The likelihood of someone challenging the United States to a great sea battle is fairly small. Someone challenging the United States to a tank battle probably is not going to happen in the next ten years. Somebody challenging the United States to a tactical air superiority battle anytime soon probably also is unlikely. But the United States is going to be challenged. The questions are, How? and Where?
What happened to the USS Cole (DDG-67)—or to our airmen at Khobar Towers in 1996 or our two East African embassies in 1998—is more likely than a great naval or tank battle to be the challenge we are going to face. Recently, I served as co-commissioner of the ten-week review on the attack on the Cole, and our experiences and recommendations might offer some perspective.
First, our charter specifically forbade us from looking at accountability issues, so we did not. We also did not look at why the Cole was in Yemen. That is important because our review took as a given that the United States is going to remain engaged around the world. That is what naval professionals do—conduct U.S. policy around the world by a program of active engagement. That is what the Cole was doing. The U.S. National Security Strategy and U.S. National Military Strategy say we are going to be engaged actively around the world. And we are not likely—if you listen to our leaders—to back down from that policy because of terrorist activities. Therefore, the answer to Why Yemen? is because it is there.
We did look at Department of Defense (DoD) policies and practices as they apply to small, transiting units such the Cole and aircraft. For example, what is done for the single U.S. Air Force C- 141 and its crew when they stop in Nairobi for fuel? Who is protecting them? Who is doing their threat analysis? Who is providing them intelligence? We also found that individual engagement activities such as small humanitarian demining teams act just like the Cole. They have all the same characteristics. They are like the lost patrols of the world. They are out there by themselves without much oversight.
What we were to look at is whether DoD—and all its entities—was doing what needed to be done to make that kind of engagement activity safe. Therefore, the crew or the captain of the Cole was not a party to our inquiry. The parties to our inquiry were people such as the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commander-in-Chief, Central Command, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense.
We thought it important to start by putting our report in its cultural and historical context. In addition to engagement activities, we discussed terrorism, surprises, sovereignty, and what the commanding officer could be expected to do. DoD has done a lot since the terrorist attack on the Air Force barracks at Khobar Towers. Money has been spent, and people have been trained. But the effort largely has been aimed at fixed installations; the Cole and her situation were not very well addressed.
We looked at whether terrorism is a crime or an act of war. The Secretary of Defense and the President said, "This cowardly criminal act will not go unpunished." Was it cowardly? The guys who attacked the Cole died for their cause.
Is it criminal or war? The attackers' were members of an armed force doing their duty. Their goal is to get U.S. presence in the Middle East reduced or to get us out of there entirely. They are trying to remove us from the battlefield and they are attacking uniformed members of our armed forces in the performance of their duties. Does this sound like war?
The trouble is that U.S. national policy defines a terrorist attack as a cowardly crime. When members of the uniformed military think about cowardly criminals, we tend to think of people who steal from the post exchange and things like that. So somehow we have to get our people in uniform to realize that national policy calls terrorism a crime because it fits into the international context much better that way—if we call it a crime, most nations of the world will support activities to fight it. Even the Syrians will arrest people for terrorist crimes. But to translate this activity into terms our people in uniform will pay attention to, we have to use words such as war. If we say you are at war and these people are trying to kill you, then everybody in the military knows what to do. So we discussed this issue in our report.
You need to look at the patterns of terrorist activity, and we did this in our report, to come to any judgment about the Cole and DoD's role in either supporting her or leaving her hanging out there. When you examine the attacks on the Marine barracks at Beirut, the World Trade Center in New York, the federal office building at Oklahoma City, Khobar Towers, the two East Africa embassies, and the Cole, there are some striking similarities. They all were truck bombs. The Cole was attacked by a truck bomb. It had an outboard motor, but it was a truck bomb. All these attacks were in daylight.
There is another similarity. They were all different. In every case the terrorists changed their pattern just a little bit; they found a seam or a way to get at us for which we were not prepared. This has enormous implications for the intelligence and training communities.
So what is the next attack going to look like? It is going to be a truck bomb in daylight, and it is going to be applied in some new and different way. The bottom line of our review of the case of the Cole was to give the Secretary of Defense 30 findings and 50-some recommendations by which we felt the United States could continue to do its engagement activities but mitigate the risk.
I will summarize briefly what we told the Secretary of Defense. First, we found no tactically actionable intelligence predicting this attack. Nevertheless, we came up with a series of recommendations that the intelligence community must do if we are to continue with these kinds of engagement activities. Some are classified, and many of them have serious resource implications. I will address a couple of them.
We believe that units such as the Cole or that Air Force C-141 refueling in Nairobi require tailored overwatch. Someone has to be responsible for watching out for them, like we do for other kinds of special missions in the U.S. military. That is not being done. If you go to the theater joint intelligence centers and examine their workload and their priorities, which we did, you will find they are related to war plans, contingency plans, and the Cold War. The transiting unit does not get much attention. We-- like General Wayne Downing after Khobar Towers; Admiral William Crowe after the East Africa bombings; and Admiral Robert Long after the Beirut barracks—concluded that the U.S. intelligence organizations need to shift more assets and resources to analytical resources supporting antiterrorism.
