All Tomorrow's Posts

— A lot of what I have posted here has been about how to better fight the small wars and target-centric counter-terrorism that the United States has found itself pursuing lately. Over at Gunpowder and Lead, Caidid steps back and asks the most important question.

My thinking on this led me back to the War on Drugs, which bears a striking similarity to the Global War on Terror in that it’s waged as a series of interdiction missions with no clear end state. Building capabilities for this then assumes the problem will remain similar and predictable enough, and that we’ll have and utilize the capacity to keep fighting it as it appears now.

But if we’re building on a War on Drugs model, the situation is unlikely to remain static. Centralized Colombian Cartels were replaced by smaller and more agile players, speedboats were routinely stopped and so drug runners built submarines, maritime routes abandoned in favor of land transport, and gangs once confined to distinct neighborhoods became transnational nonstate actors. While the US has adapted to the specific new form of the threat, the War on Drugs has remained one in which the best our current strategy can do is hope to maintain a status quo of interdiction.

If the Global War on Terror follows this pattern, we might pursue the same means with better tactics, but we will not be making progress towards a political end. At best, will instead be really good at treading water.