I was looking at this Danger Room post last week, talking about the challenges of intercepting the Somali pirates that are roaming all over the place.
[VADM Mark] Fox, who commands U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, attributed that expanded reach to a reduced monsoon season this year and increased pirate reliance on “mother ships,” larger vessels that serve as launch points for smaller ships in deeper water. But while the weather is hard to predict, using mother ships isn’t a new tactic for the Somali pirate fleet. The Indian navy sunk one in the Gulf of Aden back in 2008. Mideast-based U.S. Navy forces even captured one the following year.
And that exposes a basic weakness, as National Journal noted. Fox confessed, “with the vast distances that are involved here, you know, there’s a lot — there’s a lot of places where we are not.”
That’s a general concern. The more immediate lesson emerging from the Quest is that even when the U.S. Navy responds assertively to a hostage situation — getting into position quickly; using massive force but not being provocative; being diplomatic before getting violent — things can still turn ugly.
Now within the DOD WMD community, the two big concerns are "loose nukes" from some nation's stockpile that might pop up in a US city and "emerging infectious diseases" that might impact the United States. Of course, these aren't the only threats that DOD sees, so you find this statement in the QDR 2010 as a defined effort: "Maintaining awareness of the global environment to identify potential threats and emerging opportunities." That's not just in adversarial countries but friendly/neutral countries and the "global commons." And it's not like the intel community isn't trying to do this already.
So the proposals include throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into "global nuclear detection architectures" and a "global biosurveillance" network. Never mind that it's DHS's job to do the first and DHHS's job to do the latter. Neither federal agency are funded enough to do the job, so obviously DOD needs to do their jobs for them (no, this isn't "interagency cooperation" as much as it is "get outta my way, you're screwing it up"). My only question is, if the DOD can't focus on one very specific region of the world and identify the exact movements of Somali pirates who are threatening ships, how exactly is it going to succeed against "loose nukes" and "emerging infectious diseases?"
I don't see it. But that doesn't stop ambitious people from trying to get attention and funding to attempt such things, even if they aren't directly supporting DOD's primary warfighting mission. It's bad policy, be it in the Obama administration or the past one.
Comments