Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

Since Donald J. Trump took over as commander in chief in January 2017, however, American leadership has been restored. Have our enemies disappeared? No. But now we have the requisite fortitude and commitment in the White House to stand up for our values and take all actions necessary to protect our nation and its citizens. What should these actions be? You cannot defeat an enemy unless you know what he is thinking and how he plans to attack you. What follows is a primer on the three most important foes we face and how they are preparing against us.

The United States’ ongoing war against the global jihadi movement—which includes al-Qaeda, ISIS, and dozens of other jihadist groups—launched in October 2001 and is our longest formal military campaign since the founding of the republic. We have weakened the original al-Qaeda’s operational capacity, and thanks to the sound leadership of the forty-fifth president, the Mesopotamian Caliphate of ISIS is just a memory. Nevertheless, the war is far from over as jihadists have moved to other regions, especially in Africa and Asia.

Nor has the jihadist threat in the West subsided, as the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, the London Bridge attack, and the vehicular massacre of innocent people on a New York bicycle path all too gruesomely attest.

At the same time, America’s erstwhile enemy, Moscow, is acting with renewed belligerence. Its invasion of Ukraine broke the sixty-plus-year-old European taboo against territorial aggrandizement through force, and its fighter jet flybys of US vessels and along the American seaboard seem like a revival of Cold War era intimidation and brinkmanship.

The communist People’s Republic of China, though it has yet to use direct force against its neighbors or the United States, has increased its military presence and strategic footprint through an array of unconventional means, from aggressive cyberattacks against US interests—both governmental and commercial—to the construction of artificial islands in disputed Asian waters.

None of these adversaries could expect to win a conventional war with a United States that still maintains a “hyperpower” position among the nations of the world. Therefore they are deploying old, unconventional techniques and developing new ones to progressively undermine our interests and weaken our allies and partners. We must study these techniques and find ways to counteract them before our national security is seriously undermined. The sooner the United States understands that the age of conventional warfare is past and that it faces irregular warfare from Russia, China, and “super-insurgencies” like the Global Jihadist Movement, the sooner it will be able to defeat or neutralize them.

It has been said that history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The United States remains a true superpower, but mostly in one dimension: conventional warfare and kinetic direct action, such as the use of special forces and armed drones. As our nation’s response to the war in Vietnam and the long conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq seems to attest, we do not much care for fighting “irregular enemies” in “messy” wars. This is a serious problem given that irregular warfare, as noted previously, is historically the prevalent mode of warfare.

At the beginning of our second decade fighting the jihadists, the Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis division of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon published a set of reports under the title Decade of War: Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations. Several of the observations and conclusions concerning Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom bear directly upon current and future threats to our republic. They include:

• A failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment our units were deployed into, resulting in a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals. (Preparing for war and understanding the enemy.)

• A slowness to recognize the importance of information and the “battle for narrative” in achieving objectives at all levels. (The role of the “intangible” and the will to win.)

• Difficulties in the integration of general purpose (conventional) and special operations forces.

• The exploitation by individuals and small groups of globalized technology and information systems to shape the battle space and approach state-like disruptive capacity. (The “downward democratization” of destructive power.)

• The increased state use of surrogates and proxies to generate complex unconventional threats.

There is widespread agreement among those who have been responsible for planning and running our more kinetic operations since 9/11 that, on the whole, our armed forces have performed without peer in the application of direct force. America’s ability to execute “strike and maneuver” missions has developed to such a degree that no other nation can come close to our capabilities in the conventional and special forces domains.

But when we have stepped beyond the application of “steel on target” and moved into the indirect and unconventional domains, we have rapidly lost our peer position to others who have devoted more time and thought to these less obvious modes of attack. ISIS had a force less than ten percent the size of ours, yet managed to bring the jihadi way of war to our shores more frequently than ever before, despite losing its main base of operations in Iraq. China now escalates its military adventurism daily according to its “One Belt, One Road” strategy: a plan to displace us as a global power. And recently, the Russian Federation has not only employed established modes of irregular warfare in Europe in ways that would impress even surviving members of America’s original irregular warfare organization, the OSS, but deployed a full suite of information operations (IO) techniques in the Middle East, Europe, and even the United States which match anything from the heyday of the USSR.

What follows is the minimum we must know about our adversaries’ unconventional and irregular techniques—the bare essentials for a better understanding of the ways America will be challenged.

The modern movement for global jihad was born with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after World War I, refined by the fatwas of the jihadi strategist Abdullah Azzam, and brought to spectacular international prominence by Osama bin Laden and the attacks of September 11, 2001. [1] For the story of how the Global Jihadi Movement was built and the ideological evolution of its key strategists and theologians, see my previous book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War , especial chapter four, “The Enemy Masterminds: The Grand Strategists of Modern Jihad.” But in recent years, the global jihadi movement has been transformed. After the death of bin Laden and the separation of al-Qaeda in Iraq from its parent organization, ISIS became the new standard bearer for holy war against the infidel in ways that made it far more dangerous than al-Qaeda ever was.

After the collapse of Syria, the jihadi capture of Mosul, and the multiple ISIS-connected attacks around the world, including the San Bernardino and Orlando massacres, people almost forgot about al-Qaeda and its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. And for good reason, for on at least four counts, the Islamic State had become more powerful than al-Qaeda had been. First, unlike al-Qaeda, the Islamic State was a true insurgency. Second, it became the richest non-state threat group of its kind. Third, it demonstrated stupendous recruitment capabilities. And most importantly, the Islamic State achieved that which all other modern jihadi groups have failed to achieve: the reestablishment of a theocratic caliphate.