The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2 page)

I hope to convince you that we face a potentially fatal challenge, which we must and can overcome
.

As you read these pages, remember that you don’t have to be a military officer to see the global war. A man of peace, Pope Francis, has warned us of the gravity of our situation: “Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction,” Francis said at a mass at the Italian Military Memorial of Redipuglia.
(“War Is Madness.”
USAtoday.com/story/news/word/2014/09/13/pope=urges-world-to-shed-apathy-toward-new-threats/155753437
).

And he knows the consequences: “War ruins everything, even the bonds between brothers. War is irrational; its only plan is to bring destruction: It seeks to grow by destroying.”

Very few Americans—indeed very few Western leaders who, from time to time, use the word “war” and promise to “win” it—seem to recognize that a global war is being waged against us. Even the few who follow the actual combat tend to see the events separately: there’s fighting in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the Sinai, terrorists are at work all over the place, and we try to figure out what to do in each case.

It isn’t likely to work out well. Fighting well requires that you know your enemy, as the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said. Our leaders don’t want to identify our enemies. That puts us on the path to defeat.

Most Americans mistakenly believe that peace is the normal condition of mankind, while war is some weird aberration. Actually, it’s the other way around. Most of human history has to do with war, and preparations for the next one. But we Americans do not prepare for the next war, are invariably surprised when it erupts, and, since we did not take prudent steps when it would have been relatively simple to prevail, usually end up fighting on our enemies’ more difficult and costly terms.

So we don’t know our enemy and are not prepared to fight effectively.

Fewer still have any idea how to win. I’m in a better position than most on this score. I’ve seen, shot, captured, interrogated, and studied our enemies.

I know them, and they scare me, a guy who doesn’t scare often or easily. They scare me even though we have defeated them every time we fought seriously. We defeated al Qaeda and the Iranians in Iraq, and the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, they kept fighting and we went away.

Let’s face it: right now we’re losing, and I’m talking about a very big war, not just Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam. But we are not permitted to speak or write those two words, which is potentially fatal to our culture. We can’t beat them if we don’t understand them and are afraid to define them, but our political leaders haven’t permitted that. We’re not allowed to use the phrase “Radical Islam” or “Islamists.” That’s got to change.

Once we’ve understood them, we’ve got to destroy them. Here’s how:

•
  We have to organize all our national power, from military and economic to intelligence and tough-minded diplomacy. It’s not cheap, and it’s probably going to last through several generations.

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  They must be denied safe havens, and countries that shelter them have to be issued a brutal choice: either eliminate the Radical Islamists or you risk direct attack yourselves. Yes, there will be some foreign countries that can’t defeat their indigenous Islamists, even though they want to, and they’ll need help. They shouldn’t be punished twice—first by the Islamists, then by us and our allies—and we should welcome them to our ranks.
     On the other hand, some of these countries are considered “partners” of ours, but they aren’t. We can’t afford to be gulled by foreign countries that publicly declare their friendship, but then work in cahoots with our enemies.

•
  We’ve got to attack the Islamists everywhere and in every way. That most certainly includes attacking their evil doctrines and detailing their many failures. Are we not fully entitled to tell the truth about them? In the Cold War, we repeatedly exposed the failures of Communism. Why shouldn’t we do the same with al Qaeda and ISIS?

As you see, I’m not a devotee of so-called political correctness. I don’t believe all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral, than the system our main enemies want to impose on us.

This kind of war is not at all new. It created our world. I dare say that most Americans don’t realize that the religious and political transformation of Europe that we call the Reformation entailed hundreds of years of very bloody fighting. The religious people who settled America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fleeing that terrible bloodshed. The world badly needs an Islamic Reformation, and we should not be surprised if violence is involved. It’s normal. The important thing is to defeat the Islamists, and we must make it clear why they have declared and waged war against us, and why we reject their doctrines.

We’ve got to stop kidding ourselves about the intentions of the state and nonstate supporters and enablers of violent Islamism, whether on the ground, in the mosques, or online. We speak for freedom, they denounce it and crush it. That means we are the bull’s-eye at the center of their gunsights. And we’ve got to stop feeling the slightest bit guilty about calling them by name and identifying them as fanatical killers acting on behalf of a failed civilization.

We also have to stop kidding ourselves about our enemies’ intellectual capabilities. They may be crazy, but they’re not stupid. The bin Laden documents, and the ISIS timetable for victory, show they study us very carefully, and they excel at identifying our weaknesses. Once they learn how to exploit our weak points, they keep doing it. They keep staging multiple attacks against population centers, from New York City to Paris, from Mumbai to Beirut to Brussels, because it keeps working.

Finally, they are willing—sometimes eager—to die for their global mission.

So how do we prevail?

If you want to be a successful intelligence professional you have to learn how to get inside other people’s minds. Mostly you’re getting inside your enemies’ minds, and you have to feel the same passions, beliefs, and fears that drive them. The same requirements apply to leading and following your own people, by the way. You’ve got to get inside the minds of both the men you lead and the ones you have to obey, whether they’re military or civilians.

You’ve got to be able to anticipate your own men’s mistakes, predict your enemies’ actions, and understand what your superiors want from you. I did pretty well at the first tasks, as you can see from the results on the battlefield, and from my appointment as the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in the U.S. government. You’ll have to judge for yourself how well I did in my dealings with my bosses, especially at the end of my career, when I was told my service had come to an end a year ahead of schedule.

