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"A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and defense departments all over the 'developed' world-the fear of military impotence, even irrelevance."
- Martin van Creveld
The Transformation of War
In theory, at least, the US national security decisionmaking process is rational. During this process, the decisionmaker establishes the desired goals of policy and develops a strategy for employing often-scarce resources to achieve these goals. This rational calculus seeks to balance both ends and means.
But this rational decisionmaking process is also vulnerable, and the "chaos strategist" will target this vulnerability in challenging America. To plan a strategy of direct engagement with American military forces, as Iraq learned in Desert Storm and the Taliban did in Afghanistan, is lunacy. The chaos strategist, by contrast, must manipulate the scenario to his best advantage while striving to prevent the introduction of American military force.
Adversaries who do not practice a similar process of decisionmaking- balancing resources and constraints, means and ends-will increasingly look for innovative ways to "attack" without attacking directly the brick wall of American military predominance. The chaos strategist thus targets the American national security decisionmaking process and, potentially, the American people, rather than American military force, in order to prevail. Such a strategist seeks to induce decision paralysis.
In a strategy of chaos, the key objective will be to convince American political leaders that no clear solution, end-state, or political objective (other than the cessation of chaos) exists in the strategist's sphere of dominance-and that sphere of dominance may be at home or abroad. Chaos strategy, employed by all warring parties in the former Yugoslavia and by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, serves to initially discourage yet may ultimately provoke American intervention. Yet future adversaries will almost certainly use the leverage of chaos as a strategy for gain.
In the ongoing war on terrorism, however, the practice of chaos strategy by non-state actors, rather than by the leaders of recognized nation-states, may only complicate the security calculus for the United States and its allies. On the one hand, we will practice preemption against those who seek to harm our vital interests and our way of life. Military forces will increasingly be in the business of shooting archers, and not just catching arrows. That is...