The intelligence community has shifted some resources from its Cold War missions to its post-Cold War missions, but only at the margins. That is particularly true for analytical support. We also found that our counterintelligence assets really have not shifted to fighting terrorism. We have not thought that this is a serious threat that is not going away. In fact, we found that counterintelligence assets actually have moved away from fighting terrorism recently to the protection of technology, a la Los Alamos and things like that.
In the area of training, the Cole and her crew met or exceeded all the DoD and Navy antiterrorism and force-protection training requirements. In fact, the Cole received a letter of commendation from Second Fleet for her training performance. Nevertheless, the product of this training was not a vigilant, alert, deterrence-oriented team. So we have to assume the problem was the training regime. When we examined it in detail, we found serious flaws.
First, in the U.S. Navy, force protection/antiterrorism is not a primary mission. It is a noncombat operation. It is in the second order of training priorities, after antiair, strike, and antisubmarine warfare and all these other things. Force protection/antiterrorism does not get the support, the energy, the resources, the time, the observer-trainers, or a thinking opposition force. We simply do not produce the antiterrorism posture we need. So we recommended it be elevated in priority.
Training for uncertainty creates a problem. This is a cultural problem. Our trainers will tell you that you train for certainty; you educate for uncertainty. When we train, we want people to do things the same way every time. Whether fighting fires or launching airplanes, it does not make a difference—you do it the same way every time. But how do you train people to recognize the unusual? The next terrorist attack is going to be different from the last one. How do you train people to recognize the unexpected? That is a requirement the current system is not meeting.
We recommended shifting the entire training regime to train people to recognize uncertainty, to recognize the unusual, to recognize when something is wrong, and to be able to take quick action. That is the easy part.
The harder part is to train people to a level where their performance can be construed as a deterrence function. In the U.S. doctrine for fighting terrorism, there are three pillars: detect, disrupt, and deter. In the case of the Cole, the threat was not detected. Maybe the Cole's crew could have disrupted the attack had it been detected, maybe not. Deterrence, however, is enormously important. Terrorists are willing to die to succeed, but they are not willing to die for failure. If you can deter them, they will seek another enemy. We have tons of intelligence documenting cases where terrorists have collected intelligence, planned, gotten in position to conduct an attack, and then decided not to execute it because the target was judged too tough. Deterrence works.
The U.S. Navy training regime does not teach deterrence. It does not require people to have a game face. It does not require the posting of guards who look like guards, who look like they are ready to do things, who are equipped with the right stuff. In the case of the Cole, topside security watches were equipped with shotguns. That is not a deterrent to a guy coming in a boat from 200 yards away. You have to look and act like you are serious. You have to have the right posture—a game face. This is not easy to do. The training to achieve this level of sophistication is rigorous.
As part of a sophisticated deterrent training program, you must have a solid understanding of the rules of engagement. Our report found that the standing rules of engagement—the Joint Chiefs of Staff rules of engagement—themselves were adequate.
Finally, under the training area, we found that in some high-threat areas the threat is so severe that no one should expect the average unit to be able to counter it alone, and some temporary augmentation would be useful. There are cases in the Department of Defense where services do this; they temporarily augment units for transits through dangerous areas. The U.S. Navy has a history of doing this. During the Tanker War, the Navy put Stinger surface-to-air missile teams on the decks of transiting ships as a temporary augmentation measure.
Force protection is the third area we spent a lot of time examining. We recommended that the department implement 20-some things to address force protection issues. I will not go through them all, but I will highlight a couple to demonstrate what we measured.
Essentially, the bottom line of our force protection recommendations was to raise the cost of doing business in high-threat areas. We said, if you are going to go into these very nasty areas, you need to do these 10-15 things. Some will require spending money. Some will require hostnation agreements. A lot of our diplomats do not want to have to hammer out such agreements because they fear aggravating the host nation. In our report we raised the cost of doing this kind of engagement activity to the point where if you cannot get that agreement with the host nation, then you do not visit that nation.
Another of our recommendations dealt with the need for fully manned force protection positions. We found throughout DoD and all the services the widespread practice of having force protection be a collateral duty. This is true at the one-, two-, three-star level staffs and fleet commander staffs. Force protection positions need to be full-time.
We need to do better manning of counterintelligence organizations; these are the people who really sort out where the threats are. We need to fix the threat-level system. If you followed the congressional hearings having to do with the attack on the Cole you know that even experts confuse threat levels with threat conditions. As soon as you get into a discussion about whether the threat level was lower in Djibouti than it was in Aden, immediately you confuse threat conditions and threat levels. We do it to ourselves. We have a very complex system that nobody can figure out.
Three different agencies—the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the theater commander-in-chief (CinC)—set threat levels. That is a terrible situation. It is awfully confusing. Then there is the name: threat condition, threat con. It is a completely different system. So we recommended changing the name of the threat con system. Threat levels refer to what the bad guy is doing. Whereas, the measures of threat conditions—for example, the Cole was in Threat Con Bravo in Aden—refer to things we are doing. So why not change the name of measures that refer to our actions as alert conditions? The threat level refers to the other guy; what we are doing should not have the word "threat" in it.
