01 August 2008

New Defense Strategy Focuses on Terrorism, Extremists

Plan seeks to balance resources to unconventional, conventional threats

Defense Secretary Gates, left, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen discuss the 2008 National Defense Strategy.

By Merle D. Kellerhals Jr.
Staff Writer

Washington -- The most significant threat to U.S. national security for the foreseeable future will come from terrorists and violent extremist ideology, according to the 2008 National Defense Strategy released recently by the Pentagon.

"Violent extremist movements such as al-Qaida and its associates comprise a complex and urgent challenge," the strategy says.  "Like communism and fascism before it, today's violent extremist ideology rejects the rules and structures of the international system.

"Its adherents reject state sovereignty, ignore borders, and attempt to deny self-determination and human dignity wherever they gain power."

To counter this threat, the Defense Department has developed a new national defense strategy that is designed to defeat this unconventional challenge as well as conventional military challenges, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a July 31 Pentagon briefing.

"I firmly believe that in the years ahead, our military is much more likely to engage in asymmetric conflict than conventional conflict against a rising state power," Gates said.  Meeting unconventional and conventional challenges requires resources and funding capabilities to do both, he said.

The national defense strategy serves two critical national security functions for the United States: It helps define the threats, and it helps policy planners develop strategies and resources to meet those threats.  While the current administration leaves office next January, Gates said, this document will provide a blueprint for the next administration.

"For the foreseeable future, winning the long war against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the [United States].  We must defeat violent extremism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society and foster an environment inhospitable to violent extremists and all those who support them," the strategy says.

Gates described the new document as a balance between the range of capabilities needed to persist and prevail in an irregular conflict, like Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need to sustain conventional and strategic forces' superiority against rising powers.

It is also essential that the lessons being learned in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan not be forgotten when they are over, he said.

"The principal challenge is how to ensure that the capabilities gained and counterinsurgency lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the lessons we learned from other places where we have engaged in irregular warfare over the last two decades, are institutionalized within the defense establishment," Gates said.

Also worrisome, the strategy document says, is that physical pressures -- demographic, resource, energy, climatic and environmental -- could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological and geopolitical change to create much greater uncertainty.

"Whenever possible, the [Defense] Department will position itself both to respond to and reduce uncertainty," the document says.

The last strategy issued by the Pentagon was in March 2005 under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.