I spent many years and a lot of effort to get inside the heads of our enemies, many of whom we killed or captured, but many of whom remain at large, hell-bent on destroying us. That’s why those passions, beliefs, and fears that I found in their heads remain important today. If you understand them it’s a lot easier to defeat them, which is the central mission of this generation.

We’re going to have to learn to think like the evil men—women don’t really count in their ranks, aside from being used to breed new killers and as suicide bombers—who have sworn homage to al Qaeda, the Islamic State, various other jihadi groups, and to the leaders of radical regimes like the one in Iran. They will continue to do terrible things, and escalate their war against us, against Muslims who reject their doctrines, against Christian “infidels,” against Jews, against women, indeed against the entire Western enterprise. We have to destroy them before they fulfill their mission.

Don’t think for a minute that they’re not good at what they do. They have a serious ideology—replete with intense passions, beliefs, and fears—and they mean to dominate the world. They have built a fearsome movement, based on deep religious conviction. They think they’re winning, and so do I.

They’re good fighters. They have proven their courage and shown great skill. They learn fast, they quickly give up failing tactics, and they’re skilled at the techniques of Internet operations, from hacking to propaganda. They’re tough enemies, as I learned fighting them on multiple battlefields. We need to be a lot better. Today we’re not nearly good enough. A big reason for that is that we don’t get inside their heads. Alas, our schools, media, and social networks are doing a poor job of helping Americans understand our enemies in order to defeat them.

So is our government.

1

The Making of an Intel Officer

I was one very lucky kid. Life was rough-and-tumble for my hectic family of eleven, living and growing up in a small house in Middletown, Rhode Island. Finding a place to lay your head for a night’s sleep was a never-ending revolving search to nab one of a few fold-up cots or a bunk bed that was open. And breakfast could easily turn into a negotiation or fight for the last glass of powdered milk and a piece of toast. For a time, I added to this nonstop turbulence.

Looking back, it was this turmoil and my own dangerous behavior as an adolescent that led to my ability to get inside our enemies’ heads.

I was one of those nasty tough kids, hell-bent on breaking rules for the adrenaline rush and hardwired just enough to not care about the consequences. This misguided mind-set and some serious and unlawful activity by me and two of my co-hoodlum teenage friends would eventually lead to my arrest. The charges warranted a very unpleasant night in “Socko”—the state boys reformatory—and a year of supervised probation.
Saved!
I thought at the time. Stay clean for those twelve months and my record would be expunged.

As fate would have it, this arrest and my father’s steel hands and mother’s piercing eyes of disappointment turned my downward trajectory of crash and burn into a reservoir of opportunity for the rest of my life. From there on out, life would change. I was lucky, although it sure didn’t seem that way at the time.

As the cliché goes, “it takes one to know one.” Just like reformed hackers who have done tremendous work in cyber security, or the miscreants of the
Dirty Dozen
made famous in World War II for their unorthodox war-fighting ways (to say the least), I was briefly the same sort of irreverent rascal. Like many of our best intelligence professionals, life experiences, like mine, sharpen our focus into how the world looks through criminal eyes.

My father was a no-nonsense guy named Charlie. He served more than twenty years in the U.S. Army in both World War II and Korea. He retired as a sergeant first class. Like virtually all of his peers, Charlie was a tough disciplinarian and worked hard. After the Army, he went to work for a bank, starting as a teller and finishing as vice president, which tells you a lot about his talent and ambition. Common among his generation, he was a chronic smoker and like it or not, being of Irish descent, Charlie toasted life with drink in hand more than he should have done. After surviving two major heart attacks and a total of six heart bypasses, he developed serious diabetes, eventually losing both of his feet. A fighter right up to the day he died, it was a combination of smoking, drinking, heart complications, and diabetes that killed him. That day was a terrible and intense one for me. Waves of memories of my childhood rushed into my mind as I remembered the lessons I learned from my rejection of his good sergeant’s counsel and near-daily physical interactions.

My mother, Helen, was an even tougher Irishman. She kept order in a one-bathroom house with nine kids who all had to be out the door at the same time. She organized the daily chaos in genealogical order, first born, first in, youngest last. It was good training for living in military barracks. In fact, growing up with enough siblings to field a baseball team was invaluable in learning how to build an effective organization of a very different kind.

Helen was valedictorian of her high school class. She was brilliant and remains the most courageous person I have ever known. Although she had received a full scholarship to Brown University’s Pembroke College for women, when Charlie came back on leave from World War II and asked for her hand in marriage, she dropped out of school, married her high school sweetheart, and the kids soon started their arrivals. Later in her life, Helen went on to finish her undergraduate degree and earned her Doctor of Laws—all the time working, going to school nights and weekends while raising her Irish brood. She was not one to suffer fools gladly. And anyone foolish enough to drop by for a casual visit was immediately put to work or could find themselves in a heated political debate. She ran our house like the Army bases that were my homes for decades. Once retired from service to our country, Helen and Charlie moved into our little house on the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean in Middletown, Rhode Island, where I raised hell and drew the wrong kind of attention until these two giants in my life put a stop to it all.

One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers.

Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”