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FORECASTING WAR

So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.

—President Barack Obama

The least successful enterprise in Washington, D.C., is the one that places bets on the nature and character of tomorrow’s wars. The industry remains enormously influential and well financed, because everyone in Washington knows that bad bets cost lives and waste trillions. As our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the services, defense industries, and their supporting think tanks, along with Congress, academia, and the media, continue the search for a new and imaginative view of wars to come. Virtually without exception, they get it wrong—and only in Washington are bad bets rewarded rather than punished.

The future-gazing industry grew apace with the emerging dominance of the United States military after World War II. Since then, two generations of failed future-gazers have made the term “intelligence failure” a hyphenated word. Perhaps at no time in our history has a single governmental function been so singularly (and rightfully) vilified. From 9/11 to the appearance of the Sunni insurgency in 2003, to the more recent return of the Taliban and the profoundly disturbing and unexpected arrival of ISIS, our intelligence agencies have left a sorrowful trail of missed guesses and informational black holes. In fairness to current political leaders, our poor record in forecasting threats has a long and uninterrupted provenance that has led to tragic strategic surprises. Korea caught Truman completely by surprise and unprepared for war. Kennedy and Johnson would never have gone to war in Vietnam had they suspected that the price would be sixty thousand dead. Saddam’s surprise invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was an intelligence meltdown of the first order. In 2003, Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction.

Failure to predict the time, place, cost, duration, intensity, and nature of the threat has cost the nation dearly in lives and treasure. Every aspect of defense policy and management is dependent upon anticipating properly whom we will fight and, equally, whom we should ignore. Poor threat prediction has too often led to the purchase of weapons and development of forces ill suited to the exigencies of future battlefields. Failure cannot be ascribed to want of effort. Without question, the most engaging sport inside the Beltway is “threat analysis” by legions of academics and think-tank gurus. The collective bill for intelligence prediction is somewhere north of fifty billion per year. Satellites, drones, planes, and computers spend millions of hours looking and counting. Tens of thousands of well-credentialed analysts work tirelessly, interpreting the data in an effort to divine the future.

Threat prediction fails, in part, because the process is done today using methodologies inherited from the Cold War and hardwired into a bureaucratic process that virtually guarantees failure at every turn. These methodologies generally divide themselves into five analytical “schools.” The culture that spawned each school shapes the nature of the inquiry. The sum of the processes practiced by these schools exerts a subtle influence that inevitably identifies future threats more like the enemies we want to fight than the enemies we have fought consistently since the end of World War II.

The “Scenario Development School” is the fastest-growing cottage industry inside Beltway think tanks. Threat prediction using “scenarios” involves a process as simple as it is deceiving. Pick one of the usual suspects with serious military capabilities who sits athwart a piece of ground of strategic importance to the United States and then encourage the stimulation of excuses for going to war with him. Since the end of the Cold War, the list of usual suspects has been monotonously consistent: China, Iran, and North Korea (with, in the background, Russia as the nostalgic favorite). Again, the problem with the scenario approach has been that, try as the pundits might (and they really try—particularly at budget time), they have not been able to elevate the overt intentions of these actors to a level approaching imminent danger.

The “Emerging Technology School” consists of frightened and well-remunerated techno-warriors who constantly scan the threat horizon anxious to alert the security community to enemies who they sense are harnessing the diabolical genius of homegrown weapon makers. To be sure, we must guard against being surprised by leap-ahead technologies in the hands of an enemy, particularly enemies who pursue nuclear weapons technologies. But too often, the technological fear mongering has led to a “Chicken Little” effect that has proven both illusory and very expensive. Technological fear mongering comes from cultural arrogance that assumes our enemies put the same trust in technology that we do. Battlefield experience in the American era strongly suggests that we have been surprised and bested on the battlefield not by superweapons but by enemies who have employed simple technologies creatively. Our combat deaths have been suffered mostly from mortars, mines, and machine guns in Korea and Vietnam and by many of these same weapons adapted to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “Capabilities-Based Assessment School” seeks to perpetuate the Cold War status quo by accepting the impossibility of predicting the threat. The capabilities approach argues for flexibility as the safest means for dealing with the ambiguity of today’s conflict environment. Security comes from creating a huge military toolbox from which weapons and forces can be retrieved and tailored to meet unforeseen threats. Adherence to the capabilities school begs the question: How can we justify spending fifty billion on a predictive process so ineffective that it abrogates the very purpose of its existence?

