Terrorism, Retaliation, and Victory: Awaken the Soul of America to Defeat Terrorism Without Casualties

By Brian Ree

We could use some help. Whatever you think of the present situation in Iraq, about President Bush and our nations Global War on Terror, about all the political spin that is being put on current events, we can all agree: we could use some help.

The threat of terrorist attack persists; the threat of chemical warfare and/or biological warfare may even have increased. Whether or not Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), other regimes that support terrorism do have them, and we cannot be sure that they are not sharing them with terrorists determined to hurt us. Even a single completed attack with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons will be intolerable. While we can count on our military to prevail in a stand-up fight, military history and current events teach us that we cannot defeat this enemy by force of arms alone. Indeed, despite all our prowess and strength, we remain vulnerable; it seems just a matter of time before we are struck again.

How can we prevail in the battle for the hearts and minds of the populations from whence tomorrows terrorists may come? Fortunately, there are things we can do. Field-tested, proven cutting edge research reveals that subtle psychological operations can disarm opponents, promote peace and inhibit attacks on our soldiers overseas and on our citizenry at home. The implementation of novel solutions will require that we abandon politics as usual, overcome our ignorance and apathy, and stop kowtowing to moneyed special interests and the agendas of corporate greed. We must demonstrate the will to be true to the most fundamental principles of America.

What can you do? Read the excerpt. Get the book. Contact your representatives. Become knowledgeable. Be active. Hold people in business and government accountable. Lets move forward: do your part.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 31, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465331724

Brian Ree

Colonel Brian M. Rees, Medical Corps, US Army Reserve, is currently the commander of the 349th General Hospital, headquartered in Los Angeles California. A graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College, he has over 26 years of commissioned service. He received his medical degree and master’s degree in public health from Tulane University, and is a board certified family physician. He has taught Transcendental Meditation and researched the application of technologies of consciousness in violent conflict resolution. This is his second book.

Book preview

TERRORISM, RETALIATION, AND VICTORY

Awaken the Soul of America to Defeat Terrorism without Casualties

Brian Rees

Copyright © 2003 by Brian Rees.

Library of Congress Number: 2002096712

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book reflects the points of view of the author only, and not those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any other governmental agency or other organization.

The authors of other sources cited in this book have not reviewed this book nor is there any reason to believe that they would share my conclusions. Any errors are mine and mine alone.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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To my family

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I

TERRORISM

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

PART II

RETALIATION

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART III

VICTORY

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

INTRODUCTION

September 11th, 2001.

Everything changed.

The families and loved ones of those killed, entire communities, are scarred for life. The rest of us, we work, we travel, we even laugh again, but something’s wrong. An inner voice reminds us that the world is different, colder; our illusion of invincibility has been disrupted, and the feelings of dislocation, grief and anger wax and wane but never completely go away.

Anthrax is in the mail; smallpox vaccine is news for the first time in decades; American soldiers die in foreign lands.

Americans continue to ask.

Why did it happen?

Can we prevent it from happening again?

What can I do?

At the time of this writing, we are entering the third year of what the U.S. military community calls the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). It is a strange war. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the United States has been the world’s sole superpower. No one can compete with our technology or our military prowess on the field of battle in a stand-up fight. Those who would oppose us try to create an asymmetric battlefield. Since they cannot successfully attack our arms, they attack our heart.

The formula for presentations in the Army is threefold:

Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, then

Tell ‘em, then

Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.

So this is what this book is going to tell you.

Part one is about terrorism. What is terrorism? What are the tools, the weapons terrorists may have at their disposal? How real is the risk of terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction?

Part two is about retaliation. What can we do to retaliate? How do we decide to do what we do? Who are we in the Armed Forces, what makes us tick, and how are you related to the Armed Forces (even if you don’t think you are)? Who are terrorists? Why do terrorists do what they do? Knowing our enemy can help greatly in determining the best ways to defeat him. Perhaps the most important questions: Will retaliation work? And is retaliation what we Americans really want to do?

