“Red-Teaming” Our National Campaign Plan:
Challenges From The Alien Culture and Mentality of The Enemy and His Unrestricted Sustaining Networks

Just as Kipling’s orang-utan was said to have had “too much ego in his cosmos,” so, too, with the ethnocentrism and blinding pride of nations. Just as it takes a very special mental effort and honesty and humility to discern and consider one’s deepest philosophical presuppositions about life and meaning and final purpose, so, too, does it take such qualities to understand “the other,” especially to understand another nation and its deep culture, particularly when that nation or religious culture also constitutes “the enemy,” not just “the alien other.”1

While sharply answering the deeper fundamental question about “the kind of war” we are in, it is also decisively important to ask and to determine:

• Who is the enemy?

• What are we trying to defend; and why?

• What can we afford to lose, and how much will it cost us?

• And, what is our measure of cost, not just of material cost, but of moral cost, i.e., the spiritual cost and the long-range effects on our character?

For, Thucydides said that “most people’s character sinks to the level of their fortune,” which his vivid depiction of the Corcyrean Civil War so unforgettably illustrates and confirms. Moreover, Thomas Jefferson memorably said that the most important consideration of any public policy was its effects on the moral character of the citizens. And, this is especially true in times of strain and sedition and war. Public policy, strategic policy, must not pander to the prejudices or the vices of a people, for this is a corrupting and illusionary form of expediency and a self-sabotaging injustice.

The ethical factors of war--not just one’s own honor and sustaining morale--are important, along with the physical and intellectual factors. For, it is so often true that our intellectual and moral character constitutes and decisively forms our destiny. Virtue really matters, and so does the bondage of vice. Indeed, it has been wisely said that we have as many masters as we have vices!

By “Red-Teaming” our own plans and strategy and interpretation of reality, we may better learn to see the world through others’ eyes. We may thereby come to understand and to savor in depth the often threatening strategic environment and the mentality of an adversary or rival.

Let us also imagine that our adversaries are learning from us and making their own close analyses and modified strategic doctrines for striking at our“leadership, infrastructure, civilian command-and-control facilities, intelligence facilities, lines of communications, orother strategic rear-area targets.” Let us especially consider that they are keenly studying our “strategic rear-area targets,” such as our agriculture and agricultural logistics, so as to apply their own latent or open weapons of “destruction, disruption, and deception” the way we do in targeting another country. Our Joint Warfare Analysis Center, for example, can make very detailed studies of the critical infrastructure of foreign nations. What if these countries or groups develop their own Joint Warfare Analysis Centers against us?

Let us further imagine that a group such as al-Qaeda is developing into a “networked, foreign, covert Special Operations Force” like one of our “Special Mission Units” or “National Mission Units.” And what if they have also learned from the Soviet and Russian “GRU Spetsnaz units” and their strategic missions of wreaking havoc in the rear-areas of the enemy, whether in Europe or in the Homeland of the United States and its border areas? Would this realization (or hypothesis of a “GRU-al-Qaeda Spetsnaz Network”) not help us acutely to think with “the mind of the enemy,” or with what the military and intelligence communities call the “mind of the Red Team”? For a “Red Team,” deftly operating as an intelligent and subtle enemy, mediated especially through his own special world-view and culture and distinctive mentality, tries to defeat our own defenses and critical assets. If we learn to think with the mind of “the enemy,” whoever it might be, we might better anticipate and forestall his operations and “alliance system,” as well as his strategy.

When, a few years ago, for example, the National Security Agency (NSA) used a set of “Red Teams” to penetrate and disrupt our military bases and their information systems, they were especially effective in going after “soft targets,” like the “un-hardened” computers which facilitate the military pay system or medical logistics and hospital re-supply. So, too, it would be the case, and a fortiori, if we were to “Red Team” the “soft targets” of our agriculture—especially our crops and crop-products and their facilitating infrastructure. If a “Red Team” could sow enough doubt and suspicion about our “agricultural base and its logistical communications” so as to get certain arguably contaminated crops on the Quarantine List, they would be very effective and disruptive of our trade and economically consequential, would they not? Such a deception certainly constitutes a form of subversive economic warfare. Just think what a real enemy from a foreign strategic culture might do.

If a “Red Team” were to suggest that certain seemingly natural pests that were permeating the crops—for example, in our Florida fruit orchards or in our California grape vineyards—were really a hostile intrusion of a foreign power—would not the Insurance Companies thereby abandon the farmer and refuse to indemnify and reimburse the vulnerable farmers, and then what? Think of the social disruption, as well.