The “New Concepts Masquerading as Strategy School” is my personal favorite. Futurists inside the Beltway frequently fall victim to a new idea expressed as a “war-fighting concept.” Remember “shock and awe”? This concept grew out of our victory in Desert Storm. It was premised on the ridiculous idea that U.S. killing technologies would prevail against any enemy. Fear of precision bombing would strike at the psyche of a cowering foe. He would be awed and shocked enough to give up after an overwhelming demonstration of U.S. precision firepower. Of course, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS have long put paid to this idea. But sadly, it continues to seduce and spawn other firepower-centered silliness. Take the concept of net-centric warfare, for instance. In the nineties, senior naval officers predicted that our ability to dominate the network would “lift the fog of war” and allow us to see, strike, and kill any enemy from the air. Again, no one in Washington talked to the Chinese and North Vietnamese about this beforehand. Other silliness followed 9/11. The concept of “effects-based operations” (EBO) was the brainchild of Air Force senior officers. The geniuses behind EBO postulated that winning could be guaranteed by simply selecting the proper bombing targets. Build an air campaign based on the desired “effect,” bomb it, and we win. The latest embodiment of ridiculous firepower concepts is another Navy stroke of genius termed “AirSea Battle.” The concept is a thinly veiled battle plan for defeating the Chinese from the sea. More on AirSea Battle, and what the Chinese think of it, below.

The “Global Trends School” is the most insidious of these schools, because it has been given legitimacy by the Obama administration. In fact, the president and his defense intellectuals contend that climate change is more of a danger to national security than ISIS. This approach seeks to launder politically and socially popular global concerns into future military threats. The global trends movement started to gain adherents after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the intelligence community went looking for alternative avenues to justify post–Cold War weapons and structures. The most fashionable include diminishing global water supplies, urbanization, and the AIDS/HIV epidemic. But the current favorite inside the Beltway is climate change. In fact, at the 2015 Climate Change Summit in Paris, President Obama carried the war against climate change forward by claiming that rising global temperatures actually cause wars. While scientists agree on the dangers of global warming, I have yet to find any respected social scientist who makes a causal connection between air temperature and war.

So where does the administration get its facts about climate change and war? First, it contends that a warming planet causes drought, which leads to mass migration away from areas of creeping desertification. To be sure, rising temperatures combined with overgrazing in places like central Africa have caused displacement of peoples. Yet the misery of these peoples leads to, well, misery—not war. Tribes striving to exist have little energy left over to declare war against neighbors. Central Africa is in the grip of often-horrific conflicts, started by Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al Shabaab in Somalia. But these terrorists are motivated by “the usual suspects,” like religious hatred, centuries-long tribal animosities, and political greed.

One source for connecting war to temperature comes from the political closeness between environmentalists and the antiwar movement. Their logic goes like this: “Global warming is bad. Wars are bad. Therefore they must be connected.” Remember, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, environmentalists warned of a decade of global cooling that would come from burning Kuwaiti oil fields, which did not happen. More recently, environmental radicals argued against bombing ISIS oil trucks, fearing the environmental consequences. Again, this did not happen.

In fact, environmental activism aside, the three-thousand-year historical record of human conflict argues conclusively against any causal relationship between war and temperature. Let me be more specific. Never in the written history of warfare, from Megiddo in 1,500 BC to the Syrian civil war today, is there any evidence that wars are caused by warmer air.

I really do not care about the administration’s attempted connection between war and climate change; it is certain that many American people do not care either. My real concern is that the administration might translate this into a deflection of resources away from fighting a war against global terrorists to a contrived war against global warming. That would cause real harm to our Soldiers, who are trying to win a real war.

There is nothing wrong with the defense intellectual community cranking out concepts, even the patently ridiculous ones cited above. The problem comes when silly ideas become strategies. It begins with a chorus of ahistorical acolytes who preach so loudly that a concept becomes an office in the Pentagon. Soon, the general or admiral in charge of the concept starts to lobby the administration, Congress, and the media. Shortly thereafter, lines in the defense budget appear, and careers are made. The conceptual gurus retire and get good jobs with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or General Dynamics. Weapons platforms (ships, planes, and missiles) suddenly become perfect instruments for fulfilling the requirements demanded by net-centric, effects-based, or AirSea Battle concepts, and a trillion dollars of your money goes down the drain. Sadly, the consequences are not just wasted money. Every dollar wasted on trillion-dollar gizmos is a dollar taken away from those who actually fight our wars. I find it discouraging that in our recent history, few concepts have emerged from Beltway gurus that advocate for the Soldiers and Marines who engage daily in the bloody business of close combat. There’s just no money in that.

