Terrorists are more vulnerable than many believe
By John A. Warden
Most commentators have been telling us for weeks that the
United States has little capability to fight a war against
terrorism and that attacking Osama bin Laden and his supporters
in Afghanistan will lead to the same disasters that befell the
Soviets in the 1980s and the British a century earlier. They
say this war is completely different from the Persian Gulf War
and that our high-tech weapons will be of little value.
Happily, they are wrong on all counts.
A decade ago, the coalition formed by the earlier President
Bush to fight the Gulf War made parallel, near-simultaneous
attacks on Iraq as a system ? not just against its occupying
army in Kuwait. The objective was to paralyze the system and
bring the war to a rapid conclusion, with a minimum amount of
bloodshed and long-lasting destruction. It worked.
The concept of system warfare, while new, is not difficult to
understand. All organizations, including al-Qa'eda and the
Taliban government, are systems with distinct interconnected
elements. Think of five concentric circles: The innermost
circle contains the leadership elements (bin Laden, Taliban
leaders); the second circle from the inside contains process
elements (such as communications and financing); the third
circle contains infrastructure elements (airfields, training
camps); the fourth contains demographic elements (Afghan
civilians); and the fifth contains combatants (Taliban
aircraft, bin Laden fighters).
This "Five Rings" methodology was the concept behind Gulf War
targeting. Each of these rings contains a center of gravity
that, if attacked, has a much greater impact on its parent
system. To paralyze a system, it is important to attack its
centers of gravity in parallel ? in other words, in a very
compressed time frame. Not all attacks need be negative; we are
"attacking" the civilian ring with food and other humanitarian
assistance, for example.
If you try the old method of just hitting one or two things ?
like bin Laden and a training camp ? the remainder of the
system (the Taliban, al-Qa'eda) is still fully functional or
quite capable of repairing itself and conducting
counterattacks. Likewise, attacking the elements one at a time
also gives the system ample opportunity to repair itself and to
react. So, parallel attacks ? striking many centers of gravity
across the entire system ? leads to a far higher probability of
system paralysis and of success. It also is the least-expensive
way to fight in terms of dollars and human lives on both sides.
Not surprisingly, the first overt military operations Sunday
were focused against the terrorist systems in Afghanistan and
the Taliban government that supports them. We saw attacks
against centers of gravity in all five rings:
Ring 1: Defense ministry, other Taliban and terrorist
headquarters.
Ring 2: Communications and possibly electrical power.
Ring 3: Airfields, terrorist camps.
Ring 4: Positive operations with food, medicine and information
to support that large part of the Afghan population that has no
love for either the Taliban or the terrorists that it supports.
Ring 5: Taliban aircraft and air-defense units and specific
terrorist groups.
We should expect that in a short time, if not already, the
Taliban will experience the start of paralysis, which will
leave it in a perilous situation. That in turn will make it
difficult, if not impossible, for the Taliban to support or
protect terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
At the same time, this paralysis paves the way for dissident
groups such as the Northern Alliance to take actions that would
have been nearly impossible when the Taliban was fully
functioning, able to communicate effectively across a country
the size of Texas and able to move with some rapidity to
counter uprisings or trouble spots.
As the Taliban's paralysis spreads, the terrorist groups within
Afghanistan will see their own mobility and communications
severely restricted and begin to feel vulnerable and trapped.
Note that an attack on any single one of these elements would
have produced little the Taliban and the terrorists could not
have dealt with easily. For example, because the U.S. responses
to the embassy bombings in Africa were single point ? a bin
Laden camp and a plant in Sudan ? they had little prospect of
doing anything but convincing the Taliban and the terrorists
that they could attack the United States with impunity.
No longer. After the first set of U.S. attacks, it becomes
easier and easier to focus on individual terrorist groups
within Afghanistan and more and more difficult for those groups
to escape, defend themselves or respond effectively. At the
same time, it becomes much easier for the United States to
conduct humanitarian missions to save lives and show the
majority of the Afghan people that America is much more their
friend than is either the Taliban or the plague of terrorists
that it has nurtured.
At this moment, terrorists and their supporters around the
world must be experiencing the first real anxiety of their
modern history, for the United States and its allies have shown
their ability to apply weapons ranging from the cyberworld to
the stealth world against the terrorists' entire system ? and
on a worldwide basis.
Conversely, Americans should feel better and safer than they
have since Sept. 11. Their country is on the offense ? and that
is by far the most effective defense against a virulent and
evil enemy.
Retired Air Force colonel John A. Warden, a key air-strategy
planner in the Gulf War, is the co-author of Winning in
FastTime.
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