Crusader Corner: Defenseless in the Face of our Enemies

What keeps America from protecting itself against radical Islam?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is adapted from a speech the author delivered this week at the Westminster Institute in McLean, Va. The topic: “Defenseless in the Face of Our Enemies: What Keeps America from Protecting Itself from Radical Islam.”

Two weekends ago in Orlando, Fla., in the wee hours of the morning, a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub teeming with revelers. After killing and wounding scores of people, he took hostages in a restroom. He began calling police and media outlets, began crafting social-media posts, all for the point of announcing what was already clear to the nightclub denizens who’d heard him screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” — Allah is greater! — as he fired shot after shot: Omar Mateen was a stealth Muslim militant.

He was an adherent of radical Islam who committed his atrocity in furtherance of its ongoing jihad against America and the West. He took time in the midst of the carnage to make bayat — a pledge of allegiance — to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the Islamic State terror network and its proclaimed caliphate.

By the time police barged in three hours later and killed Mateen in a firefight, he had murdered 49 people and wounded another 53, many quite seriously.

It should have been possible to see Omar Mateen coming. He was a first-generation American citizen, born in this country to immigrant parents from Afghanistan and raised in a troubled household — one in which the father is a visible and ardent supporter of the Taliban, the fundamentalist jihadist group that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, harbored al-Qaeda as it plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, and to this day wages war against American troops as it fights to retake the country.

Read the Remainder at National Review

Modern War: How Tactics Used in Iraq and A-Stan Can Make The U.S. More Vulnerable in Future Wars

We need to ask ourselves which lessons are worth retaining versus which do we think we should retain but make us more vulnerable.

Editor’s Note: This article is drawn from a talk given by the author to the Special Operations Medical Association Scientific Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 24, 2016.

Question: Do the wars of the last 15 years really prefigure the future? Many people think they do. But, the answer is “Yes” only if all future fighting is done in tribal shatter zones, where we retain air dominance. Meanwhile, additional questions that should haunt everyone in uniform for the remainder of their careers are: What is particular to Afghanistan and Iraq, and what is generalizable? What belongs in the lockbox because it won’t apply elsewhere? Or, which lessons are worth retaining versus which will we think we should retain, but will make us more vulnerable?

Historically, being able to reach, keep, and smash objectives so that your forces can move forward without you having to fear for your rear was critical. At the broadest level, no war was deemed over until one side conceded defeat. This required killing your adversary’s hope and not just his will to continue. When your enemy acceded to the terms you dictated, you had finally succeeded.

The piss poor substitute today, given our inexplicable reluctance to declare war, is to talk about end states instead. Yet, if you stop and think about it, there is no such thing as an end state. Time goes on. More events occur. End states don’t end anything. But, repeat “end state” often enough and the term begins to take on a reality of its own.

In my mind, this is similar to invoking “complexity,” which everyone now accepts as a description of today’s reality. Yet nothing we face today is more complicated than World War II. Instead, the scope of what we think we should consider seems to have expanded, thanks to the speed and volume of information flows. On top of that, we think we have the capacity — or will soon develop the ability and/or the software — to help us think through all likely consequences, even though this will only compound paralysis by analysis.

Meanwhile, who are we currently up against? Jihadis, to whom nothing is particularly complex or nuanced, except how long it might take to undermine us. They aren’t encumbered with our same sensibilities: If you’reof us, good. If not, you’re expendable.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we become more like them. Just the opposite. I want us to tilt war back to a format that advantages us, which means we need a 21st century rethink of Just War theory, and of who deserves noncombatant status among other things. We also need to give serious consideration to the following lessons that have emerged out of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1. More technological innovation is not always a better means of warfare.

But along with this, we need to rethink our conviction that if we just keep on technologically innovating we will retain a sufficient edge. Take improvised explosive devices versus drones. Which have had a more profound psychic effect on people? With precision-strike, the individuals we target change their tactics, techniques, and procedures, and a lot of them get killed. But the pressure is Darwinist and we are helping individuals get smarter faster; drones do not dissuade communities from supporting terrorists. With IEDs, on the other hand, the randomness has been pernicious, forcing us into rolling fortresses and sowing seeds of not-yet-detonated post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, in the who-is-out-innovating-whom sphere, we not only overlook innovations in what people are willing to do with and to other human beings at our growing peril, but we ignore the ways in which future adversaries will be able to take greater advantage of our self-inflicted Achilles’ heels. We have quite a few.

Read the Remainder at Task and Purpose

Going to War Without Skin In The Game

It is interesting to note how many pro-intervention, pro- “boots on the ground” neoconservatives have never served in the military.

I’m grateful that America treats its veterans better now than it did in decades past. My father was spit on by hippies when he came home from Vietnam. Yet, “thank you for your service” comments don’t undo the horrors of war. Gratitude is no substitute for not sending brave young Americans into harm’s way unless it’s absolutely necessary.

President Reagan used open military force about three times in his presidency. President Clinton deployed the military left and right, in one peacekeeping or nation-building exercise after another. President Bush II campaigned on a less interventionist foreign policy. He said America needn’t be the world’s policeman, and this view was held by most of the conservative movement in the 1990s.

9/11 changed the world, though. Military action was absolutely necessary after those attacks; you can’t let something like that go without response. Yet, if you’d told me on 9/11 that ten years later I’d be in Afghanistan, deployed in what was ostensibly the same war, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet there I was, on 9/11/11, in Afghanistan, as we attempted to turn the country into a pro-western democracy.

“It’s easy to be a hawk when someone else does the fighting.” 

Read the Remainder at Breach Bang Clear

 

Terror Watch: ISIS Thugs Urge Attacks on American Soil During Ramadan

FYI: Ramadan this year is June 5th thru July 5th, so keep your head on a swivel and Stay Frosty. -SF

BEIRUT, Lebanon – The Islamic State group appeared to try to keep morale high among its supporters in a new audio message released on Saturday, which also called for attacks on the US during the holy month of Ramadan.

The audio recording reportedly featuring IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani was posted online late Saturday evening after much fanfare by IS supporters on Twitter.

“Will we be defeated if we lose Mosul, or Sirte, or Raqqa, or all the cities, and go back to how we were before?” Adnani said.

The three cities are IS’s strongholds in Iraq, Libya, and Syria respectively.

“No. Defeat is only losing the desire and the will to fight,” Adnani continued, in his first voiced speech since October.

The spokesman appeared to mock the United States, which is leading a coalition of countries in an air war against IS in Iraq and Syria, for failing to definitively defeat IS.

He said even “20,000 air strikes” by the coalition had not destroyed IS.

Adnani also called for attacks on the US and Europe during the holy month of Ramadan, which starts in early June this year, an appeal he made at the same time last year when urging supporters to seek “martyrdom.”

On Friday, flyers apparently dropped by the coalition on Raqqa city in northern Syria urged residents to leave the city, perhaps ahead of an offensive by anti-IS forces to recapture it.

“It would appear IS is more clearly acknowledging its limitations in holding territory” while stressing the “idea of living on despite losses,” wrote jihadism expert Aymenn al-Tamimi in reaction to Adnani’s recording.

IS has seized swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq to create a self-styled “caliphate.” Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has received pledges of alliance from jihadist groups around the world.

Read the Original Article at Times of Israel