Furthermore, will not the current war in Afghanistan also provide “lessons for enemies,” who, realizing some of our strengths very vividly, will therefore strive to form “far looser and more broadly distributed networks, groups of cells that have a high degree of individual independence and survivability and that do not have rigid hierarchies, headquarters, or physical facilities that can be located and attacked.”2 Moreover, Cordesman argues, “a key lesson of Afghanistan to such enemies is the need for more anonymity, more emphasis on cover organizations and proxies, and for sequential or multiple attacks from isolated cells and elements so that losses in one area will not halt the overall [terrorist or bio-terrorist] campaign.”3

In our current context of conflict it would also be good for us to have read and understood the Koran, especially what it thinks of non-Muslim infidels. And it would likewise be good for us to do the same with the decisively formative Jewish Talmud, and to understand what its deep attitudes and ideas are about the non-Jewish “Goyim.” The concept and reality of the “Oral Torah” and of the “Mystical Cabala” are also very revealing; as is Professor Benjamin Ginsburg’s unflinchingly candid and very important book, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. For, the deeper views about man and God that are rooted in alien religious cultures also decisively influence political culture, military culture, and strategic culture. We must deeply savor these truths and their intimately practical implications for the conduct of war and for the sustainment of peace.

Therefore, our “war games” and training and education must make special provision to teach us,without superficiality, the heart of other World-Views and their cultures. The British Empire and their Oxford-and -Cambridge-formed elites were much better than we in understanding foreign ways of life, and in teaching them the responsibilities and burdens of colonial rule or governance among foreign cultures. Such a disposition and orientation were a fruit of long cultivation and an especially rich and diversely experienced intellectual culture. Now that we in the United States are unmistakably involved in a protracted and deepening cultural-religious war, and not just with and within the Muslim world, but also as a participant in the neo-Jewish Zionist world, we must make every effort to foster both the discipline and the intellectual culture to understand other mentalities and martial and political cultures. We must strive to grasp other cultural forms of strategic and grand-strategic thinking.

The Japanese-Chinese strategic game of “Go” is distinctively different, for example, from the traditional Western strategic game of Chess--and there are many practical implications of these contrasting mentalities. In the game of Go, one is always trying to surround and isolate one’s opponent. This is exactly what many would like to do today against “the World’s Sole Superpower,” especially when, in Samuel Huntington’s own influential words, this “Lonely Superpower” in increasingly perceived to be as a “Rogue Superpower.”

The two Chinese Senior Colonels who wrote Unrestricted Warfare made some very revealing commentsafter their book had been published and after the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had been hit by our weapons. These Colonels were interviewed by a well known Hong Kong newspaper about their upcoming second book, and they took this occasion to comment on how the Americans conducted the Kosovo War and how their own proposals in Unrestricted Warfare were to do the exact opposite, and thereby enable “the weaker” to defeat a “stronger” power such as the U.S. They said, by way of sharp illustrative contrast with themselves, that the Americans had revealed a grave mismatch between their ends and their means. That is to say, the Americans irrationally imposed upon themselvesvery restrictive means and “rules of engagement,” and, yet, they still delusively tried to implant their “values” and “human rights” and “democratic procedures” in the fevered and culturally fractured Balkans, of all places! These Americans, they said, even strove concurrently to pursue other sentimentally utopian and intrinsically unfulfillable ends, as well, and even expected to attain them within a short time! The Chinese culture of Sun Tzu, however, would, by contrast, have very clear objectives and disciplined ends--without “mission creep”--but they would be resourcefully unrestricted in the means they resorted to, in order to attain those focused and disciplined ends.

True “Red-Teaming,” therefore, will help us understand such different perceptions and such momentously distinctive mentalities. This clarifying practice--like the Mossad’s own Advocatus Diaboli Teams (Devil’s Advocate Teams)--will greatly help us in the U.S. Special Operations Command, especially in light of our foreignstrategic-cultural missions. Often we Americans walk around as if history didn’t matter. Now, we certainly cannot afford to walk around as if culture also didn’t matter. No matter what we think, however, the mentalities of alien strategic cultures will certainly and momentously matter. The truth always does.

We may run. We can’t hide.

We must also always preserve “the tragic sense of life,” for “that man sets in motion events which he can neither calculate nor control is a tragic fact” (A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy).

Real “Red-Teaming” will help us grasp these deeper truths and matters of moment. Do we agree?