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The Pentagon has a secret new strategy for taking on terrorists
From the 1 AUG 05 issueOn March 3, with little fanfare, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, signed a comprehensive new plan for the war on terrorism. Senior defense officials briefed U.S. News on the contents of the still-secret document, which is to be released soon in an unclassified form. ... Pentagon officials say they have a strategy that examines the nature of the antiterror war in depth, lays out a detailed road map for prosecuting it, and establishes a score card to determine where and whether progress is being made. Was the United States really winning the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld asked his commanders, and how could we know if more terrorists were being killed or captured than were being recruited into the ranks? The initial result was a 70-page draft report, which subsequently went through over 40 revisions as it was shared with Rumsfeld's inner circle, then a larger group, called the senior-level review group ("Slurg," in Pentagon-speak), and then regional commanders and other agencies. For those who wondered why we were doing "nothing" - this is evidence of the answer I gave a long time ago: we ARE doing something, but the public hasn't been told because its classified Traditionally, the geographic commands have been reluctant to yield to SOCOM on counterterrorism issues, but that's no longer an option... The Pentagon's Special Operations Command is designated in the new plan as the global "synchronizer" in the war on terrorism for all the military commands and is responsible for designing a new global counterterrorism campaign plan and conducting preparatory reconnaissance missions against terrorist organizations around the world. Under a draft national security presidential decision directive, expected to be approved next month, the White House would have greater flexibility to resolve turf battles in the government's overall counterterrorism effort. I cannot emphasize enough just how important these 2 steps above are The new strategy, for the first time, formally directs military commanders to go after a list of eight pressure points at which terrorist groups could be vulnerable: ideological support, weapons, funds, communications and movement, safe havens, foot soldiers, access to targets, and leadership. Each U.S. geographic command is to follow a systematic approach, first collecting intelligence on any of the two dozen target groups that are operating in its area of responsibility and then developing a plan to attack all eight nodes for each of those groups. Here is the part that will have the left and the Islamist fellow-travelers howling - and its a VERY important change The terrorist threat against the United States is now defined as "Islamist extremism" --not just al Qaeda. The Pentagon document identifies the "primary enemy" as "extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends" and that form part of a "global web of enemy networks." Read more - there is a TON of info at the link in the article - and there's also a pre-emptive spin attempt to show this as being kind-of PC (you'll see what I mean) Posted by: OldSpook 2005-07-28 |
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