Battle Ready sic-4

by Tom Clancy

  No one can predict the future, but we can make judgments on the growing number of threats that now face us. Some of these will not be what we have grown used to preparing for.

  Our security interests will require that we have a military capable and prepared to respond to:

  • A global power with significant military capabilities.

  • Regional hegemons with asymmetric capabilities, such as weapons of mass destruction and missiles, designed to deny us access to vital areas and regional allies.

  • Transnational threats that include terrorist groups, international criminal and drug organizations, warlords, environmental security issues, issues of health and disease, and illegal migrations.

  • Problems of failed or incapable states that require peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, or national reconstruction.

  • Overseas crises that threaten U.S. citizens and property.

  • Domestic emergencies that exceed the capacity of other federal and local government agencies to handle.

  • Threats to our key repositories of information and to our systems of moving information.

  This demanding list of requirements does not include many of the clean, clear war-fighting missions our military would prefer. We have sworn to defend against “all enemies foreign and domestic.” But today the “enemies” that threaten our well-being may include some strange, nontraditional ones.

  At this moment in Iraq, we are dealing with the Jihadis, who are coming in from outside to raise hell; crime on the streets is rampant; ex-Ba’athists and Fedayeen are still running around making trouble; American soldiers are getting blown up; suicide bombings have driven out the UN and many NGOs; and there is a potential now for the country to fragment — Shia on Shia, Shia on Sunni, Kurds on Turkomans; you name it. It is a powder keg. If there is a center that can hold this mess together, I don’t know what it is. Civil war could break out at any time. Resources are needed; a strategy is needed; and a plan is needed.

  This is not the kind of conflict for which we have traditionally planned. War fighting is only one element of it. Some people on the battlefield don’t play according to our rules. They do not come in military formations and with standard-issue equipment. They come in many different forms; and all of their agendas are different.

  The destabilizing environment in which we may commit forces to confront many of these threats may be further degraded by the effects of urbanization, economic depression, overpopulation, and the depletion of basic resources. The world has become reliant on natural resources and raw materials that come from increasingly unstable regions, with the compounding problems of a poor infrastructure and environment. Access to energy resources, water sources, timber, rare gems and metals, etc., is becoming a growing rationale for intervention and conflict in many parts of the world.

  We will also require that our forces continue to meet the peacetime demands of engagement and shaping. The importance of maintaining stable regions by building viable, interoperable coalitions with the forces of regional allies will remain necessary to ensure our security in key areas of the world. Military engagement produces dividends in deterrence, confidence building, and burden sharing, and also demonstrates our commitment and resolve. Yet these tasks will continue to tax our already thinly stretched forces.

  Some proposals have been put forward to achieve — and afford — a military transformation by drastically cutting our force structure, removing forward-based and — deployed forces from overseas, and stopping modernization. Advocates of such a “strategic pause” think we can withdraw from the world and opt out of interventions that threaten our interests. They are wrong. They are blind to the world as it is. We cannot gamble on a self-ordering world. The risk to us could be great — even fatal — if we are not capable of dealing with an unforeseen threat that emerges from this disordered global environment.

  The need right now is critical to transform our military in a deliberate and thoughtful, yet significant, way. Americans must acknowledge this need and support investment in this transformation for it to succeed. This will require a stronger and closer relationship between Americans and their military. This relationship has drifted apart, and has even been strained at times, since the end of the Vietnam War and the institution of the all-volunteer force.

  What should be the shape of that transformation?

  The military traditionally goes out there and kills people and breaks things. From that, we determine how we are going to straighten out the mess or resolve the conflict. Once upon a time, we looked at the other elements of national power — political, economic, information, whatever — to figure out how we could bring them to bear. That’s what George Marshall did at the end of World War Two. It has not happened in recent times.

  The military does a damned good job of killing people and breaking things. We can design a better rifle squad than anybody in the world. We can build a better fighter, a better ship, a better tank, a smarter bomb. We are so far ahead of any potential enemy right now in those kinds of technological areas, in the areas of expertise, of quality of leadership, and of all the other elements that make military units great on the battlefield, that you wonder why we keep busting brain cells working to make it better, or to transform it into something else.

