PNAC - Document Archive

[Steve Gardner]

This thread will build into a complete archive of all memos and documents published by PNAC between 1999 and 2005. Where possible, the full text of the documents will be set out here.

The reason for doing this is simply that there is some suspicion certain documents have been withdrawn from PNAC's website, prompting speculation that they contain information that might be considered damaging in some way.

(Edited on 17th May to add: the PNAC website is now down - apparently their account has been suspended. All of which only adds to the intrigue)

It's also a good way of demonstrating to those prepared to read through the material presented, that these people are hellbent on war.

Index

2005

Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces, January 28, 2005

2004

John Kerry Doesn't Know His Own Mind, Project Memorandum, William Kristol, August 19, 2004

"Get our troops home" - Part II: Is Kerry undermining the effort in Iraq right now?, Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, August 11, 2004

Kerry: "Get our troops home," Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, August 10, 2004

The 9/11 Commission & Intelligence Reform, Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, August 9, 2004

Kerry's More "Sensitive" War on Terror?, Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, August 5, 2004

Less Central, More Intelligent?, Gary Schmitt, Weekly Standard, July 19, 2004

Shooting First, Gary Schmitt, Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2004

"Slam Dunks" & "Rockstars," Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, April 23, 2004

Addressing Terrorism Before 9/11, Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, March 25, 2004

Cut Defense?, Project Memorandum, Gary Schmitt, March 9, 2004

Our Basic Instincts Were Sound, Gary Schmitt, Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2004

Counterterrorism and the Clinton Administration, Project Memorandum, Elizabeth Tulis, January 20, 2004

Intelligence Sharing, Project Memorandum, Daniel McKivergan, January 6, 2004

[Steve Gardner]

Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces

January 28, 2005

Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a "broken force." Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality. We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. This nation can afford a robust defense posture along with a strong fiscal posture. And we can afford both the necessary number of ground troops and what is needed for transformation of the military.

In sum: We can afford the military we need. As a nation, we are spending a smaller percentage of our GDP on the military than at any time during the Cold War. We do not propose returning to a Cold War-size or shape force structure. We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world.

The men and women of our military have performed magnificently over the last few years. We are more proud of them than we can say. But many of them would be the first to say that the armed forces are too small. And we would say that surely we should be doing more to honor the contract between America and those who serve her in war. Reserves were meant to be reserves, not regulars. Our regulars and reserves are not only proving themselves as warriors, but as humanitarians and builders of emerging democracies. Our armed forces, active and reserve, are once again proving their value to the nation. We can honor their sacrifices by giving them the manpower and the materiel they need.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution places the power and the duty to raise and support the military forces of the United States in the hands of the Congress. That is why we, the undersigned, a bipartisan group with diverse policy views, have come together to call upon you to act. You will be serving your country well if you insist on providing the military manpower we need to meet America's obligations, and to help ensure success in carrying out our foreign policy objectives in a dangerous, but also hopeful, world.

Respectfully,

Peter Beinart
Jeffrey Bergner
Daniel Blumenthal
Max Boot
Eliot Cohen
Ivo H. Daalder
Thomas Donnelly
Michele Flournoy
Frank F. Gaffney, Jr.
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Lt. Gen. Buster C. Glosson (USAF, retired)
Bruce P. Jackson
Frederick Kagan
Robert Kagan
Craig Kennedy
Paul Kennedy
Col. Robert Killebrew (USA, retired)
William Kristol
Will Marshall
Clifford May
Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey (USA, retired)
Daniel McKivergan
Joshua Muravchik
Steven J. Nider
Michael O'Hanlon
Mackubin Thomas Owens
Ralph Peters
Danielle Pletka
Stephen P. Rosen
Major Gen. Robert H. Scales (USA, retired)
Randy Scheunemann
Gary Schmitt
Walter Slocombe
James B. Steinberg
R. James Woolsey

[Steve Gardner]

Source: Intelligence Sharing

January 6, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: DANIEL McKIVERGAN, Deputy Director

SUBJECT: Intelligence Sharing

I would like to draw your attention to the following piece (“Wall Nuts: The Wall Between Intelligence and Law Enforcement is Killing Us”) by former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker posted on December 31, 2003 on Slate.com. You may also find additional information on this subject in an October 15, 2001 piece (“Not Serious About Surveillance”) in the Weekly Standard by Project Director Gary Schmitt.

Wall Nuts: The Wall Between Intelligence and Law Enforcement is Killing Us
Stewart Baker
Slate.com
December 31, 2003

Earlier this month, as fears of new al-Qaida attacks mounted, the Justice Department announced new FBI guidelines that would allow intelligence and law enforcement agents to work together on terrorism investigations. An ACLU spokesman was quick to condemn the guidelines as creating the possibility of “an end run around Fourth Amendment requirements.” I used to worry about that possibility myself. Not any more. Because the alternative is to maintain a wall of separation between law enforcement and intelligence. That’s what we used to do. And on Sept. 11, 2001, that wall probably cost us 3,000 American lives.

There’s a quiet scandal at the heart of Sept. 11; one that for different reasons neither the government nor the privacy lobby really wants to talk about. It’s this: For two and a half weeks before the attacks, the U.S. government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaida killers and that they were already in the United States. In fact, the two were living openly under their own names, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles, and to procure a California identity card.

