WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH asked Donald Rumsfeld to come up with a plan to invade Afghanistan and kick al Qaeda out of its hiding places, Rumsfeld and General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he’d have to wait a while. Though the CIA had been pursuing al Qaeda leads in the region for much of the 1990s and had contingency plans to topple their protectors, the Taliban, the Pentagon had no contingencies for the type of operation the president wanted.
It took months for special operations forces Alpha teams, 12-man commando units, to sneak into Afghanistan and establish contact with the Afghan Northern and Eastern Alliance guerrilla fighters–and still more time to set operations in motion to push the Taliban out and kill al Qaeda terrorists.
According to published accounts, the plan originated with the CIA, not usually known for its military operational planning acumen; but, fortunately, it worked like a charm. Within weeks, special forces A-teams, with their Afghan counterparts, were marching through Kabul.
While the “Afghanistan Military Options” file folder might have been thin, the “Iraq Military Options” and “North Korean Military Options” folders are not. For much of the last decade, Pentagon strategists have been hashing out options to re-fight two wars that were never truly finished. Hundreds of pages of theses and papers by military “graduate students” at the National War College, Naval War College, The Air University, and the Army War College have been written on a variety of strategies and plans for possible conflicts with the “Axis of Evil.”
The armed forces are prepared to deal with Kim Jong Il’s saber-rattling and Saddam’s refusal to abide by the 1991 cease-fire agreement. The notion that military planners have been paralyzed by Turkey’s denying U.S. troops basing rights, or the prospect of refugees and tribal uprisings in Iraq, is ludicrous. A variety of studies and proposals by military officers have dealt with such questions for years. Denying North Korea nuclear weapons and ending that regime’s blackmail of its neighbors would be difficult, but not impossible, as these well-researched papers show.
Moreover, the services have extensively “war gamed” their different strategies and tactics. One war game in November 2002, dubbed “Title X,” involved 130 representatives from the military and other government agencies–read CIA, FBI, and the State Department. Taking place in an auditorium at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, it lasted five days. During the exercise, participants “gamed” the president’s “preemptive strike” doctrine. There were three scenarios: (1) the discovery of a terrorist weapon of mass destruction; (2) eliminating terrorist training facilities and weapons labs; and (3) stopping a state sponsor of terrorism. The war game presented strategists with a variety of diplomatic and time constraints, forcing gamers to adjust their operations on the fly.
While the participants are often reluctant to disclose the particular countries they use in their scenarios, it’s not a stretch to assume that Iraq, North Korea–and even Iran–are the hypotheticals. Many military exercises during the mid-’90s used a China vs. Taiwan scenario as well–though the countries were usually given fictitious names like “Korova” vs. “Kartuna.”
Rest assured that while top-level planners don’t always pick the best plan–and even the ones they do, as the axiom goes, rarely survive the first shot–the military is indeed stretching its intellectual foundation and thinking through the strategic problems presented by America’s potential foes.
Christian Lowe is a staff writer for Army Times Publishing and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.
