A Lexicon Deconstructed: T-Z

T is for Threat

One can track America's evolving definition of the threat from the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a massive bureaucratic analytical process that belches out, every four years, a jargon-laden policy statement designed to guide both the Defense Department and Congress in defense budget appropriations. The first QDR (1993), dubbed the Bottom Up Review, essentially plotted the threat along traditional lines: modest at the level of individual actors and subnational violence (there was a mild uptick in civil strife following the collapse of the Soviet empire), highest at the level of state-based threats (remember, we had just gone through kicking Iraq out of Kuwait), and likewise modest at the level of catastrophic violence or global war (the residual threat of post-Soviet Russia). The 1997 QDR slightly downshifted state-based threats and upgraded the strategic-level threat, reflecting the Pentagon's emerging infatuation with "rising China" as a potential downstream "near-peer competitor." The 2001 QDR, hastily rewritten after 9/11, naturally elevated both the individual actor and catastrophic threat estimates, reflecting al Qaeda's successful 9/11 attacks. Those estimates, and the accompanying de-emphasis of state-based threats, were somewhat enhanced in the 2005 QDR, reflecting a growing appreciation of both al-Qaeda's worldwide network and China's continued military build-up.

What's most notable about this post-Cold War evolution of America's threat perception is the acknowledged nexus between super-empowered individuals and the capacity for catastrophic terrorist acts, which, in the age of globalization, are most saliently translated into severe disruptions of global communication, transportation, energy, and supply-chain networks. To the extent that international crises are increasingly defined primarily in terms of their capacity for perturbing globalization's dense weave of networks, the Leviathan's historic role as arbiter among the world's militaries is inevitably eclipsed by the "system administrator" function that I identify as being logically centered in the US military's "second half" forces, or those more focused on, and customized toward, peacekeeping, postconflict stabilization and reconstruction, disaster response, and counter-insurgency. In effect, the nation-building function begins to eclipse the warfighting function as the world's primary threats shift from the realm of zero-sum defense to nonzero-sum security.

U is for Unconventional

In US military parlance, conventional forces fight conventional wars against conventional opponents, meaning our warfighters kinetically engage your warfighters in a zero-sum contest. The goal is simple: kill more of them than you lose, gaining territory and other operational objectives in the process. Conventional military "platforms" (e.g., tanks, bombers, missiles, destroyers) deliver conventional weapons that kill people, make holes, and break things. All effort is made to avoid "collateral damage," or harm to non-combatants (the public). This describes the realm of war. It is a description both ancient and modern. It also describes less and less of the world within which our military operates, as well as less and less of the operations undertaken by our forces.

In US military parlance, "unconventional" describes what I like to call "the everything else": the non-kinetics to be employed (e.g., non-lethal weapons, medical assistance, civil affairs programs), the non-warfighters to be deployed (military police, trainers, Seabees), the uncommitted to be won over or at least not antagonized (local opinion leaders, global media, aid workers), and the unsensational to be accomplished (electricity back on, markets back open, government back up). A good example of the shift embodied by the US military's new focus on counter-insurgency? Instead of the conventional warfighting planning measure of determining your number of troops by your opponents' number of troops, in this unconventional peace-waging environment, you set the number of your troops according to the size of local civilian population. Why? You're not trying to defeat the enemy (insurgency) as much as win the people. Our unconventional forces win the people to starve the insurgency.

Our enemies' version of unconventional warfare is usually described as "unrestricted," meaning operating with impunity outside the bounds of normal warfare, a function we view as belonging exclusively to the state. In that sense, the frightening phrase "unrestricted warfare" is a bit of a hype, because all it really means is that our primary enemies of today and tomorrow are no longer nation-states, but individuals who will - like states before them - pretty much do whatever it takes to win. Given that tens of millions were killed in "restricted warfare" across the 20th century by nation-states that allegedly obeyed the "rules," I think we should view warfare waged primarily by nonstate actors to be a much welcomed step "down," especially if our preferred counter is unconventional operations. In terms of overall violence levels, the post-Cold War's "democratization of violence" is a vast improvement from great power wars launched by autocracies.

V is for Virtue

If your grand strategy encompasses a long war against a global insurgency of radical extremists, it's going to emphasize unconventional operations and tactics and require significant numbers of unconventional forces. Besides demanding far more strategic patience, for these efforts pay off in months and years, not hours or days, this approach demands far higher standards of personal conduct from those who represent your nation in the field. That includes both uniformed military and civilian, and both government and contract personnel. War is waged by soldiers according to fairly wide-open rule sets, but the "rules of engagement" when peace is being waged are at once more obvious and more easily confused. Where combatants don't wear uniforms, clear lines are easily blurred, and where contractors wield deadly force, clear lines are easily crossed.

