Necessary and Overdue Thoughts About the War Against Terrorists -- Part 1

We need  a strategy to win our purported war against terrorists, and if we currently have any such strategy, it needs to be changed.

As things stand, we are squandering our resources -- the lives of our troops and the funds being expended -- to no avail. The U.S. military victory in Iraq did nothing to stop terrorist attacks against our country, and nobody expects victory in Afghanistan, whatever that means and even if it is achieved, to do so. 

Our adversaries have demonstrated that they are capable of moving to, and initiating strikes against us from any number of different locations. Nor are those hostile to us lacking in daring, imagination, or resources. Furthermore, they have the luxury of being able to select from a plethora of soft, vulnerable targets in our homeland, and to pick and choose optimum times to strike such targets. 

No nation ever has won a war by engaging only in defensive actions. Nonetheless, that is what the U.S. is doing by only taking defensive measures and responding to individual attacks as they occur against us. We are losing and will continue to lose if we allow the contest to continue as such a low level war of attrition. Our response to every attack that has been mounted against us together with our losses in the strike has been far more expensive to us than it has been to our attackers in terms of  both personnel and monetary costs. Furthermore, that is true even without taking into account the enormous burdens of purported defensive measures our government has put and is continuing to put into place. Most of these measures are wasted except insofar as they create popular illusions that the government is doing something to protect America and Americans.

This disparity in the expenditure of resources means that we are losing the war, albeit slowly -- so slowly that the inevitable end result seems to be escaping public notice. Ultimately, however, our present course can lead only to ruin and defeat.  

We need a strategy that will make hostile actions against the U.S. and its people more costly to our adversaries than it is to us, sufficiently more costly to dissuade our adversaries from attempting attacks against us. Or, as President Reagan famously said of his cold war strategy: 

We win, they lose!

K.R., your not-so-humble blogger, intends in future parts of this series to suggest such a strategy. Part 2 will deal with a way or ways to go on the offensive by economic and/or perhaps other nonmilitary means, and Part 3 will suggest a coherent military strategy. These suggestions will not be hampered or circumscribed by political correctness.