thedrifter
12-27-04, 08:01 AM
From Brushfires to Conflagrations
December 27, 2004
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by Bob Newman
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Based in the Pacific in the 1970s, I was assigned my first billet involving defeating terrorists, with the heavy hitters being groups like Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the New People’s Army. In Europe in the early and mid-1980s, my daily duties included, among other things, avoiding being blown up by the Communist Combatant Cells, Red Army Faction, Action Direct, ETA and the Red Brigades. (Also during this time, the United States suffered horrendous losses to terrorists in the Middle East.) By the late 1980s, I found myself teaching counterterrorism at a Department of Defense school, during which time a Marine gunnery sergeant was assassinated by a “sparrow squad” from the Marxist New People’s Army in the Philippines. Also assassinated by a sparrow squad was U.S. Army Medal of Honor recipient Col. James “Nick” Rowe.
In early 1990, I suggested to the editor of the Marine Corps Gazette (a professional education journal of the Corps) that the magazine publish an article on how terrorism was going to be a major threat to Americans in the coming years and that Marines would be fighting terrorists more and more. He wrote back saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and that the Corps would never become a force that would frequently find itself engaging terrorists.
Institutional arrogance and a failure (unwillingness?) to understand the nature of the terrorist beast are two of the most commonplace assets terrorists use against us. These factors contribute directly to the growth of terrorist movements, which always begin as infants but which more and more frequently grow into maturity with alarming rapidity.
If the civilized world does not act upon this fact in the very near future, brushfire wars involving terrorists will evolve into full-blown conflagrations that will spread with horrific speed that we will be unable to douse.
For example, the New People’s Army was once a smallish band of communist thugs. Today, they are tens of thousands strong and represent a dire threat to the Philippines.
In Nepal, the communist terrorists there began as a minor rebellion in the mid-1990s. They have now slaughtered many thousands and can shut down the capital of Katmandu at will.
In the late 1960s, Basque terrorists known as ETA began a modest terrorist campaign for independence. Now more than 800 people have been killed in attacks in this European nation.
Islamic terrorism began with the PLO and has been allowed to fester and become so grim an infection that Muslim terrorists now have the ability to strike in nearly any country.
As the United States continues to rebuild and refashion its military from being disemboweled by negligent politicians and a complacent populace in the 1990s, we must look at successful counterterrorist programs (the British against the Irish Republican Army and communist terrorists in then Malaya, the Germans against the Red Army Faction, the Italians against the Red Brigades, the Peruvians against Sendero Luminoso, et al.) and apply the lessons learned there to the current situation.
If one examines the aforementioned successes, two obvious facts are revealed: the good guys engaged the bad guys early on and kept at it very vigorously, refusing to surrender and attacking the enemy every way they could, everywhere they could.
If we fail to do the same, more and more brushfires will erupt into firestorms of unspeakable intensity, and all the water in the world won’t be nearly enough to stop them.
Unfortunately, many Americans don’t believe in prescribed burns or proactively thinning out forests, and it is these Americans the terrorists are counting on.
Bob Newman
Ellie
December 27, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Bob Newman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Based in the Pacific in the 1970s, I was assigned my first billet involving defeating terrorists, with the heavy hitters being groups like Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the New People’s Army. In Europe in the early and mid-1980s, my daily duties included, among other things, avoiding being blown up by the Communist Combatant Cells, Red Army Faction, Action Direct, ETA and the Red Brigades. (Also during this time, the United States suffered horrendous losses to terrorists in the Middle East.) By the late 1980s, I found myself teaching counterterrorism at a Department of Defense school, during which time a Marine gunnery sergeant was assassinated by a “sparrow squad” from the Marxist New People’s Army in the Philippines. Also assassinated by a sparrow squad was U.S. Army Medal of Honor recipient Col. James “Nick” Rowe.
In early 1990, I suggested to the editor of the Marine Corps Gazette (a professional education journal of the Corps) that the magazine publish an article on how terrorism was going to be a major threat to Americans in the coming years and that Marines would be fighting terrorists more and more. He wrote back saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and that the Corps would never become a force that would frequently find itself engaging terrorists.
Institutional arrogance and a failure (unwillingness?) to understand the nature of the terrorist beast are two of the most commonplace assets terrorists use against us. These factors contribute directly to the growth of terrorist movements, which always begin as infants but which more and more frequently grow into maturity with alarming rapidity.
If the civilized world does not act upon this fact in the very near future, brushfire wars involving terrorists will evolve into full-blown conflagrations that will spread with horrific speed that we will be unable to douse.
For example, the New People’s Army was once a smallish band of communist thugs. Today, they are tens of thousands strong and represent a dire threat to the Philippines.
In Nepal, the communist terrorists there began as a minor rebellion in the mid-1990s. They have now slaughtered many thousands and can shut down the capital of Katmandu at will.
In the late 1960s, Basque terrorists known as ETA began a modest terrorist campaign for independence. Now more than 800 people have been killed in attacks in this European nation.
Islamic terrorism began with the PLO and has been allowed to fester and become so grim an infection that Muslim terrorists now have the ability to strike in nearly any country.
As the United States continues to rebuild and refashion its military from being disemboweled by negligent politicians and a complacent populace in the 1990s, we must look at successful counterterrorist programs (the British against the Irish Republican Army and communist terrorists in then Malaya, the Germans against the Red Army Faction, the Italians against the Red Brigades, the Peruvians against Sendero Luminoso, et al.) and apply the lessons learned there to the current situation.
If one examines the aforementioned successes, two obvious facts are revealed: the good guys engaged the bad guys early on and kept at it very vigorously, refusing to surrender and attacking the enemy every way they could, everywhere they could.
If we fail to do the same, more and more brushfires will erupt into firestorms of unspeakable intensity, and all the water in the world won’t be nearly enough to stop them.
Unfortunately, many Americans don’t believe in prescribed burns or proactively thinning out forests, and it is these Americans the terrorists are counting on.
Bob Newman
Ellie