Despite this paper trail, and despite having two and a half weeks to follow the scent, the FBI couldn’t locate either man—at least not until Sept. 11, when they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. If we had found them, there is a real possibility that most or all of the hijackings would have been prevented. The two shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, who flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who flew into the South Tower. They were linked to most of the other hijackers as well. So August 2001 offered our last chance to foil the attacks. And if we want to stop the next attack, we need to know what went wrong in August 2001. Despite all the resources of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, we did not find two known terrorists living openly. How could we have failed so badly in such a simple, desperate task?

We couldn’t find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001 because we had imposed too many rules designed to protect against privacy abuses that were mainly theoretical. We missed our best chance to save the lives of 3,000 Americans because we spent more effort and imagination guarding against these theoretical privacy abuses than against terrorism.

I feel some responsibility for sending the government down that road.

In August 2001, the New York FBI intelligence agent looking for al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi didn’t have the computer access needed to do the job alone. He requested help from the bureau’s criminal investigators and was turned down. Acting on legal advice, FBI headquarters had refused to involve its criminal agents. In an e-mail to the New York agent, headquarters staff said: “If al-Midhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel[ligence] agent. A criminal agent CAN NOT be present at the interview. This case, in its entirety, is based on intel[ligence]. If at such time as information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up criminal investigation.”

In a reply message, the New York agent protested the ban on using law enforcement resources for intelligence investigations in eerily prescient terms: “ome day someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ Let’s hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama Bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.’ “

It breaks my heart to read this exchange. That “wall”—between intelligence and law enforcement—was put in place to protect against a hypothetical risk to civil liberties that might arise if domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence missions were allowed to mix. It was a post-Watergate fix meant to protect Americans, not kill them. In fact, in 1994, after I left my job as general counsel to the National Security Agency, I argued that the wall should be left in place because I accepted the broad assumption that foreign intelligence-gathering tolerates a degree of intrusiveness, harshness, and deceit that Americans do not want applied against themselves. I recognized at the time that these privacy risks were just abstract worries, but I accepted the conventional wisdom: “However theoretical the risks to civil liberties may be, they cannot be ignored.” I foresaw many practical problems as well if the wall came down, and I argued for an approach that “preserves, perhaps even raises, the wall between the two communities.”

I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks. In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable. In 2000 and 2001, the FBI office that handled al-Qaida wiretaps in the United States was thrown into turmoil because of the heights to which the wall had been raised. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the body that oversees national security wiretaps, had ordered strict procedures to ensure that such wiretaps were not contaminated by law enforcement purposes. And when those procedures were not followed strictly, the court barred an FBI agent from the court because his affidavits did not fully list all contacts with law enforcement. This mushroomed into a privacy scandal that set the stage for 9/11.

In the spring and summer of 2001, with al-Qaida’s preparations growing even more intense, the turmoil grew so bad that national security wiretaps were allowed to lapse—something that had never happened before. It isn’t clear what intelligence we missed, but the loss of those wiretaps was treated as less troubling than the privacy scandal that now hung over the antiterrorism effort. The lesson was not lost on the rest of the bureau. According to a declassified Joint Intelligence Committee report on Sept. 11, “FBI personnel involved in FISA matters feared the fate of the agent who had been barred and began to avoid even the most pedestrian contact with personnel in criminal components of the Bureau or DOJ because it could result in intensive scrutiny by the Justice Department office that reviewed national security wiretaps and the FISA Court.”

Against this background, it’s easy to understand why FBI headquarters and its lawyers refused to use law enforcement resources in the effort to find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. To do so would be to risk a further privacy scandal and put their careers in jeopardy. Viewed in this light, the New York agent’s fight to get law enforcement involved in his search for the terrorists looks like an act of courage that borders on foolishness. We can all be thankful for his zeal. But in the end, one agent’s zeal was not enough to overcome the complex web of privacy rules and the machinery of scandal that we built to enforce those rules.

What lessons can we learn from this tragic unfolding?

First, that the source of this tragedy was not wicked or uncaring officials. The wall was built by professionals who thought they were acting in the country’s and their agency’s best interest. They were focused on the hypothetical risk to privacy if foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement were allowed to mix, and they worried that courts and Congress would punish them for putting aside these theoretical concerns to combat a threat that was both foreign and domestic. They feared that years of successful collaboration would end in disaster if the results of a single collaboration could be painted as a privacy scandal, so they created an ever-higher wall to govern operations at the border between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence. As drafted, the rules technically allowed antiterrorism investigators to do their jobs—if the investigators were sufficiently determined and creative. For a while they were, but the FISA court scandal sapped their determination and finally choked off any practical hope of getting the job done.

The second lesson is that we cannot write rules that will both protect us from every theoretical risk to privacy and still allow the government to protect us from terrorists. We cannot fine-tune the system to perfection, because systems that ought to work can fail. That is why I am profoundly skeptical of efforts to write new privacy rules and why I would rely instead on auditing for actual abuses. We should not again put American lives at risk for the sake of some speculative risk to our civil liberties.

And the final lesson? Perhaps it isn’t fair to blame all the people who helped to create the wall for the failures that occurred in August of 2001. No one knew then what the cost of building such a separation would be. But we should know now. We should know that we can’t prevent every imaginable privacy abuse without hampering the fight against terror; that an appetite for privacy scandals hampers the fight against terror; and that the consequence of these actions will be more attacks and more dead, perhaps in numbers we can hardly fathom.

