We have to become comfortable and familiar with the fact that military planning and policy is not exactly the same as, or necessarily aligned with, any given administration's policy. One place to begin is by reading, or at least thumbing through, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (scroll down the page linked to here, and you'll find a link to a pdf file of the Review).
The most recent review represents some of the long term thinking among military strategists, who say that we are headed for a "long war" of at least a generation, which will have the defeat of global terrorism at its center.
The first key to interpreting the Quadrennial Defense Review, or other policy projects, is to figure out whether we agree with their assessment of security threats. Then we can begin figuring out whether we like the solutions they pose. Some of these solutions may be military, others may not: diplomacy, economic incentives and sanctions, and trade are other ways to affect the behaviors of other countries and societies, for example.
My own position on the threat of global terrorism is in many ways in keeping with a Summer 2006 article in the World Policy Journal by Carl Conetta, the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute. Conetta writes that:
Central to the "long war" framework is the assertion of a unitary challenge from a "global Islamic insurgency" that is worthy of comparison to the challenges of the Second World War or the Cold War. But the "global Islamic insurgency" does not exist except as a construct in the minds of jihadi fanatics, a coterie of neoconservative thinkers, and the authors of the QDR. What does exist are a number of separate local insurgencies with a strong Islamic element. Seven of these are substantial in size and intensity, but none are simply wars of Islamic assertion.
What Conetta is basically saying is that jihadists and insurgencies may be sizeable enough to require military or other attention. A number of them use the terms and symbols of Islam to express their radical agendas. But these groups are not part of a global conspiracy, nor are they working together. Believing that they are will skew exactly those policies and tactics designed to eradicate jihadist activity. Assessing the dangers of jihadist activity, how dangerous they are, to whom, and how to thwart them should take the facts into account.
There are certainly other ways to read the evidence. That's fine. It's simply important to understand that the military operates independently of our elected officials, and to know that we can and should turn toward their planning materials if we want to understand more fully how wartime planning and policy is achieved.
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