WHOM WILL WE FIGHT?

Instead of betting the future on failed conceptual approaches, consider the value of a new approach that exploits contemporary history and human behavior as components of a way to see into the future. Too often, generals are accused of trying to “fight the next war like the last.” I suggest that much of our failure to anticipate the future properly rests on the fact that generals fail to look closely at the past, particularly the history and past behaviors of our enemies. Since the end of World War II, the generals have gotten it more wrong than right by ignoring “last wars.” President Eisenhower’s New Look sought to replace conventional with strategic forces, and the nation went to war in Vietnam woefully underresourced for a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaign. We paid a similar price in 2003, when U.S. command delayed too long in applying the lessons of Vietnam to the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, in today’s Beltway, culture, history, and behavior are neither studied nor understood adequately. Thus, touting the past as a reliable road map for the future is a tough sell.

The power of an historical-behavioral approach comes from the realization that regardless of region, actor, motive, geopolitical circumstances, intensity, or type of conflict, our enemies have consistently repeated behaviors that they believe offer the greatest chance of success against us in battle. Patterns of behavior wind their way through all of our contemporary wars and are repeated at all levels of war, from strategic to tactical.

Lately, the historical-behavioral approach to future-casting has gained serious intellectual reinforcement within the social sciences. The Nobel Prize–winning research of economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reveals how humans behave when they make serious decisions in life. Many of these decisions are made less from logic and data than from the psychology of personal biases and past behaviors and experiences. Phillip Tetlock, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania (and a colleague of mine), takes Kahneman a step further in his book Superforecasting.¹ Kahneman concludes that even the most powerful and politically savvy fall victim to what he terms “scope insensitivity.” Every human being, no matter how connected with the outside world, eventually gets to a point where there is nothing more in his understanding of the political environment. Tetlock uses the term “WYSIATI,” or “What you see is all there is,” to describe the phenomenon of scope insensitivity. In other words, human behavior derives only from what the person sees. Scope insensitivity explains why leaders choose to go to war in circumstances doomed to failure. To someone outside the inner circle, the leader might be totally nuts, as well as dangerous. But the leader acts only on what he sees, on the basis of his perception of the realities of the world. Thus, behavior driven by experiences in dealing with the outside world might just be the most powerful single indicator for forecasting the future decisions of global leaders and the course of world events.

Everyman’s scope insensitivity is different from the insensitivity of those who start wars. Everyman is powerless. But leaders who control militaries and populations have the power to act and be destructively swayed by their social insensitivity. The difference lies in an old war-college equation: “threat equals capability times will.” An example: in his heyday, Fidel Castro would have reveled in the military defeat of the United States. His scope insensitivity was formed from a wacky Caribbean version of Marxism that drives him to this day. However, Castro was and is powerless. His “capability” against us is virtually zero. Thus, his threat to us is nil. Of course, Vladimir Putin is a different story. No one can really anticipate what Russia will do in the future without understanding Putin’s behavioral history, the history of his state since the end of the Cold War, and the limits of Putin’s social insensitivities.

So let us apply Tetlock and Kahneman to the usual suspects. Then let us expose their scope insensitivities to the war-college equation, threat equals capability times will, to see what behavior and history tell us about whom we will fight in the future.

Without question, the Beltway believes (and some in that realm even hope) that our future enemy will be China. The Chinese are perfect enemies. Their capability score is big and growing. They may be the only potential adversary whose matériel capabilities make it worthy of our expensive, high-tech weaponry. The big defense corporations can rely on the modernization of the Chinese military to justify almost a trillion dollars (yes, that’s with a t) of new aircraft, ships, and missiles. The Chinese threat touches all of the schools: the technologists warn of Chinese missiles capable of killing our aircraft carriers; the scenario makers love to anticipate crushing the new Chinese navy in a great sea battle; and the concept theorists are thrilled with the chance to showcase U.S. weaponry as the best tools for confronting nascent Chinese expansionism.