The country and its leaders have had more than two years to consider the failures of August 2001 and what should be done. In that time, libertarian Republicans have joined with civil- liberties Democrats to teach the law enforcement and intelligence communities the lesson that FBI headquarters taught its hamstrung New York agent: You won’t lose your job for failing to protect Americans, but you will if you run afoul of the privacy lobby. So the effort to build information technology tools to find terrorists has stalled. Worse, the wall is back; doubts about legal authority are denying CIA analysts access to law enforcement information in our new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. Bit by bit we are recreating the political and legal climate of August 2001.

And sooner or later, I fear, that August will lead to another September.

Stewart Baker heads the technology law practice at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. From 1992 to 1994, he was general counsel of the National Security Agency.

slate.msn.com/id/2093344/

Source: Counterterrorism and the Clinton Administration

January 20, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: ELIZABETH TULIS, Senior Research Associate

SUBJECT: Counterterrorism and the Clinton Administration

We would like to draw your attention to the following piece in the January 26 issue of the Weekly Standard, “Showstoppers: Nine Reasons Why We Never Sent Our Special Operations Forces After Al Qaeda Before 9/11” by Richard Shultz.

In the mid-1990’s, the U.S. government developed the capabilities to strike al Qaeda training camps, cells, and individual terrorists. Yet planned missions were never executed. In recent weeks, Democrats have criticized the Bush Administration as not sufficiently serious about prosecuting the war on terror. Shultz’s analysis, based on a larger classified study, shows that opportunities to address the threat of al Qaeda were acknowledged and discarded well before the 2000 election. Shultz identifies the following nine major “mutually reinforcing, self-imposed constraints that kept the special mission units sidelined.”

Terrorism as Crime: The designation of terrorism as criminal activity (rather than acts of war) placed the Justice Department, not the Pentagon, at the center of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. As a result, legal instruments like extradition became the weapon of “choice” employed against terrorists and precluded the Defense Department from coordinating a military response.

Not a Clear and Present Danger or War: Both the Pentagon and the CIA were resistant to classifying actions that were not conducted by “armies of other nations” as acts of war. The Pentagon believed that attacks on targets like the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers facility in Dhahran were a “force protection issue.” Terrorism was understood as an ongoing threat that required vigilance, but it was not grounds for war.

The Somalia Syndrome: The Clinton Administration was haunted by the image of Somalis dragging the body of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu following the 1993 special operations forces mission to capture Mohammed Aidid. The Somalia catastrophe also reinforced “wariness” of the SOF within the senior ranks of the military itself.

No Legal Authority: In the 1990’s, lawyers at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community argued that the Department of Defense did not have the legal authority to execute the clandestine missions of the SOF and related counterterrorism units. The argument focused on Title 10 and Title 50 of the U.S. Code. One interpretation of these items would have allowed the possibility of the execution of the SOF missions, but ultimately “[t]he Pentagon did not want the authority to strike terrorists secretly or to employ Special Forces against states that aided and sheltered them.”

Risk Aversion: Not only were SOF missions considered too dangerous and unpredictable in general, but the political and military leadership demanded “fail-safe options.” Opportunities to strike at al Qaeda were lost because of fear of potential casualties.

Pariah Cowboys: Individuals who pushed for the execution of offensive operations against terrorist targets—notably civilian members of the National Security Council’s Counterterrorism and Security Group—were undermined and marginalized by senior officials at the Pentagon.

Intimidation of Civilians: Military officials frequently “stymied hard-line proposals from civilian policymakers” by couching their own arguments in terms of the “experience factor” and citing the civilians’ lack of military credentials.

Big Footprints: As originally conceived, an SOF counterterrorism unit would be “small, flexible, adaptive, and stealthy;” each of its operations would leave a “footprint” that was very small, even invisible. However, when SOF missions against al Qaeda were proposed, senior military officials would demand that the plans be revised to include conventional forces—hundreds of men, gunships, planes, a quick-reaction force ready for assist—that would mitigate “risk” but leave a huge “footprint.”

No Actionable Intelligence: The defense community defined the targets of the counterterrorism efforts fairly narrowly: Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda operatives were the focus. But “actionable intelligence” on these targets was hard to acquire. At the least, it would have required the establishment of intelligence networks in regions like Afghanistan and Yemen. But this could only be accomplished by recruiting “indigenous elements” in these areas to provide information and assist in the operations. But risk aversion (again) prevented the preparations needed for the acquisition of “actionable intelligence.”

The full article can be read here.

Source: Our Basic Instincts Were Sound

Our Basic Instincts Were Sound
Gary Schmitt
Los Angeles Times
February 1, 2004

If David Kay is right about what his weapons inspection teams have found -- or rather not found -- in Iraq, it's clear the Bush administration was wrong about Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, says there are no large chemical and biological stockpiles likely to be found, and that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program had been literally buried. While he also concluded that Iraq had been aggressively moving to develop longer-range ballistic missiles, had kept its biological-weapons research program alive and tried to restart its nuclear program in 2001, the overall picture is far from the robust set of WMD programs suggested by one senior administration official after another in the year leading up to the war.