Part three is about victory. It is within our grasp, but it’s not a lay up. After the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are historical footnotes, we will still be wrestling with the dynamics that created them. If we are to be truly victorious and if we are to enjoy a long and just peace, it will not be accomplished exclusively by force of arms. We will need to broaden our thinking, take bold steps in both the foreign and domestic arenas, and change the face of America.

The Chinese symbol for crisis is a combination of the symbols for danger and opportunity. It is clear that we are in danger.

Perhaps less clear is the fact that the political, emotional, and moral fallout from the attacks we suffered left us, even if only for a while, with a sense of national unity; it provides us with a unique opportunity. We may have the national will to remake our nation. Fortunately, all the changes we need are in the direction of becoming more true to the values and promise of America.

PART I

TERRORISM

Kill one, frighten ten thousand.

—ancient China, anonymous

CHAPTER 1

Terror

War is terrible, but the terrifying nature of war is largely a side effect. As the Spartan phalanx advanced upon its enemy and brought its lances forward all at the same moment, their opponents knew they were about to engage soldiers who trained incessantly for battle. From the Red Chinese soldiers blowing bugles at the onset of an assault in Korea to the Coalition planes bombing Iraqi soldiers in Desert Storm, terror is part of the experience. While commanders recognize the value of terrorizing their enemies in terms of lowering their morale and combat effectiveness, terror is an often incidental means toward a tactical end.

Attacks on civilian populations are not necessarily terroristic. Indeed, they usually are directed at the infrastructure supporting the enemy force. The Union destruction of crops in the Shenandoah Valley and Sherman’s march through Georgia are American examples. Soldiers of good conscience resist terrorizing civilians. Chuck Yeager recounts receiving orders to strafe German civilians if military targets did not present themselves. He and his comrades complained, on both humanitarian and utilitarian grounds (bailing out over civilians you’ve just strafed is a bad end).

Terrorists on the other hand want to create terror as a tactical end. The army defines terror as the ‘calculated use of violence or threat of violence to increase fear, to coerce or intimidate a government or society in pursuit of goals, political, religious or ideological.’ The purpose is to create psychological trauma. The military value of their target is a secondary consideration.

There is usually a strategic purpose as well. The Basque separatist wants a homeland. The Irish terrorist wants all British rule out of Ireland. The Islamic extremist wants the end of Israel and the end of infidel presence in the land of Mohammed.

Motivations run from the prosaic to the bizarre. The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan wanted to use nerve agent to initiate Armageddon, leaving the world to only those followers who had the proper angelic seal on their foreheads. Some American white racist groups share that apocalyptic leaning; they use The Turner Diaries as their guide, seeking to start World War III in order to rid the planet of all non-white non-Christians. The Rajneeshees in Oregon used salmonella in an attempt to make the locals too sick to vote, so they could take over town politics.

Some combatants cannot compete with the military of what they view as their oppressors, so they irregularly and covertly attack more or less governmental or military targets. A cynic might note that such guerrillas are called ‘freedom fighters’ when they’re on our side, and ‘terrorists’ when they oppose us. Those who clearly deserve the label terrorist deliberately attack soft targets—noncombatants, civilians, women and children. By such attacks, they attempt to rob the target population of its confidence in tomorrow.

Unprepared populations can experience societal breakdown. This is exacerbated by perceptions of poor leadership, use of a new or unanticipated weapon, no perceived effective response, and a lack of accurate information. The terrorists certainly hit us with an unanticipated weapon, but I don’t believe they correctly anticipated our response. Hitler used the terror bombing of London in 1940 to try to break British morale with similar poor results.

We can understand why the attacks on New York and the Pentagon failed to generate panic. Leaders at all levels performed admirably. Firefighters, police and other first responders performed heroically. Accurate information, even though it was all bad news, was available either instantly, or at least was perceived to be available as soon as possible.

Though most Americans did (and do) feel psychologically traumatized, we did not see a breakdown characterized by self-centered actions such as looting. Instead, we saw a galvanizing of society. We are not surprised by the cool professionalism of those at the Pentagon. But the response of New Yorkers was inspirational and created a positive feedback loop nationwide, responsible in large measure for the virtual unanimity of sentiment we all experienced.