But if we apply the template of behavioral history and score their social insensitivity, the Chinese simply do not fit the profile of an enemy ready to go to war against us. First, the obvious: great nuclear powers simply do not go to war with great nuclear powers. The proliferation of nuclear weapons among enemies like China, Russia, and soon Iran offers good news and bad news: the good news is that no large power can threaten us; bad news—we can never return the favor. There is no logical, strategic reason for the United States to bomb a major power to achieve any end other than national survival. Thus, the presence of nuclear weapons has virtually eliminated any chance of great powers fighting each other in big wars that demand the mobilization of the nation and the commitment of massed forces. Likewise, the muting effect of the nuclear ceiling on great-power violence eliminates the possibility of massive air or naval campaigns, because the risk-versus-reward curve is simply out of kilter.

Second, the tenets of geostrategy argue against a war with China. Simply put, the United States cannot fight a war on the continent of Asia and expect any strategically useful outcome. There are two countries on the planet that are unconquerable: China and Russia. China in particular cannot be conquered because of its vast spaces and a three-thousand-year-old culture, strictly averse to fighting extraterritorial threats . . . that is more than a billion people, by the way, with an army five times the size of ours.

Another even more subtle argument for focusing on China comes from the current administration’s new strategy that calls for a “pivot to Asia,” a thinly veiled expression of intent to shift focus away from the Middle East. Truth is, the pivot toward China is really just a cynical, strategic “head fake.” The administration knows we will not fight China. Yet the pivot allows it to perpetuate the myth of muscular U.S. military power after leaving the Middle East—all without having to expect a real war.

The AirSea Battle gurus beat the drums for a war against China by citing the growing strength of its navy and air forces. Of course, the Chinese military is growing. Throughout history, all emerging great powers have sought to express their places in the world by spending on their militaries. Theodore Roosevelt gave the British fits at the turn of the last century as the United States began to flex its naval muscles. However, this time, the war-college equation gets in the way; a threat is a multiple of capability times intent. If intent is zero, the threat is zero. There is ample evidence in Chinese history that the Chinese, while nationalistic, are not expansionistic. They already have their empire; they just want to keep it.

Of course, the Chinese view us with suspicion. Any two great powers juxtaposed across the Pacific would act in a similar fashion. But suspicion, envy, and cultural jingoism are not sufficient to justify a war against a nuclear power. It just does not make sense to them, and it should not for us either.

Next in the line of the most popular “usual suspects” is North Korea. During my career I served four years in the Republic of Korea—as a major, colonel, and general. All of my service was with tactical units, preparing to fight the North. I commanded an artillery battalion whose mission was to protect the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which separates North and South Korea. So I think I know the region and the threat well enough to call myself an authority. Bottom line up front: we will not fight the North Koreans. To be sure, they maximize the capabilities quotient with a million-man army and nuclear weapons. Any shaky Stalinist regime headed by a thirty-something sociopath has to command our attention. No doubt, Kim Jong Un’s “scope insensitivity” tops the charts. But from a purely military perspective, the threat of a spontaneous North Korean attack on the south is highly overrated. The North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) seems impressive at first glance. The truth, however, is that this army is a rusting relic of the sixties; NKPA tanks and aircraft are museum pieces. Soldiers spend most of their training time scratching for food. Few of North Korea’s aircraft are flyable. Its air force is so strapped for fuel and spare parts that North Korean pilots are essentially untrained.

The only conventional capability in the NKPA is their artillery, with its rockets and long-range guns strung along the DMZ in range of Seoul. The North Korean Special Forces pose a serious unconventional threat. These two forces would cause serious damage to the South. Yet the North Koreans know well they would eventually lose against the more modern and powerful South Korean and U.S. militaries.

What about the North Korean nuclear threat? This is where mythology trumps strategy. Kim Jong Un, like his father and grandfather, is the one character who can order a nuclear strike or an invasion of the South. But the historical-behavioral background of the Kims argues that they have been in the shakedown business—not the war-making business—for more than seven decades. Their scope insensitivity is incredibly narrow; they are leaders with no experiential depth. They carry on a predictable comic-opera rant after each of their underground nuclear tests in order to extort food and fuel from the West. In truth the North Koreans know they have nothing that even comes close to a legitimate strategic nuclear capability. It will be years—if not decades—before they put together a rudimentary nuclear missile force, one capable of threatening anyone. These people act like clowns, and their repetitively bad behavior has become tiresomely antiquated. North Korea is nothing more than an isolated, neo-Stalinist enclave sandwiched between superior fighting neighbors who would crush it if it dared to advance beyond its borders . . . and the North Koreans know it.