Critics of the war and the administration have been quick to use Kay's statements as evidence that the White House jury-rigged intelligence estimates to support its policy of getting rid of Hussein, and hyped what intelligence there was on Iraq's programs. But the Bush administration relied on virtually the same intelligence estimates that the Clinton administration used during the U.N.-inspection crisis in late 1997. As far as hype goes, it would be hard for anyone to beat then-Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's appearance on national television, holding up a five-pound sack of sugar and announcing that a similar amount of Iraqi produced anthrax was enough to kill half the population of Washington.

So, who is at fault? Right now, it looks like U.S. intelligence simply didn't do its job. Not that the job was easy; Iraq was a virtual police state, and Hussein was adept at uncovering plots against him and hiding his own plans. Remember, after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, we were surprised to discover that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was just months from producing a bomb -- not the five to 10 years that U.S. intelligence had thought. The reality is we had no high-level Iraqi spies who could tell us what was going on; moreover, Hussein appears to have been good at feeding false information through double agents and our high-tech collection systems. With no new information of note, it is no surprise that the analytic side of the intelligence community -- a bureaucracy like any bureaucracy, with its own inertia -- didn't change what it thought about these programs from what it had learned in the early 1990s.

It now appears that Hussein believed that by destroying his chemical and biological stockpiles and not rebuilding major weapons-production sites, he could keep U.N. weapons inspectors from finding anything significant and ease out of sanctions. Once the inspectors were gone and the sanctions eliminated, he could then use the smaller seed programs he had covertly maintained to rebuild and restock his WMD arsenal. Meanwhile, he hoped to deter the U.S. from a military invasion by feeding us disinformation that he still retained a deadly chemical-weapons capability. Obviously, it was a strategy that was too clever by half. And it was a strategy about which we had too few clues.

One result of this missed estimate of the Iraqi threat has been calls for the administration to rethink not only its assessment of the threat posed by the combination of weapons proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism but also the possibility of taking preemptive military action to address this threat. Can the U.S. employ such an option, with all the political and strategic risks it entails, when the intelligence it rests on seems so shaky?

The answer is not so clear. Although it appears the intelligence community overestimated the WMD threat posed by Hussein's Iraq, it is equally true that U.S. intelligence recently underestimated the nuclear weapons programs of two other rogue states, Iran and Libya. Both countries had programs further along and more sophisticated than either the U.S. or its allies knew. Based on these three cases -- and a history of previously underestimating WMD programs in Pakistan, India, North Korea and, yes, Iraq -- the lack of solid intelligence may mean we have more to worry about in the future, not less. What is becoming clear as we unravel both the Iranian and Libyan programs, with their webs of covert foreign suppliers, is how difficult it is to contain proliferation. It is premature to think that military preemption can be taken off the table completely.

So, what should be done? The most obvious goal should be to improve intelligence. Central Intelligence has too few spies who have access to these weapons programs, too few analysts with experience in the field and it lacks the capability to crack the deception and denial that surround the programs. That said, we shouldn't expect intelligence ever to improve to the point that a president will be relieved of having to make hard judgments. The fact remains that the programs on which we are collecting intelligence are readily hidden in a sea of normal commercial endeavors and a global trading system.

Our next goal, however, should be to understand that what we lack in detailed intelligence about weapons programs is more than offset by our strategic intelligence about particular countries' intent. We knew, for example, that North Korea had every intention of using its "peaceful" nuclear program to get a nuclear weapon as far back as the first Bush administration. We had similar insights into Pakistan's nuclear program, Iran's, South Africa's, South Korea's, Taiwan's and a host of other countries' ballistic missile and WMD programs. In some cases, we had the will to head off these efforts; in other cases, we didn't. Yet the decision not to act was rarely, if ever, because we didn't understand a country's intentions.

The real issue is whether we have the political will to use what we know to design policies for unfriendly countries far enough in advance so that we don't have to rely on the more difficult and risky military option. As the history outlined above suggests, we have had a sketchy record in this regard. As for the future, it's anybody's guess. On the one hand, Sept. 11, 2001 -- and the administration's reaction to it -- has made America and its allies more acutely aware of the dangers we face. Even countries that strongly disagreed with us over Iraq, such as France and Germany, have joined in the administration's Proliferation Security Initiative to help stop international trafficking in WMD technologies. And it would be hard to imagine Berlin, Paris and London taking the lead in addressing the Iranian nuclear program in the absence of President Bush having made the issue of terrorist-sponsoring states getting their hands on WMD a global security priority. However, the danger is that the apparent intelligence failure on Iraq's WMD programs will instill a new caution both here and abroad in how we tackle these issues.

But that would be missing the forest for the trees. Whatever the shortcomings in our intelligence on the particulars of Iraq's programs, the basic intelligence assessment that Hussein had never given up his desire to reconstitute his WMD programs was correct. While we should not avoid a debate over how the intelligence community came to misjudge the state of Hussein's programs, this should not distract us from what has always been the core issue for both defenders and critics of the war: To wit, given Hussein's intentions and history, would a policy of containment and deterrence have been sustainable and sufficient to prevent him from becoming a dangerous threat to the U.S. and our interests in the region?

Source: Cut Defense?

March 9, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Cut Defense?

