Posted on 01/31/2002 9:30:02 AM PST by RCW2001
In a speech laying out the Bush administration's justification for proposing a $48 billion increase in the 2003 defense budget, Rumsfeld said the nation is vulnerable to new forms of terrorism ranging from cyberattacks to attacks on U.S. military bases abroad to ballistic missile attacks on American cities.
"Our job is to close off as many of those avenues of potential attack as is possible," he said in a speech at the National Defense University.
His remarks coincided with new indications that terrorists have considered a range of possible attacks. The FBI warned on Wednesday that al-Qaida terrorists may have been studying American dams and water-supply systems in preparation for new attacks. And in a report to Congress made public Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet said rudimentary diagrams of nuclear weapons were found in a suspected al-Qaida safehouse in Kabul, Afghanistan. Other evidence uncovered in Afghanistan includes diagrams of American nuclear power plants, although it is unclear if an attack was planned.
Rumsfeld said there could be no doubt that in the years ahead the American people will be faced with an attacker as unconventional and unpredictable as the hijackers who killed more than 3,000 people by flying airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
He warned of new adversaries who may strike in unexpected ways with weapons of increasing range and power. He appeared to be referring to ballistic missiles, a weapon the administration fears countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq could either use against America or sell to terrorist groups.
"These attacks could grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered" on Sept. 11, he said.
The speech made a case for spending more money on a wide range of weapons and other military programs, although Rumsfeld mentioned no specific amounts of spending for individual programs.
He made a pitch for deploying defenses against ballistic missiles to guard against the possibility that American and allied cities could be held hostage to "nuclear blackmail." And he said new earth-penetrating weapons could make obsolete the deep underground bunkers where terrorists hide.
He said the war in Afghanistan has shown the effectiveness of some new military technologies that past administrations failed to develop in sufficient numbers. He cited the example of unmanned aircraft such as the Predator, which provides live TV images of the battlefield but is in short supply.
He also mentioned a shortage of manned reconnaissance and surveillance planes, command and control aircraft like the Air Force's AWACS plane, chemical and biological defense equipment and certain types of special operations forces.
Rumsfeld cited specific lessons learned from the Afghan campaign:
- Wars in the 21st century will increasingly require all elements of national power - not just the military. They will require that economic, diplomatic, financial, law enforcement and intelligence capabilities work together.
- The ability of military forces to communicate and operate seamlessly on the battlefield will be critical to success. He noted the success of U.S. special forces on the ground in Afghanistan communicating target information to pilots of Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps strike aircraft.
- Wars must be fought by "coalitions of the willing" - they should not be fought by committee. The United States has taken the lead in the war in Afghanistan, not allowing coalition partners to determine the mission.
- Defending the United States requires prevention and sometimes pre-emption. Rumsfeld has said many times that the Sept. 11 attacks showed that it is impossible to defend against every possible threat in every place at every conceivable time. He cited the old saying that the best defense is a good offense.
AP-ES-01-31-02 1320EST
Not in my house. No one else thought it was worth worrying about, so all I got stored was a little extra water.
Then I ended up in the hospital with a kidney infection from Christmas to Jan 5, anyway. I figured if anything did happen, it was as safe a place as any. Security guards (sort of), emergency generator, kitchen, etc. It was kind of funny on Dec. 31 though, when the head nurse very quietly came around and put manual blood pressure cuffs in each room, just in case.
I'm with ya blam...I'm sick of this crap/no crap BS.....We better start protectng our borders, AND profiling etc......If we don't, we leave ourselves wide open...JMHO.
FMCDH
By making sure our kill ratio is better than 5 to 1. We've done that before.
Kinda hard to do that when you have the United States Government banning normal capacity magazines (10+). Its not always one shot, one kill, you know. Sometimes you miss.
I can't disagree with the point about disarming Americans (join the NRA, while I may not agree with every step it takes it is the most powerful 2nd Amendment rights org out there) the issue of numbers isn't the whole story.
Just as it has been true historically, logistical support is a key to any succesful campaign. The abilty to project power beyond your borders, in itself provides a certain (though not total) measure of security. Having 200,000,000 people of fighting age means little or nothing if you can not transport them to the front, or protect them from aeriel attack.