Next in line among the usual suspects is the sentimental favorite: Russia. Vladimir Putin is indeed another international sociopath who has been given an extraordinary license to bully his “near abroad” neighbors. No one questions that it is Putin’s hand that directs the ethnic Russian “separatists” to defy the legitimately elected Ukrainian government. This administration and members of NATO and the European Union (EU) have failed to halt his aggression. Sanctions may harm the new urban middle and upper classes, but Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian media and his promise to restore Russian power and prestige maintain his popularity among the people. He and his country score high on both variables: a huge nuclear arsenal and past personal behavior that is both troubling and unpredictable; further, Putin’s social insensitivity equals Hitler’s.

Putin has publicly stated that his national security objective is to split the NATO alliance. He believes NATO and its prime benefactor, the United States, are the principal impediments to his grand design to return Russia to imperial greatness, and Russia will do what Putin wants. But on the surface, Putin holds a weak military hand. Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is a failing state only half the size of the Soviet Union, with an economy less than a tenth of those of the United States and the EU combined. Putin’s military is getting better, to be sure, but a closer look reveals an establishment made up mostly of unwilling young men who lost the conscription lottery. The Russians do not have a single fifth-generation stealth aircraft. Their conventional navy would last a day in combat against ours. Virtually all of their armored forces date from the Desert Storm era, and we witnessed how well those performed in the hands of Saddam’s military.

In November 2015, I visited our Army in Europe to speak firsthand with the leaders of all NATO armies. In sum, all of the European generals I spoke to considered Putin “containable” if the United States placed a few armored brigades within the eastern NATO states: the Baltics and Poland. The cost of such a move to the United States would be minimal. Moving existing matériel to Europe would not require a single new weapons program or any increase in existing manpower. From what I witnessed, I strongly believe that such a force, properly positioned, would create a deterrent sufficiently intimidating to keep Mr. Putin on his side of the line for a very long time.

To anticipate whom we must fear the most, we must return to Colonel Yahara. Take a moment and look across a map of the expanse of Islamic nations in turmoil. Begin your visual transit with the North African states that touch the Atlantic, shift southward into central Africa and across the troubled and chaotic states that border the Mediterranean. Skip to the Levant, then to the true heartland of the Middle East: Pakistan and Iraq. What you see is utter chaos, perhaps the most destructive array of geopolitical mendacity and horror seen since the Assyrian holocaust in the eighth century BC.

Scholars call this turgid sweep the “Arc of Instability.” After the collapse of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and the expansion of the threat from radical Islamism, perhaps a more relevant term might be the “Arc of Failure.” This growing horror is persistent, most likely generational . . . and it affects our homeland. Radical Islamist threats are growing. But also, more troubling, they are becoming more skilled at both terrorism and war.

Look carefully at media images of ground fighting across the Middle East, and you will notice that the bad guys are also fighting differently.² In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the West confronted terrorists acting like, well, terrorists. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda relied on ambushes, roadside bombings, sniper fire, and the occasional “fire and run” mortar or rocket attack to inflict casualties on U.S. forces. When terrorists were stupid enough to come out of the shadows, they fought as individuals in a mob of other individuals. Just the rip of a Kalashnikov or a single launch of a rocket-propelled grenade was enough to show their manhood. If they stood to reload they risked annihilation at the hands of their disciplined, well trained, and heavily armed U.S. opponents.

Today it is different. We now see Islamic fighters becoming skilled Soldiers. The thrust of ISIS down the Euphrates illustrates a style of warfare that melds the old and the new. U.S. Soldiers fighting in Iraq used to say, “Thank God they can’t shoot.” Well, now they can. They maneuver in reasonably disciplined fighting formations, often mounted on board pickups and captured Iraqi Humvees. They employ mortars and rockets in deadly barrages. To be sure, parts of the old terrorist playbook remain: they butcher and execute in front of the global media to make the Iraqis, Syrians, and Libyans understand, in unambiguous terms, the terrible consequences of continued resistance. Like their forbearers, they still display the terrorist’s eager willingness for death and the media savvy of the “propaganda of the deed.”

We see these newly formed pseudo-armies emerging across the Levant as well. The Darwinian process of wartime immersion has forced them to either be dead or a lot better. Some observers of their transformation admit that Hezbollah now are among the best-trained and skilled light infantry on the planet . . . and thanks to their Iranian patron, they have stockpiled more than 100,000 rockets ready to be fired against Israeli civilians.