If congressional “budget hawks” have their way, there will be cuts made to the Bush administration’s defense spending package. Last week, the Republican-controlled Senate Budget Committee voted to slice $7 billion from the Pentagon’s FY 2005 budget. The ostensible reason for the reduction is the large federal deficit. With the national defense budget authority up by nearly $90 billion since 2001, the presumption is that there is room to cut.

But this is not the case. Adjusted for inflation, the $423 billion in defense budget authority requested for FY 2005 is only 15% more than the FY 2001 total. This increase is remarkably small given the fact that, during this period, the U.S. has fought two wars and is still engaged in major military operations in two theaters. Moreover, a considerable percentage of the increase in defense spending has gone to paying personnel, benefits and health costs. Compared with the Reagan-era budget ramp up in the early 1980s, a far smaller amount of today’s increases has gone to procuring new equipment and replacing aging infrastructure. Indeed, a close analysis of the administration’s defense budget reveals that current procurement plans – for new ships, planes, satellites, and missiles – cannot be supported by projected budget totals in the coming years. Add to this the fact that the active-duty military is too small to carry out the grand strategy the White House has adopted for the post-9/11 world, and one is left to conclude that Congress should be lobbying the White House to increase the Pentagon’s budget, not to cut it.

Even today, America’s defense burden is low – accounting for less than 4% of the GDP and less than 20% of the federal budget. (During the Reagan build-up, the comparable numbers were over 6% and 27%, respectively.) Members of Congress looking to trim the deficit should first take a hard look at other elements of the federal budget. With the nation at war, cutting defense should be the last thing on their minds.

Source: Addressing Terrorism before 9/11

March 25, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Addressing Terrorism before 9/11

This past Sunday, pundit Fareed Zakaria alleged that the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which he characterized as "Bill Kristol's advocacy group," paid no attention to Al Qaeda in the 1990s. Similarly, Zakaria wrote last month in the New York Times, "One searches vainly through the archives of the Project for the New American Century, the main neoconservative advocacy group, for a single report on Al Qaeda or a letter urging action against it before 9/11."

In fact, the directors and fellows of the Project published several articles on the subject of the war on terrorism and Al Qaeda prior to September 11.* In September 1998, after the embassy bombings, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote an editorial in the Weekly Standard in which they expressed concern that the Clinton administration's cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan had not "made a dent in the terrorist networks" and questioned whether the Clinton administration "really has the stomach for such a war."

In an essay in the book Present Dangers, edited by Kristol and Kagan and published in September 2000-a month before the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Project Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht discussed the necessity of taking action to "check the lethality, if not the growth, of Taliban/bin Laden-style Islamic radicalism."

After the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, Project Senior Fellow Gerecht and PNAC Deputy Executive Director Thomas Donnelly each published lengthy articles on Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and the war on terrorism in the October 30 Weekly Standard. Gerecht directly implicated bin Laden in the attack on the Cole and criticized the Clinton administration's failure to threaten the Taliban in Afghanistan and their backers in the Pakistani government in order to force the Taliban to stop harboring bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In urging a policy of force against Al Qaeda, Gerecht wrote this:

One can only hope that a Gore or Bush II administration will not repeat past mistakes. Yet the reluctance to use military force in the Middle East is clearly a bipartisan American reflex. The fear that serious military responses to terrorist attacks can lead to an endless series of attacks and reprisals is an understandable foreboding. But what ought to be clear is that whoever perpetrated the attack on the U.S.S. Cole isn't going to desist voluntarily. Two men vaporized themselves to express their hatred of the United States. By any true-believing standard, their act was a glorious success, quite sufficient to inspire others to follow. We cannot counter such determination and passion in a courtroom.… Our enemies, and the friends of our enemies, must know that an easygoing, corpulent, wealthy Western nation is, when it wants to be, an indomitable, bloody-minded force that will seek awful vengeance upon its foes.

In that same issue of the Weekly Standard, the Project's Deputy Executive Director, Tom Donnelly, complained that the Clinton administration did not recognize the attack on the U.S.S. Cole for what it was: "an act of war." Donnelly warned that the anti-American terrorists were "increasingly well organized, well armed, and well trained," and he predicted that "unconventional attacks like that on the Cole or on the Khobar Towers or the ambush of the Rangers in Mogadishu will continue." The American response, Donnelly argued, "should be to use the instruments of war-intelligence gathering and military force-not only to avenge them and deter similar acts, but also to frustrate the political aims of our enemies."

In July 2001, Gerecht, then director of the Project's Middle East Initiative, criticized the Bush administration's failure to improve upon the performance of the Clinton administration in seriously addressing the problem of Al Qaeda. Gerecht lamented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to withdraw U. S. Marines from military exercises in Jordan and to move ships anchored in Bahrain because of the threat of terrorist attacks, calling Rumsfeld's decision "an extraordinary triumph" for bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Gerecht further criticized the U.S. failure to respond to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole several months before. And he wrote, "The Saudi militant is unquestionably going to come at us again." Gerecht urged the adoption of a far more aggressive counter-terrorism policy-one much like that eventually adopted by the Bush administration after 9/11.