A sense of virtue is essential for any grand strategy's staying power. Your people must be convinced that right is on their side, justifying their use of might. But when that might's employment is severely circumscribed and subordinated to the unconventional fight for people's allegiance, the warrior's virtues can become, suddenly and with disastrous consequences, completely inappropriate to the task at hand. The warfighter untrained for penal duties can generate scandal in the unconventional realm that results in many additional deaths suffered over time at the hands of a re-energized insurgency. So Abu Ghraib matters. And Guatanamo Bay matters. And secret tribunals and rendition programs matter. For they all create friction within your ranks and reduce your national fitness in your own public's mind as well as in the minds of your allies and those uncommitted.

Virtue matters because virtue expands your networks and reduces those of your enemy. Every player counts in this regard, from the most senior leaders right down to the "strategic corporal" whose decisions can make or break you.

W is for WMD

Security experts classify WMD, or weapons of mass destruction, in three major baskets: nuclear, biological and chemical. That's the NBC trio you hear so much about today, even though, in historical sequencing, it's more like C-N-B. Nineteenth-century science was dominated by advances in chemistry, which in turn yielded the chemical weapons first employed in World War I. Those weapons didn't achieve much on the battlefield, being deathly hard to wield, so they soon fell out of favor, becoming a latent 20th-century threat that very rarely materialized. Saddam Hussein was a practitioner, for example. In the 20th century, the big story became physics, which likewise yielded catastrophic weaponry deployed first in World War II. When we see Iran and North Korea pursue nukes today, our real fear is that either rogue regime might transfer the technology to transnational terrorists-the so-called suitcase bomb threat. All worth worrying about, but dealing with these threats has more to do with closing the door on the last century than mastering the new technologies - and resulting threats - of the next.

Biology will define the 21st century, fueled first by the study of genes. For now, cloned animals and genetically altered foodstuffs constitute the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that fire popular imagination while stoking public fear, but soon enough the most common GMOs will be humans themselves. Weaponization will again follow right on science's heels. Today's GMO becomes tomorrow's GET, or genetically engineered threat. There's a race going on right now in the emerging field of biological warfare - epidemiology meets Dr. No. Scientists will tell you we're roughly a decade away from being able to rapidly detect GETs using mass spectrometry and other sensor advances. That's good news because security experts will tell you we're roughly a decade away from many governments and nonstate actors being able to weaponize GETs. If you get spooked by E coli hiding in spinach, then consider the panic factor of a pandemic-class viral agent that's been genetically masked to look and feel like the common cold.

In the 21st century, security will be all about the speed - and the intelligence - of response. Imagine rerunning the global spread of AIDS but this time in a matter of days instead of years. "28 Days Later," how many civil liberties would you surrender? In my mind, this is why kinetic missile defense is so 20th century. As Fred Ikle argues in Annihilation From Within, in the 21st century we won't see the most dangerous weapons flying at us; they will appear seemingly out of nowhere. And when the man on the white horse appears offering salvation? I say, guard your freedom.
Where's the handhold for grand strategists? Chemical weapons and nukes speak more to the defense paradigm, whereas biological pushes us more into security. Genetically-engineered threats become yet another emerging dynamic that pushes the Pentagon more into the SysAdmin-style coordination with other nations' security agencies, our own nation's Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector that operates that dense global weave of networks across which biological threats - launched both accidentally and malevolently - will travel. Grand strategy thus becomes increasingly indistinguishable from globalization's system administration function, which means most of your freedom of action, such as it is, moves upstream into the research behind, and design of, worldwide sensor networks.

X is for Xenophobia

Xenophobia, or the fear of foreigners, has been a recurring theme throughout US history. Despite being a nation of immigrants whose oddly synthetic mash-up of a culture reflects our collectively global origins, Americans have often turned on their foreign-born compatriots. Historically, this has happened in response to one or both of the following conditions: 1) a rapid and large influx of a group with a non-Protestant faith (think Irish Catholics in the 19th century and Hispanic Catholics across the last two decades); and/or 2) the growth in individuals' real incomes either stagnates or falls, when, as economist Benjamin Friedman notes, class conflict and anti-immigrant sentiment tends to break out.

How this matters to grand strategy? First, strong anti-immigrant fervor tends to be associated with more isolationist sentiment. Americans want less to do with outsiders and the outside world. Interwar America (1919-1941) was both isolationist and closed to immigrants. Think it can't happen again? Here's betting that Lou Dobbs and a dirty nuclear bomb detonated somewhere in America's heartland could give you a run for your FOREX.