  Transformation has to include finding better and more remarkable ways to tap into technology, our own brainpower, our training and education, and creative ways of redesigning our organization to make our military even more efficient and more powerful on the battlefield.

  But transformation has to go beyond that.

  What is the role of the military beyond killing people and breaking things?

  Right now, the military in Iraq has been stuck with that baby. In Somalia, we were stuck with that baby. In Vietnam, we were stuck with that baby. It is not a new role, and it is going to continue. We have to ask ourselves how the military needs to change in order to actually deal with these political, economic, social, security, and information management challenges that we’ve already been facing for a long time. If those wearing suits can’t come in and solve the problem — can’t bring the resources, the expertise, the organization to bear — and the military is going to continue to get stuck with it, you have two choices: Either the civilian officials must develop the capabilities demanded of them and learn how to partner with other agencies to get the job done, or the military finally needs to change into something else beyond the breaking and the killing.

  What could this mean?

  It could mean that we return to a military that’s a calling and not just a job. For more than a quarter-century, we have been operating with an All-Volunteer Force — and the American people tend to forget that, until the volunteers stop showing up and reenlisting. The troops will start getting out because they’re deployed too long and too often. We need sufficient forces to meet our commitments, have the time for our forces to be properly trained, and provide for the quality of life that supports a first-rate military.

  We were building an All-Volunteer Force with professionals, not mercenaries. The troops certainly don’t mind a better paycheck, but first and foremost they truly want to be the best military in the world. We owe them that and we owe them the care they deserve after serving our nation.

  It could mean military civil affairs will change from being just a tactical organization doing basic humanitarian care and interaction with the civilian population to actually being capable of reconstructing nations. That will require people in uniform, and maybe civilian suits as well, who are educated in the disciplines of economics and political structures and who will actually go in and work these issues. Either we get the civilian officials on the scene who can do it — get them there when they need to be there, give them the resources and the training, and create the interoperability that is necessary — or validate the military mission to do it.

  It could mean we would at last go into each of these messy new situations with a strategic plan, a real u
nderstanding of regional and global security, and a knowledge of what it takes to wield the power to shape security and move it forward. Where are today’s Marshalls, Eisenhowers, and Trumans, who had the vision to see the world in a different way, and who understood America’s role and what had to be done in order to play that role?

  Our military men and women should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting — our generals will take care of that — but for the aftermath and for winning the war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept less; if we accept any level of sacrifice without an adequate level of planning?

  It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and the sacrifices being made. It also kills me to hear someone say that each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, the numbers are statistically insignificant. Bullshit. We should challenge any military or political leader who utters such words. The greatest treasure the United States has is our enlisted men and women. When we put them in harm’s way, it had better count for something. Their loss is a national tragedy.

  As I reflect on my own forty years of military service, and my later years of diplomacy and peacemaking, I have to ask: “What is our legacy?” My son is now a Marine captain. What have we left for him to look forward to?

  We all know that burgeoning technology will widen his horizons beyond anything we can imagine. It will also present new questions of ethics and morality that we have barely begun to fathom. Yet he must also live with the organization I have had to live with for forty years. Napoleon could reappear today and recognize the Central Command staff organization: J-1, administration stovepipe; J-2, intelligence stovepipe — you get the idea. This antiquated organization is oblivious to what everyone else in the world is doing: flattening organization structure, with decentralized operations and more direct communications. This must be fixed.

  My son will have to deal with the inevitable military-civilian rift and drift — which will become more severe in the future. He will also have to deal with the social issues we have not been able to fix. And they will get tougher, within a national debate over why we still need a strong military. My son’s generation must ultimately face the question of how much the military should be a reflection of U.S. society. The people of America will get the military they want, in due course, but it is up to the military to advise them about the risks and consequences of their decisions.