Despite this commentary by Project directors and fellows, including especially Reuel Gerecht's all-too-prescient forecast, we would be the first to admit that we, like so many others, paid too little attention to the threat from Al Qaeda prior to September 11. We do find it odd, however, to be criticized by someone who seems to have paid even less attention to that threat than we did. A quick search of Zakaria's writings prior to September 11, 2001 produces only one article on the threat of global terrorism, with no mention of Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

-------------------------
* In addition to sending out faxes, Project directors and fellows publish articles on many subjects, and these publications often receive more attention than the faxes. Some of the articles discussed above were also faxed out, along with other memoranda such as an October 17, 2000 commentary on VOA coverage of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. By any standard, Zakaria's search was incomplete.

Source: "Slam Dunks" & "Rockstars"

April 23, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: "Slam Dunks" & "Rockstars"

President Bush has recently stated that it may be "time to revamp and reform our intelligence services." Indeed, it is - as suggested by two revelations contained in Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack.

In Woodward's book, he recounts a key briefing held on December 21, 2002 in the Oval Office. CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy for intelligence John McLaughlin were there to brief the president, the vice president, NSC advisor Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andrew Card on the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. At the end of the briefing, Tenet told the group "it's a slam dunk case" that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. But Woodward writes that the president "pressed" Tenet on the wmd issue: "George, how confident are you" that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? Tenet, as head of the US intelligence community and chief intelligence advisor to the president under the National Security Act of 1947, told the president: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk."

Woodward also writes on the intelligence behind the president's decision to start the air campaign two days earlier than planned and before all aspects of the military operation were ready to go. On March 19, 2003, the CIA told the president that one of its "assets" in Iraq had located the place where Saddam and his sons were staying that night. The information, Director Tenet told the president, was "as good as it gets." The asset was one of about 90 Iraqi agents, code-named DB/ROCKSTARS, tasked with providing the CIA first-hand intelligence on what was going on inside Saddam's regime. But the most consequential piece of intelligence produced by the ROCKSTARS network - Saddam's bunker - apparently turned out to be bogus. There was no bunker and, of course, Saddam was not killed. It now looks like a significant portion, if not most of the ROCKSTARS, were working either for themselves or Saddam.

The evidence is that President Bush was not well served by either the DCI or the intelligence community's lead agency, the CIA. Despite that, calls for reforming the intelligence community almost always include proposals to centralize even more authority under the DCI and/or give the CIA even more resources. Before heading down that road, Congress and the White House should think seriously about the performance of both in recent years.

Source: Shooting First

Shooting First
Gary Schmitt
Los Angeles Times
May 30, 2004

With the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and the continuing difficulties in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, it's reasonable to ask: Has a death blow been delivered to the idea of military preemption and, more broadly, to the idea of preventive wars? Has our experience in Iraq effectively removed from play a policy option that many here and abroad believed was the cornerstone of the Bush administration's new strategic doctrine?

For the foreseeable future, the Iraq war and its aftermath cannot help but put a hitch in the step of any president contemplating similar action. People can continue to debate whether the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs, but there is no question that U.S. intelligence did not have a good enough handle on what was going on in Iraq. When the director of the Central Intelligence Agency next tells a president that the case regarding a country's suspected weapons programs is a "slam-dunk," one can assume that that assessment will be greeted with far more skepticism.

Similarly, presidents will recall our current difficulties in putting Iraq back together and ask whether we have the talent, wherewithal or will to handle what follows a military intervention. Whether one supported the war, thinks that better planning for the war's aftermath could have precluded many of the current problems or believes that the president's vision for Iraq is still salvageable, the reality is that continuing troubles in Iraq will have an effect on presidential decision-making for years, especially when it comes to preemption and wars of prevention.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of preemption's death are greatly exaggerated.

The fact that the Bush administration is not looking to repeat Iraq any time soon is a straw man. The doctrine of preemption was never intended to be the hinge on which the administration hung its national security strategy.

While the Bush administration's public articulation of the strategy gave preemption greater weight than ever before, the strategy represented a relative shift in value, not a wholesale abandonment of previous security strategies. For example, deterrence remains an important element in the U.S. toolbox of statecraft, even while strategic defense and preemption have taken on more of the burden as the U.S. attempts to manage the new threats and technologies of the post-Cold War world. Nor does it mean that preemption is a policy option of the first resort. As national security advisor Condoleezza Rice has said, "The number of cases in which it might be justified will always be small."

Small as the number may be, preemption is still part of the picture. This should come as no surprise. Bush and his national security team did not invent the idea. As Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written in his new book, "Surprise, Security and the American Experience," preemption and preventive military action have a long history in U.S. statecraft.

The Monroe Doctrine rested on Washington's willingness to strike before being struck. Though preemption took a back seat to mutual deterrence during most of the Cold War, it remained a policy option for President Kennedy as he worked his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And lest we forget, President Clinton's Pentagon was working up plans for a military strike against North Korea before talks led to an agreement that would supposedly put an end to that country's clandestine nuclear weapons program.

That going to war in Iraq has proved more difficult than anticipated does not change the underlying realities that gave rise to the Bush administration's decision to give preemption a more prominent status in U.S. statecraft. Do we think the potential consequences of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction are any less significant? Are we any more confident that a state such as Iran would never conspire with terrorists to carry out an operation against our allies or us, the Great Satan, with such weapons? Do we really think that North Korea, which allows millions of its citizens to starve so it can avoid giving up its weapons programs, would be a responsible actor on the world stage once it matched up its weapons with ballistic missiles?

