Understanding the war on terror … Adm. William J. Fallon, the "silver fox," flight officer and warrior for more than 39 years, talks about the global war on terror and the new technologies needed to meet the mission challenges ahead

CHIPS, April-June, 2006 by William J. Fallon

The No. 1 focus area in the Pacific is the war on terrorism. It is the No. 1 issue for our nation. This war today is a worldwide challenge in which national will and perception are paramount features. This is a real problem, and I welcome your feedback.

From where I sit (or fly, since I spend most of my time in the air), I get the feeling that the majority of American people don't quite get it. This is not a slam, it is not an indictment or accusation, it is just an observation. While there is a lot of talk about the war, I don't think most of us truly understand what it is that we are involved in. I can offer that probably the No. 1 reason is that this conflict does not fit the concept and vision of a war as we have known it--at least in my lifetime.

This war is not specific to Iraq or Afghanistan, although these countries seem to garner most of the attention. It is quite understandable, since we have a couple hundred thousand of our best and brightest men and women engaged in conflict in those spots. They are in challenging circumstances every day. We are suffering some not insignificant casualties, and many sacrifices are made by these men and women.

But this is not the only place in which this war is being waged.

This fact seems to elude a lot of people. It is not just a conflict in which we have staged actors lined up force-on-force as in conventional warfare. There was that type of fighting in the first several weeks of the thrust into Iraq, but that is not the way it is now. In fact, we are facing a global, non-state terrorist threat in which our overwhelming conventional capability is being challenged asymmetrically.

We do not have a problem when we are challenged force on force. Ask any of our leaders or Soldiers, Marines, Airmen or Sailors in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I expect that you would hear that virtually in every conflict we have prevailed. But this is not traditional conflict as we understand it.

The principal weapons in this conflict are IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The intent is to maim and kill as many human beings as possible. The other weapon of choice is the suicide bomber. Interestingly, the key tool of this war is something very different than what has been used in other conflicts--the Internet. Enemy leaders have stated openly that the most important tool for them is the ability to communicate ideas and thoughts, and shape opinions using the Internet. That ought to be of high interest to all of us.

What makes this particularly challenging is that these tools, and the way they are being used in our society, which is very open, very trusting, and very much inclined to act in a free and unfettered manner, make us vulnerable. This is a real problem because philosophically we do not want to encumber ourselves with more security, more restrictions, and more things which confine and challenge us. The enemy seeks to exploit the freedoms and liberties which we cherish.

We are winning on the battlefield everyday. I just spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, and Commander, U.S. Central Command Gen. John Abizaid, and many of our other leaders, who have been in the field the last couple of weeks. They have been to Afghanistan and Iraq, and they report that they sense a growing confidence among our people in the field and, more importantly, among the Iraqis with whom they are dealing. As the capabilities of Iraqi and Afghan security forces grow, this is beginning to have a ripple effect in Iraqi society.

This confrontation in which we are engaged is not going to be over any time soon. No matter how fast the Iraqi and Afghan security forces can pick up the burden to defend themselves, these are only two battlefields in this war.

Our enemies have a lot of patience, and they take the long view. But they have weaknesses. They make mistakes, and they have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. I think that some of these recent desperate measures they have taken, including mass bombings of their own people, are beginning to have a very negative effect on their ability to win hearts and minds. Their own supporters are turning against them in significant numbers.

You only have to ask our people who are serving there or those who have recently returned to compare their experiences of recent months to a year ago. What I hear increasingly is that more and more of the Iraqi people are coming to our people, or to their own security forces, fingering the bad guys or the locations of IEDs.

The terrorists that we are challenged by thrive in areas of instability and insecurity. Our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are in trying to deny these sanctuaries to the enemy. But they have lots of other places in the world from which they are operating or could operate.

Let me segue into the Pacific Command area of operations. One of the key objectives of our staff, our subordinate commanders, our component commanders and all of the people in PACOM, is to work throughout the vast area. This area contains 50 percent of the world's territory, has 60 percent of the world's population, and 4 of the 5 largest gross domestic products of the world, including the United States, Japan, China and India. Fifty percent of the world's energy goes through one spot in the ocean, a mile-wide span in the Strait of Malacca. These are mind-numbing statistics. This region is critically important to the security of this nation.