Second, we live in an age in which numerous rising powers not only challenge America's self-image as a superpower, but likewise are likely to trigger, through their stunning economic and - more importantly - material success, a sense of what Richard Hofstadter called "status anxiety" for our nation as a whole. And when Americans get anxious about their perceived status in a world teeming with revolutionary change, they tend toward what Hofstadter dubbed the "paranoid style" of U.S. politics - namely, ginning up new enemies as required.
All of this rising fear inside America is somewhat ironic, I would argue, because it's largely directed at a world of our own creating. America is the iconic source code for much of what we know as globalization today, and yet our success in spreading it has led much of our society to grow alienated from our historical offspring. While we instinctively worry about this "monster" turning on "Dr. Frankenstein," the biggest danger of the next decade or so is that the good doctor will turn on his creation.

Y is for "Yankee, go home! (and take me with you!)"

"Yankee" refers to the enduring image our military's many overseas adventures have inculcated in foreign cultures. Much like baseball's New York Yankees, Americans tend to be the team that everyone else around the planet loves to openly hate while secretly admiring. By and large, in keeping with Michael Scheurer's analysis on radical Islam, most people in this world tend to admire us for who were are and despise us for what we do abroad. This is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. From Teddy Roosevelt's time through the Kennedy administration, American military interventions tended to elicit more cheers than jeers: charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, "the Yanks are coming" in WWI, Lend-Lease and the second front in WWII, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift, MacArthur landing in Inchon and JFK staring down the Soviets over Cuban missiles. Sure, there was always plenty of "Yankee, Go Home!" sentiment throughout Latin America, where our many interventions accomplished little good for the locals and typically advanced only our commercial interests, but by and large our overseas interventions enhanced our global reputation-that is, until Vietnam. Since then it's been one long, hard slog to get our act back together with regard to counter-insurgency that's finally begun to repair our reputation as occupational hazards.
Desert Storm didn't knock that Vietnam Goliath out of our memories. Little General David Petraeus' shiny new COIN did. And that makes a world of difference for America's grand strategy going forward.

Z is for the new Zion

From the very beginning, Americans have held themselves and their "new world" in unique religious esteem. This enduring self-perception has yielded two opposing tendencies across our history: a missionary-like zeal to improve the world in our image and a desire to remain aloof from that world, serving it merely by example.
William Bradford, future governor of the Plymouth Colony, proclaimed in 1620 as he debarked the Mayflower: "Come let us declare in Zion the word of God." As Michael Oren notes in Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, "Bradford was quoting Jeremiah, but 'Zion,' for him, was not the old Promised Land of Canaan but its new incarnation, America." Later, during our Revolutionary War, Orens writes that "the colonists' image of themselves as the New Israel attained special poignancy...Casting King George III in the role of pharaoh and the Atlantic acting as the Red Sea, patriot writers likened George Washington to Moses, and John Adams to Joshua leading their people to freedom."
Fast-forward past a Civil War that featured another Moses (Abraham Lincoln) and real slaves to be freed, pausing briefly at President Harry Truman's seminal role in helping midwife the state of Israel into existence, and then scan through decades of a special bilateral bond that sometimes left Washington standing alone as Jerusalem's only ally in this world. That special bond has led every administration since Dwight Eisenhower's to spend significant diplomatic and military resources to address the lasting diplomatic conundrum that is Israel's contested existence in the Middle East, culminating in George W. Bush's ambitious attempt to recast the region's entire political architecture through his "big bang" strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein. Does America's powerful Jewish lobby in Washington play a significant role here in steering our grand strategy? No more than the House of Saud. But absent oil, America would still be deeply involved in the search for Middle East peace. "New Jerusalem's" many believers wouldn't have it any other way.

Countering that tendency to go abroad in search of monsters to slay and allies to defend is the longstanding belief of many Americans that our exceptional development as a republic constitutes our primary gift to world history. John Winthrop, a contemporary of Bradford who led his own band of English Puritans to the nearby Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, established this image with his description of the colony as a "city upon a hill." By escaping the corruption and wars of the Old World, America's true mission was to perfect itself and, by doing so, demonstrate to humanity what the best path forward should look like.
What these two images tell us is that interventionism and isolationism are two sides of the "exceptionalist" coin, one view being to spread that unique truth and the other being to preserve it. This is the essential conundrum of any revolutionary power: replicate oneself abroad or continue the process of purification back home. Whether we care to admit it or not, America has been a revolutionary global force from the minute our Founding Fathers declared 13 colonies free and independent in 1776. By declaring our "inalienable rights," we set in motion a clash of rule sets that continues to this day, because our "pursuit of happiness" has progressively forced us into ever greater connectivity with the world outside, fueling in turn globalization's advance.

Now, with upwards of five-sixths of humanity swept up in similar pursuits, America finds itself challenged to redefine-yet again-our relationship with a world that's simultaneously becoming more like us and yet less American. Do we lead directly or more by example? What level of hard power and what level soft? Where to break out the kinetics versus the non-kinetics? When to rollback and when to contain?
How do we balance our ambitions for the future against our responsibility for today? By deciding what we can change in this world and what we can't. Whether or not God grants us the necessary grace, this basic understanding must shape our grand strategy going forward.