U S Department of Defense

The Real "Long War" U S Department of Defense

In common with the military establishments in most of the world's other countries, the U. S. military faces two challenges. The first of these is to decide strategic priorities in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the likely de-emphasis on preparation for large-scale counterinsurgency missions. The second connected challenge is the balance to be struck between traditional military functions and the "newer" nontraditional ones. Of course, the deterrence and prevention of war will remain the top priority for the U. S. military as for most others, and thus the maintenance of the capacity to "fight and win" so far as resources will allow, remains a non-negotiable requirement. Nonetheless, within that setting, there yet remains a whole set of second-order decisions about investment in forces and capabilities that may be good for traditional warfighting tasks but not for nontraditional ones, or vice versa. Although the inherent flexibility of military forces will often allow an effortless switch from one mission priority to another, there are nonetheless real and substantial dilemmas and choices in creating sufficiently balanced forces. One way of helping to resolve these issues of choice is to address the relative seriousness of the threats to the United States that need to be dealt with. This is usually done by assessing, first of all, the likelihood of the threat, and then its relative seriousness to U. S. peace, security, and prosperity, should it materialize. Finally, judgments need to be made about the cost effectiveness of the contribution that the military can make to the countering of the threat. Against these criteria, the threat of the illicit trade in drugs must rank high, and almost certainly higher than is generally perceived, because it easily can be shown that this is, first of all, a clear and present danger in that the threat is already here, rather than a threat that might or might not materialize in the future. It currently constitutes a threat at the individual level (in terms of death, injury, and human misery to be measured in terms of hundreds of thousands every year), at the national level because it undermines the fabric of state and society, and at the level of the international system because it destabilizes essential regions, especially when the illicit trade in drugs becomes aligned with other forms of threat such as international terrorism (as in the case of al-Qaeda in the Northern Maghreb).