at hand, even if it results in casualties, Smith said. He added that the state of war should also mean forgetting about the legal niceties when it comes to going after terrorists. "I think we ought to tread all over them. We ought to destroy them." He believes that any presidential order against assassinating terrorists should be lifted. "When and where we find them, take them out," Smith recommended. Smith and other military leaders worried about the lack of a hard-hitting, high-tech, mobile response team within today's military. They said they favor creating a 5,000-person force, drawn from all the armed services, "which would raise holy hell" when rushed into a terrorist encampment, as opposed to inflicting pinpricks with the kind of cruise missile attacks former President Clinton ordered against Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in 1998. Smith called such Tomahawk cruise missile attacks "an abomination" that obviously failed to deter future terrorist attacks on the United States. "We are moving from a world where one nation-state fights against another nation-state, into a world of chaos," said Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the retired Marine Corps commandant. He agreed that U.S. forces have to be restructured to meet the dramatically different kind of threats exemplified by the suicide flights of hijacked airliners into symbols of American power. Terrorist attacks, such as those of Tuesday, are "more than terror," said the former Marine chief, who long has warned that the military must train to fight in the cities where terrorists often use women and children as shields. Terrorist attacks on the United States are designed to go beyond a quick shock of horror, he said, "to strike fear into the heart of the people." Krulak added that every day the federal government suspends commerce such as airline travel and stock market trading "is a success for chaos. We've got to get right back in the saddle" after a terrorist attack. "I don't understand the wait." Retired Army Col. John B. Keeley, a combat veteran formerly on the policy staff of the CIA, said one of the first things the U.S. government should do in the wake of the aircraft attacks is to take a leaf out of Israel's book and put armed and beefy sky marshals on the nation's commercial airliners. If they had been aboard the hijacked planes, Keeley contended, they could have overcome the knife-wielding terrorists. Keeley lambasted narrow thinking by the intelligence community. "Why didn't anyone ever think about the possibility of using hijacked airplanes?" he asked. He said U.S. thinking and actions have been formulated by "Marquis of Queensberry rules while the terrorists have been playing by gutter rules." In contrast to other military officers interviewed, Keeley said his biggest fear was not that the American military would move too slowly to retaliate for Tuesday's attacks but that it would be ordered to move too fast. "We have to be prudent and show restraint," he contended, and plan for a long and difficult war where assassinations by our side should be allowed. Preparing to combat terrorism and to attack countries that fail to hand over terrorists or otherwise harbor them is going to take extra billions of dollars for intelligence gathering, high-tech weapons, specialized training, and mobility. "It's not going to be cheap," said one four-star officer worried about the President's loading more missions onto the armed forces without increasing funding significantly. But money may be the least of the Pentagon's problems, said a veteran congressional budget specialist who will be analyzing Bush's emergency request for additional money to repair the damage inflicted by the terrorists and to finance retaliatory strikes. "They'll be crowding at the door to double whatever amount the President asks for," said the budget analyst, referring to members of Congress. "Concern about breaking into the Social Security lockbox is a thing of the past." Finally, the fate of a national missile defense, President Bush's top military priority before September 11, is now a little uncertain. The budget analyst said the terrorist attacks will inspire "a lot of foolish talk" by lawmakers for and against national missile defense. "The pro-missile nuts will argue that the attacks prove we need to defend America against everything. The anti-missile nuts [who said the real threat was terrorism] will say, `We told you so.' "