Cole USS Cole and Anti-Terrorism

Cole

USS Cole and Anti-Terrorism Strategies

The USS Cole Commission Report does not simply describe what occurred during the terrorist attack on the military transport vessel in October of 2000, nor does it stop at listing the possible intelligence and security failures that allowed for that attack on the vessel to be successful. Instead, it uses the incident as a platform for discussing larger trends in maritime security, terrorism, intelligence needs, and other aspects of national security. Most essentially, the report redefines the nature of the threats facing U.S. military forces in the current era when compared to the threats that existed in previous decades and centuries, noting that in the post-Cold War era the enemy is more likely to be "transnational" -- that is, not affiliated with a specific government or national body, but rather looser in their organization, smaller in their scale, and more difficult to obtain reliable and consistent information on. In order to combat this changing threat, the report recommends several strategic changes in five categories of organization, antiterrorism/force protection, intelligence, logistics, and training. Many of the recommendations are rather broad, with specific actions being taken only after further threat-identification and solution development by various offices within the purview of the DoD.

2)

Though many observers and officials have praised the Proliferation Security Initiative instigated by President George W. Bush in 2002, the agreement that the seventy-or-so countries "support" is rather toothless, and though it does indeed discourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, it does not actually enable the legal use of force to accomplish this in most instances. Even countries that have fully signed on to the initiative retain the legal right to ship such weapons and necessary materials, according to this report, with domestic laws in the various national entities still serving as the only legal means for the seizure of such weapons and materials. This, of course, only applies to nations where domestic laws have been passed that make the shipping, receiving, transport, etc. Of such materials illegal; for this reason, the initiative has largely focused efforts on strengthening such domestic laws, and it has met with some success here. The report generally shows, however, that the initiative does little in a direct and practical means to disrupt proliferation, despite the claims made in the 109th Congress that nearly three dozen separate proliferation incidents were stopped in the first two years of the initiative alone. Discouraging is not the same as stopping, and this initiative has little stopping power.

3)

According to the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism published in February of 2003, the first major objective in the nation's antiterrorism strategy is simply to defeat the terrorists and their organizations. This seems almost laughably simple, but victory against terrorism is difficult to define; the report itself acknowledges this and includes in its strategy efforts to "compress the scope and capability of terrorist organizations, isolate them regionally, and destroy them within state borders." Even defining when these disparate features have been met is difficult, and thus the strategy itself is somewhat ill-defined in many places. There are two primary objectives that carry more concrete meaning -- and more in-depth explanation -- in the report, but these are grand projects that themselves have ill-defined boundaries and murky understandings of true possibilities. Attempts to deny support to terrorists, through financial and material means as well as through the provision of sanctuary or even simple encouragement, are certainly warranted, but defining which organizations are terrorists is something that cannot be accomplished unilaterally if it is to have any meaning, yet multilateral agreement is often highly difficult to reach. The same can be said of the objective to diminish the conditions that terrorists exploit -- at some point, the level of control needed for this (regardless of the practical difficulties) becomes tyrannical and dictatorial, removed from terrorism only for its level of organization and official sanction.