  My son will face nontraditional missions in messy places that will make Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq look like a picnic. He will see a changed battlefield, with an accelerated tempo and greatly expanded knowledge base. He will witness a great drop in the sense of calling. People entering the military will not be imprinted with his code. On his watch, my son is likely to see a weapons of mass destruction event. Another and worse 9/11 will occur in some city, somewhere in the world where Americans are gathered. When that nasty bug or gas or nuke is released, it will forever change him and his institutions. At that point, all the lip service paid to dealing with such an eventuality will be revealed for what it is — lip service. And he will have to deal with it for real. In its wake, I hope he gets to deal with yet another — and better — Goldwater-Nichols arrangement.

  What will we expect of him as a battlefield commander? Brains, guts, and determination — nothing new here. But we would ask for more than battlefield skill from our future commanders. We want character, sense of moral responsibility, and an ethical standard that rises above those of all other professions. We want him to be a model who accepts the profession of arms as a calling. We want him to take care of our sons and daughters and treat their lives as precious — putting them in harm’s way only if it truly counts. We’ll expect him to stand up to civilian leadership before thinking of his own career.

  And I hope that we would think enough of him and his compatriots to show some respect for them along the way.

  I have been all over this globe and exposed to most of the cultures on it. I am fascinated by them. I love the diversity. I want to understand them and embrace them. I could never understand prejudice or rejection or the sense of superiority that drive the hatemongers of the world. I lived through a tumultuous period of our history when our own minorities broke from second-class citizenship into full participation in this wonderful dream we call America. I have been proud of their accomplishments and contributions. They have proven the bigots wrong and made our nation greater. I hope the dream we have struggled to realize can be extended to the rest of the planet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Working on this book has been a long, hard process. Thanks to the friendship, encouragement, patience, prodding, creativity, and skillful contributions of Tom Clancy, Tony Koltz, Neil Nyren, Marty Greenberg, and Fred Williams, this project was made possible.

  — Tony Zinni

  Примечания

  1

  In 2003, during and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it became clear that at that time the Iraqis actually possessed few, if any, WMD. The point of all their many games during the years of inspection now seems to have been to hide their ability to restart their WMD programs.

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  2

  His predecessors included Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Coalition commander during the First Gulf War; Marine General Joe Hoar, one of Zinni’s oldest friends; and Army General Binnie Peay. He was succeeded in 2000 by Army General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander for the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq… distinguished company.

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  3

  Large zones of northern and southern Iraq were interdicted by the UN after the First Gulf War. The Iraqi military (with some exceptions) were not allowed to fly military aircraft or drive military vehicles in these zones.

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  4

  A single droplet on the skin is lethal. And enough could be loaded into a missile warhead to kill most of the population of Tel Aviv.

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  5

  Even though the UN resolution stated that UNSCOM would have unrestricted access to any facility they needed, the Iraqis had insisted on granting air access to only a single Iraqi site, the very inconvenient base at Habbaniyah. There had been protests, but it was a battle nobody wanted to fight.

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  6

  The system naming military operations always uses two terms, with the first term indicating the theater. Thus, “Desert—” indicates a CENTCOM operation.

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  7

  The advisers were assisted by a small team of Vietnamese Marines, a “cowboy,” a radio operator, and at times a driver: The cowboy looked out for the adviser’s security and basic needs. He cooked for him and took care of laundry and sleeping arrangements. The radio operator carried the radio, which was the adviser’s link to his own headquarters. Without it, he couldn’t do the job. It was his lifeline.

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  8

  In every other military except ours, the green beret is a symbol of Marine commandoes. The British Royal Marines wear green berets, for instance. Only in our system does the Special Forces wear that particular headgear (though berets in other shades have spread to other branches of service). The Marine Corps doesn’t have any of that.

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  9

  The NVA and VC also had versions of regional and district divisions that were to some extent aligned with those of the U.S. and South Vietnam.

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  10

  Whenever the Marines saw a croc, they’d open up fire at them. At first, Zinni thought they were killing them because they feared them. Later, he learned the skins were worth sixty dollars in Saigon. Bagging a croc was almost as good as bagging a VC.

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  11

  Since the VC often popped smoke when they heard or saw helos, it was important to confirm color to ensure you didn’t land in the wrong place.

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ack)

  12

  The Vietcong often dug trench lines behind the hedgerows that frequently bordered trails, leaving them there as ready-made ambush spots.

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  13

  U.S. assets went to U.S. units as the first priority.

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