Plan Of Attack
The Pentagon has a secret new strategy for taking on terrorists--and taking them down
For a Pentagon that has been seen as primarily championing pre-emptive attacks against terrorist threats, the new strategy's enthusiastic embrace of foreign partners is a real sea change. Feith describes the reasons for it. "How do you fight an enemy that is present in numerous countries with whom you're not at war?" he asked. "The answer, in many cases, is we're going to have to rely on the governments of the countries where the terrorists are present. We can't do it ourselves, because you're talking about actions on the sovereign territory of other countries. . . . We need to have countries willing to cooperate with us and capable of doing the things they need to do to serve our common interests."
For whatever opposition they encounter, Pentagon brass know they must now rely more than ever on foreign partners; the insurgency in Iraq and the continuing violence in Afghanistan have stretched U.S. forces, simply precluding go-it-alone missions. Attempting to make a virtue out of a necessity, Washington has developed some promising relationships with countries that were previously wary or reluctant allies. The special operations commander for the Middle East and South Asia recounted several cases to U.S. News in which his forces, which traditionally work beneath the radar, have scored successes in Pakistan, Yemen, Africa, and Saudi Arabia. In a rare interview, the Jordanian special operations commander said that his men are training Iraqi counterterrorism forces at three bases in Jordan, staffing a hospital in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, and sealing the Iraqi-Jordanian border against insurgents. "We have the most secure border with Iraq of any of its neighbors," Brig. Gen. Jamal al Shawabkeh said.
The head of U.S. Army special operations forces, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, says such partnerships need to be developed around the world. "If you don't take a holistic approach to this . . . you press on one area, and you get a bulge someplace else." He described how he saw his troops fitting into the new strategy: "What my forces have got to be able to do is work around the world, continue to train and work with host-nation forces and U.S. forces and other U.S. agencies to try to establish a global intel database so that that little piece of information that you may get out of some little area, say, in Rwanda, provides the key to a cell someplace else around the world."
The new Pentagon strategy gives several new responsibilities to the Special Operations Command, which oversees all American special operations forces. "One of the earlier criticisms of the war on terror," says General Caslen, was "that we had no one to look at this from a global perspective." Now Special Operations Command has that role. Annex C of the new Pentagon plan directs the Special Operations Command to draft a global campaign plan that will detail the new counter-terrorism operations to be launched and to "synchronize" the counterterrorism plans of the five geographic military commands. In an interview with U.S. News , Gen. Doug Brown, the head of the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, said his command was selected for the new mission "because, quite frankly, we are a global command. We've always been oriented around the world." In June, Brown convened a meeting of special operations forces from 59 foreign countries in Tampa, where SOCOM is based.
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