And now there is Hamas. Gone are the fleeting “pickup teams” from Operation Cast Lead in 2008. We see Hamas fighting in small, strictly organized, tightly bound teams under the authority of connected, well informed commanders. In their war against Israeli intrusion in 2014, Hamas units stood and fought from building hideouts and tunnel entrances. Instead of charging the Israelis, Hamas waited for the Israelis to pass before ambushing them from the rear, occasionally dressed in Israeli uniforms. Like Hezbollah, they are getting good with second-generation weapons, such as wire-guided antitank missiles. The Israelis started the Gaza campaign trying to fight house to house. Soon, tank and infantry fire was replaced by hundred-ton barrages of precision two-thousand-pound bombs—and Hamas still did not quit.

These groups are now well-armed, well-trained, well-equipped, well-led, disciplined, and often flush with cash to buy or bribe their way out of difficulties. While the story of the disintegration of the Iraqi army is multicausal, the fact that it was never trained to face such a competent opponent was certainly a factor.

Michael Morrell, former deputy head of the Central Intelligence Agency calls the anti-jihad conflict in the Middle East the “Great War of our Time.” This frightening new age that Morrell describes will dominate warfare for a generation or more, because of several factors. First, of course, is the influence and global influx of foreign fighters into ISIS. As witnessed by the assault on the ISIS-held cities of Tikrit and Ramadi, Iranian advisers throughout the Middle East are getting better at their craft. Radicalized fighters from the Chechen and Bosnian conflicts have joined the ISIS team as mentors. The terrorists of the last decade used to generate one-shot suicide bombers of little strategic consequence. Now they have learned to craft fighting units, and they teach weapons and tactics very well. Second, ISIS and Hezbollah have made the bloody Syrian war into a first-rate training ground. They are exploiting that terrible war to select leaders, practice tactics, train to maneuver on the urban battlefield, and build political and military institutions with depth, mass, and resiliency. Perversely, having these two Islamist organizations in conflict makes each better, not weaker.

All of these new armies talk to each other, even occasionally across ethno-sectarian divides. Social media and strategic intercessions in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq have created a body of well-informed and battle-hardened leaders and Soldiers who actually share lessons learned. While these new armies are becoming more professional, they still retain the terrorist’s specialty in disciplined killing. Terrorist killing used to be mostly random. But now killings are carefully orchestrated, media-driven executions of surrendering Soldiers, political leaders, and former leaders of the opposition. Strategic killing gives them the psychological high ground often well before the clash of arms begins.

What we have seen in Gaza, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Libya, and Iraq is not only sobering but a cautionary tale for those Beltway gurus who are already calling for a pivot to Asia and a war against the Chinese. The truth is that America’s battle against radicalism is now a world, not just a regional, war. It is unfinished and going poorly. Of course, U.S. Soldiers and Marines are still the global gold standard in tactical competence. But their comparative advantage has diminished considerably over the past fourteen years of war against an adaptive, dedicated enemy willing to learn and to die. Inevitably, terrorists groups will amalgamate and turn into armies. Given time, ISIS will become a sovereign state, pairing their fanatical dedication with newly acquired tactical skills. Sadly, we are giving them time and room to get much better. Eventually, any attempt to renew intervention into the ISIS heartland will generate casualties on a different scale—as the Israelis and the Iraqis have learned painfully.

Then there is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla hiding in the Middle Eastern closet: nuclear weapons. No one with half a brain would deny that the Iranians will build a bomb. The ayatollahs have learned from their Iraqi neighbor and their North Korean ally that the only certain deterrent against intrusion by the United States is a nuke. They have learned from watching India and Pakistan that world approbation against new nuclear powers fades eventually. To a state that fears the United States and has the technology, not joining the nuclear club would be the height of foolishness. When Iran gets the bomb, the paranoia and extreme social insensitivity of its theological elites would certainly tempt them to use it, most likely against Israel.

The social insensitivity of Middle Eastern tyrants is off the charts. Their religiously driven ideologies and brutal worldview removes them from the community of civilized leaders. Their ability to close their world to social sensitivities of others means that only a protracted and bloody confrontation will end the horror and inhumanity of their ambitions. We have met our enemy. We do not like it, because wars in the American era do not join well with a protracted conflict against an enemy driven by superior will and a willingness to die. Colonel Yahara would understand. He would know that only Soldiers with rifles and a will to win in the close fight will defeat them.