In the case of China, the manpower numbers are staggering, but the infrastructure needed to harness those numbers just isn't in place yet, and won't be for some time. Simply put, other than a few missles that could wreak devastation on the west coast(which would be responded to with total obliteration of China, they have little opportunity to project their power to the United States.
Some early warning signs to watch for are the development of power projection platforms such as aircraft carries and advances or expansion of the ballistic missle or manned/unmanned space program (big red flags). Less subtle areas would include the internal development of the national infrastructure (how many miles of U.S. Interstate make suitable runways??) that could allow greater mobility and there more difficult targeting.
just some thoughts...
Not in my house. No one else thought it was worth worrying about, so all I got stored was a little extra water.
Then I ended up in the hospital with a kidney infection from Christmas to Jan 5, anyway. I figured if anything did happen, it was as safe a place as any. Security guards (sort of), emergency generator, kitchen, etc. It was kind of funny on Dec. 31 though, when the head nurse very quietly came around and put manual blood pressure cuffs in each room, just in case.
I wonder what it was like being in a hospital under conditions such as you describe for a patient in New York on 09/11....
In Memphis, all the hospitals are linked together via amateur radio relay stations, as backup to phone lines that might be lost in an earthquake [we're on the New Madrid Seismic Fault] or should cell and microwave antennas go down in a quake or tornado. Backup battery power is available, multifuel-capable generators and solar power rechargers are available, and the system is tested and staffed by caring and enthusiastic volunteers.
And in the first moments of the new year, those on that duty were standing by, and those ready to back the others up should a *temporary* problem last for hours or days watched with interest. The system faced the test, it thankfully wasn't needed, and should it be needed later, it works.
Now other similar projects are on-line: ARES and other volunteer communication links with local Emergency Management offices; severe weather *Skywarn* spotters working with the National Weather Service, and a tornado warning siren testing program. And other locales have similar programs in place, some more modest, some more grand.
Hopefully, they'll not ever be needed. But if they are, they're there. That's cheap insurance.
-archy-/-
You are right, Miss Marple. It's nice to know the ADULTS are in charge NOW, and that they might be a little more MATURE (and discreet, and strategic) about their handling of issues than the last administration.
Some early warning signs to watch for are the development of power projection platforms such as aircraft carries and advances or expansion of the ballistic missle or manned/unmanned space program (big red flags). Less subtle areas would include the internal development of the national infrastructure (how many miles of U.S. Interstate make suitable runways??) that could allow greater mobility and there more difficult targeting.
In the case of the interstates, it is NOT the one-mile-in-five figure sometimes quoted when funding for the Interstate National Defense Highway System was first considered. There are too many overpasses around most urban areas, though some portions might do for heavy-lift helicopter landing zones if all of a community's airport facilities were suddenly absent without leave.
As for the Chinese, maybe it's not best to consider their capabilities on our terms. They have their own way of doing things at times....
just some thoughts...
And some other considerations, in response:
The second, more interesting, idea pulled from the Soviets is that of asymmetric warfare. It’s a term that has appeared in the news more often than RMA, but it’s not always clear what it means or where it came from. It didn’t make its first appearance in U.S. military doctrine until several years after the Soviet Union had vanished. The first use of the term here, in a 1995 report titled Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States, referred roughly to fighting between forces that were not matched in size and composition; a 1998 report defined it with elegant simplicity as "not fighting fair." Meese defines it in useful terms, calling it a way for a weak enemy to dominate a strong one; once you go down this road, notions of strength and weakness become a little more fluid.
The trend has been for asymmetric warfare to leak off the battlefield. We recently saw one of the historical apogees of asymmetric warfare in New York and Washington. The likelihood of such attacks was often hinted at within military circles over the last few years. In 1999, yet another U.S. report, a Joint Staff strategic review titled Asymmetric Approaches to Warfare -- let the record show that military organizations are exceptionally good at producing a lot of reports -- concluded that asymmetric approaches "are attempts to circumvent or undermine U.S. strengths while exploiting U.S. weaknesses using methods that differ significantly from the United States’ expected method of operations." And we certainly have seen something that differed significantly from the methods we expected.