We recommended that higher authority direct the threat condition measures that transiting units should undertake. Right now, we have this ridiculous process in which a transiting unit submits a message to its higher authority that says, "I'm going to do the following measures for my threat condition." The higher authority then either approves or disapproves the proposed plan. The guy submitting his plan is clueless. He never has been there, does not know the local host-nation people, does not know what to expect from the host-nation security forces, and does not know what the last guy before him did.
Now, of course, immediately we took flak for this recommendation: "Oh, the commanding officer is king, and we should never take away the commanding officer's prerogative to do whatever he wants to do." Hogwash.
We also recommended threat conditions be classified. We should not advertise to the bad guys what we are doing. In addition, we made strong recommendations about procedures for reporting into a new operating area.
Rules of engagement is another area that deserves special attention. Essentially, if you are a U.S. military commander, there are two ways you can open fire. One is in reaction to a hostile attack. The other is in reaction to hostile intent. Hostile attack is not applicable to terrorism. When the guy has completed his attack, there is no point in shooting anybody; the attack is over.
So that leaves us with hostile intent. We believe that the current rules of engagement are adequate if you have a way to determine hostile intent. But as someone comes toward you, how do you determine that this guy is a terrorist with hostile intent and you should shoot him? There are ways to do it. You can build barriers and warning zones and keep-out zones and inspection points and things like that. We already do that on the land side; why can't we do it on the water side? If you cannot negotiate these types of conditions with the host nation, then you have to evaluate whether you should do that engagement activity.
The second rule of engagement caveat we raised is very important to serving military professionals. We told the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the higher the threat level the lower the threshold for declaring hostile intent. For the CinC, this means that if you are keeping areas at very high threat levels, then you should support the commanding officer who fires a warning shot. Well, this did not go down very well, because this is another cost of doing business that the system may not be able to stand up to. In other words, the establishment says, "Oh, no, no. If a commanding officer or one of his guys fires a warning shot in a foreign country, he better damn well be firing at real terrorists."
We said, "Well, you can't have it both ways." We found that keeping threat levels extraordinarily high for long periods of time is numbing. The result is that the forces kind of went to sleep.
In the area of logistics much was made in the press about why the port visit was unclassified. Well, you cannot do logistics with commercial companies and keep it classified, but there are actions you can undertake to turn this to your advantage. You can use contracting to increase your force protection. You can contract with host-nation people to do things you cannot do because of sovereignty issues. Host-nation people can carry guns; they can control the local nationals; they can control traffic; they can manage separation zones. You can write into the contract that the contractor has to provide interpreters. You can write it into the contract that the contractor has to put some kind of obvious marker on all the boats designated to come alongside, so you can tell the good guys from the bad guys.
The final area I will address has to do with organizational matters. We found that organizations in Washington, D.C., are not well placed to fight terrorism and to provide force protection for units such as the Cole. In DoD, there is no unity of effort. There are six or seven vertical stovepipes that deal with intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, force protection, antiterrorism, consequence management, etc. Then horizontally they are not even organized the same. You go into one of them and you will find that the intelligence guy has policy responsibility, oversight responsibility, and budgetary responsibility. You go to the force protection guy and he has one of these responsibilities, but not two. We recommended to the Secretary of Defense that he appoint someone at the Assistant Secretary of Defense level do something about this issue. Interestingly, the 2001 Authorization Act requires the Secretary of Defense to do that. By the filing of our report in January, the Secretary had chosen not to.
We found the interagency coordination process for engagement activities to be unsatisfactory. DoD has a very aggressive, well-managed engagement activity around the world. The other departments do not. We strongly recommended an interagency coordination process that would facilitate the coordination of our activities, because there were questions about what the embassy did and what the DoD attaché did, and things like that.
Finally, it is in DoD's best interests that host-nation security forces help our military units. In most places, host-nation security forces does not mean the navy, air force, or army; it usually means coast guards, internal security forces, customs, or something like that. And DoD cannot easily work with those kinds of activities, except on an exception or waiver basis. If that is the responsibility of the State Department, it needs funding for it. It is in our nation's best interest that these activities be robust. So we recommended that these activities be streamlined, so that DoD can help State in ports, airports, and things like that.
Our commission's findings are designed to permit the U.S. military to continue to do its mission and mitigate the risk. They call for a training program and an equipping program that will help the U.S. military recognize the next threat. We were not permitted or asked to address accountability issues; we did not. We coordinated our report with the Navy JAG Manual investigation. I have read every word of it, including all the endorsements. We coordinated our report with the FBI as to who-done-it. I know all about it. One must take all three reports together to evaluate fairly accountability and responsibility.
The bottom line is that the terrorist threat is not going away. It will be the weapon of choice of our future adversaries. The U.S. military is going to continue active engagement programs. Therefore, we are going to bump into these guys on a regular basis. We have to get out of the purely defensive posture of building bigger sandbags. We must have an active force-protection stance. We hope our report will help save lives.