These questions are not going away, and thus preemption as an option will not go away either. This is a reality even the United Nations cannot ignore. To his credit, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan went so far as to suggest, in a speech after the Iraq war, that Security Council members begin discussing among themselves "the criteria for an early authorization of coercive measures to address certain types of threats." This is not a road he wants to go down. Nevertheless, as he said then, if the world is to have any "confidence" in the Security Council's policy decisions, it has to be able to say it can "deal effectively with the most difficult issues."

Even now, while British, German and French diplomats are trying to handle Iran's illicit nuclear-weapons program, behind their effort stands the possible use of preemptive force by either the United States or Israel. Indeed, preemption is an essential, if unspoken, prerequisite for those talks' success. No one thinks Tehran would have begun negotiating seriously without that threat, and certainly few believe the talks would show greater progress if the prospect of military action were taken off the table.

As Robert Cooper, strategist and top advisor to the European Union's foreign affairs chief, has written: "It would be irresponsible to do nothing while even one further country acquires nuclear capability. Nor is it good enough to wait until that country acquires the bomb. By then the costs of military action may be too high." "In practice," he notes, "this is not so different from the long-standing British doctrine that no single power should be allowed to dominate the continent of Europe…. Nuclear weapons make every country potentially too strong to deal with."

Six years ago, Michael Walzer, the leading liberal "just war" theorist, wrote in defense of the Clinton administration's hard line toward Iraq that "in international law and morality, preventive wars have generally been ruled out." And that the argument against such wars had been "first worked out when the aim of the standard preventive war was to avoid a shift in the balance of power." But that argument, he wrote, "looks different when the danger is posed by weapons of mass destruction, which are developed in secret, and which might be used suddenly, without warning, with catastrophic results." For that problem, "unilateral action is still a legitimate recourse while that work is going on, before it has produced a reliable result."

The point of quoting Walzer is not to play "gotcha" with critics of the Bush administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. Nor is it meant to convey the idea that military preemption is the only tool for addressing the problems we face. Rather, the point is that, well before Bush became president, preemption was a necessary policy option. And it will remain one long after he leaves the White House for a simple reason: The world is what it is, and no responsible chief executive can afford to think otherwise.

Source: Kerry's More "Sensitive" War on Terror?

August 5, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Kerry's More "Sensitive" War on Terror?

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told an audience in Washington, D.C. today that if elected he would wage "a more sensitive war on terror." Aside from its amusing qualities, this statement adds to other evidence in Kerry's recent statements and speeches, including his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, that Kerry will be very hesitant to use force in his "war" on terrorism. Contrary to widespread accounts of his acceptance speech as hawkish, Kerry seems to believe that the struggle against terrorism can be won chiefly by strengthened alliances and public declarations.

Above all, Kerry seems opposed to taking pre-emptive military action against terrorists or against states that support them. In his convention speech, Kerry makes one reference to the need to "get terrorists before they get us," but it comes in this sentence: "And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us." Insofar as that statement has any meaning, it suggests that Kerry is counting on allied law enforcement efforts.

Elsewhere in the speech, Kerry says: "I will never hesitate to use force when it is required." But the very next sentence makes clear that he does not mean the pre-emptive use of force against terrorists. "Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response." Thus, Kerry seems to believe that the use of force is required to retaliate for a terrorist attack, not to pre-empt one.

In summing up his strategy for the war on terrorism, Kerry in his convention speech declared that "We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win." We doubt that Al Qaeda will be terribly impressed by being told this. But it is of a piece with Kerry's other statements on this subject. Kerry's strategy in the war on terrorism seems built almost exclusively on the application of what Joseph Nye has famously labeled "soft power."

That is a reasonable enough position, if ultimately mistaken. But the American people deserve to hear this debate fought out more frankly. They should know, if it is true, that Kerry does not really favor pre-emptive military strikes against terrorists. This would provide a clear and useful contrast with the policies of the Bush administration.

Source: The 9/11 Commission & Intelligence Reform

August 9, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: The 9/11 Commission & Intelligence Reform

As Congress begins to examine the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, it is essential that members keep in mind the core problems in intelligence collection and analysis identified by the commission - and by Congress in previous reports - and ask themselves whether the recommendations being put forward usefully address those concerns. In this connection, I want to draw your attention to Reuel Gerecht's article ("Not Worth a Blue Ribbon: The Conventional (and Unhelpful) Wisdom of the 9/11 Commission.") in the current edition of the Weekly Standard. (The article can be found online at http://www.weeklystandard.com). Among the highlights:

"Operationally, the commission's report simply does not address the principal problem of America's intelligence effort against Islamic extremism - the failure of the CIA to develop a clandestine service with a methodology and officers capable of penetrating the Islamic holy-warrior organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And analytically, the report's bureaucratic recommendations are unlikely to improve the quality of the U.S. government's thinking about counterterrorism - indeed, they could make intelligence analysis more monochromatic and defined by groupthink than it already is."

Moreover, "the report fails to tackle seriously the overarching policy lesson from 9/11 - the need to strike first…. The stark gravity of this theme, and the general merit of the narrative - which is well written, incisive, and politically damning (vastly more so of the Clintonites' eight years than of the Bushies' eight months) - make the conventional and sometimes sophomoric quality of the recommendations that follow all the more off-putting."