One of the clearest definitions of the potential boundaries of this notion borrowed from the Soviet military comes from -- nice touch -- the Chinese military. In 1999, two senior colonels in the People’s Liberation Army wrote a book, Unrestricted Warfare, that examined the military potential of things like hacker attacks on U.S. economic infrastructure. But Cols. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui were talking about something else, too: "‘Unrestricted Warfare’ means that any methods can be prepared for use, information is everywhere, the battlefield is everywhere, and that any technology might be combined with any other technology, and that the boundaries between war and non-war and between military and non-military affairs has systematically broken down....This new way of thinking puts weapons into the daily lives of civilians. New concept weapons can make of war something that even military professionals will find hard to imagine. Both soldiers and civilians will be disturbed to see items in their everyday lives become weapons that can attack and kill."
Ring any bells? It’s important not to make too much of Unrestricted Warfare, a book that mostly centers on technological sabotage. The authors have also explicitly and repeatedly said that they were examining possibilities, not calling for action -- and they aren’t central figures in the Chinese military.
"It was written by a couple of colonels," Meese says. "I’m a colonel, and no one listens to me."
The point is that the ideas were out there. Stephen Sloan, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, got even closer to the thing with a July 1998 paper written for the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.
"As a result of the introduction of commercial jet aircraft, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘Non-Territorial Terrorism’ -- a form of terror that is not confined to a clearly delineated geographical area. In a very real sense, terrorists now have the capacity to engage in what could be called low-intensity aerospace warfare. They have at their disposal what are for all practical purposes human intercontinental delivery systems composed of skyjackers, and terrorists who are carrying out operations thousands of miles from their base of operations."
And so it’s interesting to note the trend of coverage emphasizing the surprise of the U.S. military at the September 11 attacks. The reality is that, as much as the specifics surprised the military, the general outline of a domestic terror attack designed to produce enormous casualties is not something that came shuttling out of the clear blue sky. In fact, there’s a trail through yesterday’s news that suggests an effort by those within the national security establishment who saw the threat developing to spread the alarm -- and to push the inert body of that same establishment in the direction of meeting it.
Time, for instance, reported this in December 2000: "If you build it, they will come -- some other way. And they’re probably going to come some other way, anyway. That appears to be the bottom line in U.S. intelligence community thinking on the vexed question of missile defense....And the bad news is that, while America will have no rival on the battlefield, it will be increasingly dogged by unconventional enemies against whom technological superiority isn’t the same guarantor of victory." They did, in fact, come some other way, just about nine months later.
The attempts to sound an alarm were more often ignored, though, and then some. In June 2000, a national commission formed by Congress released a major report warning that terror attacks from overseas were increasingly likely. But Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor at The Nation, was too smart to fall for the idea that terrorists might ever attack the U.S.; he cleverly broke down the truth about the report for readers of the online magazine Salon. The headline read, "The hyping of domestic terrorism: Why a new report on the threat of international terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is a con job."
The news stories you saw in the wake of the attacks alleging that the institutions of U.S. national security entirely failed to foresee their possibility were sometimes written by the same people who wrote the earlier stories describing -- in some cases dismissing -- the warnings. It’s a fair guess that there are some awfully frustrated people in the military and intelligence communities right now.
When I left Germany in 2000, all bases were closed and you had to come in thru the guard gates with your ID. Not so bad you say? even a smart move in light of the Embassy Bombing in Africa (at the time) etc etc.
Until you realize that he castrated our Military so badly, that we (the Army) Had to Hire Brown and Root Security Guards just to man all the Guard gates! And from what I understood, we couldn't do basic background checks on the local nationals(50-70% of their employee's) because it went against German Privacy Laws.... Now I wonder how our military oversea bases could possibly make good targets???
Gee, I just never seem to find reasons to keep "Thanking" Clinton < /sarcasm>
I see the terror networks as the newest version of the old client states-they do the work of the Chinese & Russians.
Now they also work on us internally-thus the criminal alien prob & dirty Mexican gov are also a major concern. The activities on the Southern border have been very interesting. Same old Cold War, new chapter, with the heat being turned way up.
We are wide open & may have incomming any time. The state of our Union has never been so much in question.
Keep your auto gas tank full, water, food & 'tools' within reach & stay tuned.
:-(
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