Although almost all terrorist attacks so far have used conventional weapons, my concern in this book will be more regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Conventional weapons are things such as bombs and guns. WMD comprise three categories: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

The use of commercial jet aircraft as flying bombs has led to the coining of a new term, weapon of mass effect. At the risk of being visibly incorrect, I believe that method is already obsolete. September 11th put hijackers out of business, both new suicide bombers as well as old style hijackers. Anyone who stands up on a plane and announces he has a bomb and expects to be flown to Havana or Beirut or Algeria is in for a rude surprise. A month or so after the World Trade Center destruction, a deranged man (not a terrorist) got into the cockpit of an airliner bound from Los Angeles to Chicago and put the pilot in a headlock. Passengers subdued the man. A passenger was interviewed after the plane landed and was asked if he had seen the procession of passengers moving up the aisle to confront the miscreant. He replied, It wasn’t a procession, it was a track meet. Almost every guy on the plane ran up there to get this guy. As long as increased security measures can keep automatic weapons off airplanes, passengers and crew should be able to defeat potential hijackers.

We remain very vulnerable to conventional terrorism. There are only about a half dozen key switching points in the East Coast power grid. The home of all our B-2 stealth bombers is a single base in Missouri. Our ports remain vulnerable to virtually all types of weapons packed into cargo containers. Vulnerable ports mean vulnerable major metropolitan areas. The use of conventional weapons on vehicles or facilities that contain hazardous materials could mimic the use of chemical weapons. There are over two and a half million truckers licensed to haul haz-mat in the U.S.; our exposure is considerable. Our infrastructure, bridges, railways tunnels, electrical switching stations, each could be taken out with a truck-borne fertilizer bomb. Each could, but not all at once. While such attacks could kill many of our citizens and disrupt our nation’s commerce, they do not pose a threat to the nation as a whole.

WMD on the other hand, present a potentially devastating level of impact.

Weapons of mass destruction have reasonably become the weapons of choice for terrorists. Many such weapons have features that make them attractive for terrorists. For instance, they are:

• Relatively easy to obtain

• Relatively easy to produce Deliverable by fairly available modes

• Usually undetected for days (biological weapons anyway), giving perpetrators an opportunity to escape

• Secondary and tertiary transmission with some biological agents, possibly causing infection remote to the initial release of agent

• Inexpensive: The following table helps explain.

TABLE A

Weapons of mass destruction generally are understood to comprise three classes of weapons: nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. An easy acronym is NBC. We’ll consider these one at a time. Let’s start with chemical weapons.

CHAPTER 2

The most fiendish, wicked thing

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys—An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . . Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

From Lieutenant Wilfred Owen of the Royal Army, before he was killed in action in 1918

World War I (WWI) was the high water mark (so far) for the use of chemical weapons, causing over a million casualties. And the most devastating class of chemical weapons, nerve agents, had not yet been invented. Chemical weapons come in six flavors:1 pulmonary2 vesicants3 blood4 nerve5 incapacitating6 riot control, defoliants, smoke, flame

We’ll talk about the first four categories; they are most likely to be used by terrorists. The fifth category, incapacitating agents, include LSD-like substances that render those affected unable to perform complex directed tasks because of their intoxication. While they may have had a role in war games for some theoretical battlefield, they’ve never (that we know of) been used in real battle. I do not believe they would be employed by terrorists, so let’s forget them.

Use of the substances in the sixth category is not actually chemical warfare according to U.S. and NATO doctrine. Without sounding too cynical, the reasons are simple. Follow the logic:

We have a policy of no first use of chemical warfare agents.

However, we do use riot control agents such as tear gas, as well as defoliants, smoke, and flame such as napalm.

Therefore, those substances are not chemical warfare agents.

For more information, I refer you to Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, which is Part I of the Textbook of Military Medicine series, Warfare, Weaponry, and the Casualty. (The quotes in this chapter are from that source unless otherwise indicated.)

A Brief History of Chemical Warfare (CW)

Attempts to use chemicals in warfare date back to antiquity. Arsenical smokes were used by the