Lehman makes a bid for SECDEF?
Interesting article in the Washington Post via US Naval Institute Proceedings from John Lehman, a former SECNAV under Reagan and member of the 9/11 Commission. A little over the top on the naval analysis regarding China and the PLA Navy. China's making a bid for a green-water navy based along an access denial posture, they are NOT acquiring a blue-water fleet for power projection. For the most part though, a nice piece.
Washington Post
We're Not Winning This War: Despite Some Notable Achievements, New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad
John Lehman
Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.
We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.
We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.
One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.
Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.
The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.
The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.
Full Article.
Lehmen's makin' a bid for SECDEF. Rummy's days are numbered.
Washington Post
We're Not Winning This War: Despite Some Notable Achievements, New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad
John Lehman
Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.
We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.
We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.
One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.
Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.
The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.
The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.
Full Article.
Lehmen's makin' a bid for SECDEF. Rummy's days are numbered.
posted by Will at 6:16 PM
2 Comments:
"The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments."
Utter rot. If Lehman is trying to kiss up to the Bush administration, great choice of words. However, the likelihood of a terrorist WMD incident is pretty near insignificant. Not that we shouldn't have a plan, but the far more greater threat is the use of explosives by homegrown militias within the United States. The National Counter-Terrorism Center would be a better thing to site than the NCPC, one would think, in this context. I don't believe this administration has taken any steps to secure loose nuke material in the United States or Russia (see www.nti.org).
I had thought that more than a few people have acknowledged that law enforcement works very well against terrorism (ask the Brits for example). His rhetoric against Muslims/"Islamists" is worrisome - as if we needed more hot air on how to stir up Muslim-Americans against their government. Maybe Lehman needs to stick to subjects he fully understands.
J.,
I think what Lehman was referring to as the "greatest terrorist threat on the home front" was simply that: the GREATEST single event that could yield the most casualties, not the most likely threat. In this instance the issue breaks on how one defines "greatest" which, as your comment implies, was possibly a poor choice words.
I'm still waiting to read the full article to see if he makes a distinction between the WMD issue and terrorist cell activities of lesser destructive impact but my issue of Proceedings has, sadly, yet to arrive.
I also totally agree with you on the "Islamist" rhetoric. Lehman is definitely a little rough around the edges, as anyone who served in OPNAV during his SECNAV days will surely attest, but we all seem to get a little lost in the language. We need to pick a term that will not offend the innocent but is still an applicable descriptor. This is all wishful thinking though, it’s an election year and your rhetoric it seems is sadly, more important than your actual policy beliefs.
However, the actual reason for this post, which I obviously did a poor job of conveying, was the fact that Lehman is doing exactly what you say. He's kissing W's ass and ripping Rummy a new one at the same time. Why? Because he wants the SECDEF job.
Thanks for the comment.
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