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Terrorism, Afghanistan and America's New Way of War is an ambitious, lucid, and stimulating book that describes the political and military response of the U.S. government to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of 11 September 2001. Its author, Norman Friedman, weaves military analysis cleverly into his narrative of political events, as he has done in earlier books on the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, showing an ability to cut through to essentials that characterizes the best military historians. But the book has some shortcomings.
One of its central themes is that the U.S. defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan demonstrated the growing importance of a new "network-centric" military doctrine, which relies on remote sensors and computer-driven command-and-control systems to deliver smart weapons, precisely and with devastating effect, from a relatively small number of offensive units. Friedman's argument is that networked air strikes, combined with action by coalition partners such as the Northern Alliance on the ground (supported by Western Special Forces), are the way that the United States will fight future wars. He admits that what happened in Afghanistan did not entirely fit that model, because not all the necessary systems were yet available. But overall his argument is convincing, and the technical military issues are presented clearly, without excessive jargon to confound the uninitiated.
The purely military sections form only a relatively short part of the book. Having given an account of the 11 September attacks, Friedman runs through the history of the U.S. response to terrorism back to the early 1980s, criticizing the insufficiently robust policy of the Clinton administration...