The State of War and Domestic Terrorism

Chet Richards and John Mueller discuss where we're at five years after the 9/11 attacks.

Nick Gillespie & Jesse Walker from the October 2006 issue

Chet Richards on the future of the military

Interview by Jesse Walker

Since 1989 a small tribe of military analysts has explored the rise of “fourth generation” warfare, a term coined in the Marine Corps Gazette to describe conflicts that pit a state against a transnational, nonstate opponent. Unlike traditional guerrillas, who try to overthrow their host government, these nonstate groups take on external states. For an example, look no further than this year’s war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Chet Richards, 59, has spent more time than most pondering the implications of such conflicts. A retired Air Force Reserve colonel, Richards is the editor of the invaluable Web site Defense and the National Interest (d-n-i.net) and the author, most recently, of Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead (Center for Defense Information, 2006). Written with far more wit and clarity than is usually found in military texts, his book argues that the Department of Defense, designed to wage the Cold War, is ill-suited to protect Americans against the threats we face today. It examines a range of strategic and structural alternatives, including such radical notions as privatization.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker spoke with Richards in July. A longer version of their conversation is online here.

Reason: If Dick Cheney called you tomorrow and asked for your advice on how to proceed in Iraq, what would you tell him?

Chet Richards: I’d say, “Dickie, you’ve got two choices: Get in or get out.” And by “get in,” I mean open your Roman history. You can see how it has to be done. We’re talking 27 million people in Iraq, so figure a couple percent, 500,000 to a million people, and lock the place down.

If you’re not going to do that, then just get out. We’ve got enough force in there to be an irritant and a target, but not nearly enough to influence the situation. If we tell them, “Hey, we’re out of here by the end of the year, you guys figure it out,” then we at least give them some incentive to come up with arrangements that they can live with.

Reason: Suppose Cheney were to ask you about Afghanistan. How would your advice be different?

Richards: The classic solution to Afghanistan is just get out. If we could somehow change them, I’d say great. But people have been trying to do that for a long, long time.

We can probably do raids that ensure the Al Qaeda training camps don’t become particularly effective. If we had to we could put about a thousand special forces into an area and operate for a couple of weeks, disrupt the hell out of it, and then just leave. In the meantime they’ll grow poppies, and they’ll fight among themselves. Let them play that game of polo with each other’s heads and have a great time back in the 13th century.

I worry about Pakistan a lot more than Afghanistan. They have a well-educated population, they’ve managed to cobble together several nuclear devices, they can operate F-16s quite nicely, and yet they probably harbor more of what we’d call Islamic extremists than any other country in the world. They have a lot more potential to cause us problems, especially if the government is ever overthrown by Taliban look-alikes.

Reason: Your book suggests a broad restructuring of the U.S. military.

Richards: What we have right now is a military set up to fight large-scale state-vs.-state war. So you have to ask, who would we fight?

If a country has nuclear weapons, you really can’t have a large-scale conventional war. You can have a military theater, but the fate of either side is not going to be decided purely through conventional weapons.

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