Lincoln Bloomfield's remarks concerning International Affairs

DISAM Journal, Summer, 2004 by Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Jr.

[The following are excepts of the remarks presented to the Society for International Affairs, London, United Kingdom, June 3, 2004.]

The Changed Threat

Today marks a period in our history when our nations have been very busy, for going on three years now, adapting to global challenges we have never before faced. Policies and security structures that had kept us free and at peace for decades have, in an instant flash of catastrophic terrorism, been recognized to be insufficient, even obsolete. We have retooled our national security approaches on the fly, as it were, urgently seeking relief from our newfound vunerabilities and leverage to exert in the post September 11, 2001 international security environment.

Observers may differ about what the future will bring, and how best we should address its challenges. But no one can deny that violent forces fueled by hatred have been unleashed against ordinary people freely going about their daily lives in open, democratic societies, on several continents.

The terrorists' violence defies our deterrence, mocks our strength, and revels in doing harm to peoples and institutions we have long regarded as non-combatant and apolitical even neutral in wartime. It is the innocence of these victims that defines this asymmetric terrorist threat; and if there was ever a notion that some societies or countries, by remaining silent and standing aside from the Global War On Terrorism, could be exempted from the extremists' program of violent provocation, it must now be acknowledged and recognized that such a notion is demonstrably wrong.

I came into this position in the U.S. administration three years ago, believing that the strong and credible U.S. military establishment and alliance structure that had so successfully contested and outlived Soviet communism for five decades was still needed in the 21st century. In early 2001, major war did not seem to be an imminent prospect, and so it was possible to think about saving a little defense budget money on immediate needs and instead gearing modernization efforts to longer-term transformation.

Our crystal ball in those early months of the administration simply did not show what was about to happen, and the immediate burdens it would place on our own and our allies' forces. But notwithstanding the operations to remove dangerous regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it still seems, in 2004, that conventional war waged between national military forces over empire, resources or territory is not nearly as likely as it was during the Cold War although we must continually pay attention to the Korean Peninsula and the Indian-Pakistani relationship, among other potential hot spots.

Hearts and Minds

The central fact behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was not a battlefield defeat, but rather the catastrophic loss of credibility of the communist state among its own people. These people compared the unmet Soviet promise of a good life to the thriving model of democracy, individual rights and economic freedom increasingly found elsewhere. In other words, the Cold War was ultimately won, or lost if you prefer, based on hearts and minds.

What September 11, 2001 brought to the fore was the realization that, having survived one existential threat over the last half century, we now find ourselves in the midst of a new struggle, whose full dimensions are yet to be measured, with an entirely different ideological underpinning. Unlike the Cold War, this time no one threatens to subjugate us. Our enemies have no serious political demands. They define themselves by opposition to everything we represent. This is not a winner-take-all adversary, as in the tradition of imperial powers. This time, we are faced with a grim new form of zero sum game between ourselves and terrorists, measured in blood.

And so we adapt law enforcement, intelligence and military tools to secure our homelands and find the terrorists where they live. But no matter how effectively we use force against them, there is only one way truly to make this terrorism danger recede and that is to turn our adversaries away from a destructive ideology and try to calm their hatred. Once again, it seems, we are caught in a generation-long struggle for the hearts and minds of a large segment of the world's population, centered this time among the Arab and Islamic young generation. I believe it is important to talk about hearts, minds, credibility, commitment, and conscience when we are talking about achieving the piece in the modern age. All that separates 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists from 500,000 al Qaeda terrorists is the level of anger and hopelessness among their potential recruits. And at the same time, all that separates a mighty multinational coalition from a go-it-alone U.S. military adventure is the allied level of confidence in America's wisdom and reliability as a security partner.

These are political and psychological factors. They are profoundly important to our security. Perhaps our best weapons in this terrorism struggle notably include our words, foreign aid, and promotion of reform. Yet, let us be clear that military capabilities are still very relevant, even if our enemies attack with different weapons, different tactics and an entirely different ethical and moral ethos than our own.