"Undeterred, the commission would have us create a big intelligence bureaucracy associated with its new director. Count on it: The ethos that would develop under him would be no more competitive than it was collegial. Differing opinions within America's intelligence community would tend to become fewer, not more, as a new bureaucratic spirit radiated downward from the man who controlled all the purse strings and wrote the performance reports of the most important players in the intelligence community. American intelligence could well become more focused on the bureaucratic gaming that would be intense as the new structure solidified. It is hard to see how the quality of American intelligence analysis would improve through this reorganization…. But trying to do to intelligence gathering and analysis what General Motors did to car production isn't the way to make American counterterrorism more effective."

Source: Kerry: "Get our troops home"

August 10, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Kerry: "Get our troops home"

The more Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry talks about how he would wage the war on terror, the more he appears to be planning a retreat from an offensive to a defensive strategy. Last Friday, Kerry told a Kansas City audience that: "I know I can run a more effective, smarter, more productive war on terror…. I will do it by bringing to our side the allies that we used to have which should have been with us in the first place. I'll take the target off American troops…and we're going to get our troops home where they belong."

Earlier in the week, Kerry boasted that he would fight a "more sensitive" war on terror. Now he talks about bringing the troops home, "where they belong." Does Sen. Kerry really think that the war on terror can be fought from the continental United States? Is he opposed to a forward strategy of fighting terrorists wherever they operate? If so, then Kerry seems to want to return to the approach employed in the 1990s, when Al Qaeda was allowed to turn Afghanistan into a base of operations. Kerry apparently favors a defensive approach to the war on terror rather than the offensive approach the Bush administration has chosen.

Moreover, Kerry continues, in Nixonian fashion, to promise that he has a way out of the struggle that takes the burden off the United States and passes it on to France and Germany and other reluctant nations. On the one hand, that is hardly a revolutionary idea. Germany and France are already helping in Afghanistan, one critical front in the war on terror. But as for Iraq, another front in the war on terror, Kerry will not succeed in convincing those allies to send troops.

The bottom line is that Kerry sounds more like McGovern every day. The call to bring the troops home "where they belong" is straight out of the Democratic Left's playbook of the 1970s.

Source: "Get our troops home" - Part II: Is Kerry undermining the effort in Iraq right now?

August 11, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: "Get our troops home" - Part II: Is Kerry undermining the effort in Iraq right now?

Sen. Kerry's recent emphasis on getting our troops home - "where they belong" - not only has implications for the broader war on terror but also for the current conflict in Iraq. With his repeated promises to "bring the troops home," Kerry may be damaging international efforts to reconstruct and stabilize Iraq right now.

Experts in counterinsurgency know that the key to defeating an insurgent force is gaining and keeping the support of the population in which the insurgency operates. And the key to gaining that public support is not only providing the people with a reasonable level of personal security now, but also convincing them that they will continue to enjoy security and stability in the future. Only when a population is no longer intimidated by insurgents in their midst, and only when a population thinks the government and allied forces will eventually win, will an insurgency begin losing the cover it needs to survive.

Sen. Kerry's repeated assertion that he will bring American forces home in his first year in office may be undermining the effort to stabilize Iraq even today. For Kerry is signaling both our friends and enemies in Iraq that the U.S. may not remain in Iraq for as long as needed to create stability, that the United States may be short of breath and looking for the exits. It does not help for Kerry to make airy promises about bringing other international forces into Iraq to replace the American forces he plans to withdraw. No Iraqi, friend or foe, can believe the French or Germans are on their way to Iraq next year, even if Kerry is president. Under the circumstances, suggesting that other states will step in to help carry the burden when no one believes that is likely just reaffirms in Iraqi minds that Kerry may want to pull the plug on our operations in Iraq and thus abandon the goal of creating a decent, stable and representative government in Iraq.

Sen. Kerry seems to be vacillating, almost on a daily basis, between an impulse to be responsible on such issues as Iraq and a tendency to play to the left-wing isolationism now rampant in the Democratic Party. We would urge him to take the responsible course now on Iraq and stop talking about pulling out the troops if elected. After all, Kerry might actually find himself in the White House, and then he will reap the consequences if his campaign rhetoric undermines international efforts to secure a stable Iraq.

Source: John Kerry Doesn't Know His Own Mind

August 19, 2004

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: WILLIAM KRISTOL

SUBJECT: John Kerry Doesn't Know His Own Mind


The problem with being an opportunist is that you can easily forget what you've recently said.

On Monday, during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush announced that he intends to modify the configuration of American forces in both South Korea and Europe. On Wednesday, Sen. Kerry, speaking before the same audience, sharply criticized the president's decision.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" on August 1, however, Sen. Kerry responded to a question by host George Stephanopoulos on Iraq. Stephanopoulos asked Kerry whether, as president, he could "promise that American troops will be home by the end of your first term?" Kerry's answer:

I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops…. I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there but elsewhere in the world. In the Korean peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps. There are great possibilities open to us. But this administration has very little imagination.

Apparently, Sen. Kerry wanted to appeal to the "get-the-boys-back-home" sentiment in the country when he spoke on "This Week." Yesterday, addressing a convention of veterans, Kerry was busy burnishing his credentials as a hawk by suggesting that cutting our forces in Korea "is clearly the wrong signal to send" at this time.

Who knows what Sen. Kerry believes? Does Sen. Kerry even know?