Where is the Enemy (What is the Threat?)
       In the context of traditional enemies who currently have the capability to cross our borders and overrun our country, there are none.  We do not have an external enemy which has as its goal the direct physical domination of the United States.  There is no nation on the international scene which is a serious ideological competitor with our form of democracy.  We need fear no nation for its possible imposition of a competing form of government on us or other nations.  There are nations who view their interaction with us as "warlike" in the sense that they seek economic domination of markets for which we are in competition. Such domination does not translate to direct physical occupation of America. The United States is perfectly capable of engaging in and "winning" such economic wars.  This is guaranteed by the fact that we have the best research and development establishment in the world. In addition, we are a market for consumer goods that is, by far, the largest in the world.

       There are national interests vital to our survival as a nation relative to the energy and other natural resources required to fuel our industrial society and that of our allies and trading partners. Only one of these resources, oil, is of such importance that the United States. need commit its armed forces to its continued supply. It is clear that our current ability to project power abroad via air, sea, and ground forces will be sufficient, in concert with European and Asian allies, to assure this situation. Other than the continual tension among Middle Eastern protagonists, there does not appear to be a dangerous threat to our access to these resources, either now or in the future. If such threats did emerge and we were somehow unable to remove them, the United States has alternative sources of energy to last it for centuries.

       The largest external physical threat posed to the citizens of the U.S. is their vulnerability to terrorist attack sponsored by foreign governments. An Iraqi terrorist plot to assassinate former President Bush on a visit to Kuwait during April 1993 was handled by dispatch by the U.S. national security apparatus.  Through the national security advisor, actions were immediately coordinated to carry out a cruise missile attack on a major intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. But the U.S. Government has been unable to offer anything like so neat an accounting of the terrorism that has struck closer to home.

       The terrorist plot that created havoc at the World Trade Center in February 1993, and more recently threatened the Lincoln Tunnel and the United Nations, still wears the label of domestic crime.  And crime still tends to be treated with a different standard of seriousness.  The New York Times reports that "...authorities in New York managed to foil the latest bombing plot, arresting nine supposed plotters in the last two weeks, is of course reassuring.  But there were reminders that their success only followed a series of fumbles, and fingers were being pointed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation for having failed to pursue hints that a terrorist operation was under way.  Among the clues that helped thwart the planned attack on the Lincoln Tunnel and the United Nations, its was reported, was information in Arabic-language documents first discovered by the F.B.I. in 1990.  But no one thought to translate the documents until after the World Trade Center attack.  The blast that rocked the World Trade Center, moreover, was only the most obvious of signs that Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived in the United States. Two Central Intelligence Agency employees had already been slain by a Pakistani gunman outside C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia; in St. Louis, four Palestinians have since been charged with plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Washington as part of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization. Even more ominous, Government officials say, a widening network of Iranian-backed terrorism has almost certainly allowed the Party of God organization to establish North American cells." The man charged with masterminding the plot to bomb the United Nations said he was told to kidnap Henry Kissinger as trade bait to free those charged in the World Trade Center bombing, according to secretly taped conversations.

       Nevertheless, compared to the number of agencies assigned to monitor terrorism abroad, only a narrow swath of Federal authority is set aside to control domestic terrorism.  For the plotted Bush assassination, the national security apparatus was activated; for the New York terrorist bombing plots, only the Justice Department was involved.  Part of the difference lies in American laws that give intelligence agencies and the military more latitude to operate overseas than in the United States.  The freedom from scrutiny that potential terrorists enjoy in our vulnerable nation, and easy immigration and due process laws compound the risk.  But such domestic inefficiency cannot be explained merely by deference to civil liberties. Old notions of national security die hard; the idea of domestic terrorism remains something of an oxymoron. Insulated for so long from such violence, Americans still tend to look abroad for threats; that they may already lurk within is more difficult to accept.

       For example, a recent major natural gas pipeline explosion in New Jersey incinerated 128 apartments of public housing, with over 1,500 people missing within 12 hours of the early morning explosion and blaze. Preliminary reports have one person killed and 50 unaccounted for but three buildings were pulverized and it is unclear, immediately after the explosion, how many may have perished there. Whether or not this explosion was an accident, a criminal arson, or a planned terrorist  act, it is a perfect example of what kind of vulnerability to terrorism exists all over the land (in this case, a pipeline from Texas to the East Coast, buried at a depth of only 7 feet, easily accessible to small terrorist groups). Preliminary investigation reveals the possibility of an accidental breach of the pipeline by some unknown means. A scrape of one and one-half inches long and cut into the outer skin of the pipe about one-eighth of an inch, has been found, reducing the pipe's thickness from 0.685 inch to about a half-inch.  Authorities are still puzzled as to the cause of such a scrape.

       Two-thirds of all pipeline leaks are caused by contractors or excavators with backhoes digging near a main. The rest are blamed on pipe corrosion, material defects or improper installation. Investigators have dug a trench evacuated along the N.J. pipeline and have found a veritable junkyard of metal and other debris including the cannibalized sections of a truck reported stolen three and a half years ago. The truck was buried several feet underground and found perhaps 80 feet east of the point of the blast.  This discovery is ominous and worrisome. If such excavation is so extensive and undetected, anyone (including terrorists bent on massive destruction) could easily dig surreptitiously to the pipeline anywhere along its thousands of miles of existence. A small group of individual terrorists could easily, without detection, create many such explosions over the U.S. in populated areas with a small amount of C-4 plastic or other explosives.

       C-4 explosive, by the way, has been reported as being available to many who might desire it in the U.S., being imported from abroad (e.g. China) without controls, just as Mak-90 (China's version of the Russian AK-47) automatic rifles are being imported from China, both illegally and legally and without control,. Several independent sources have reported the importation of such weapons, numbering from tens of thousands to one million during the last year. In addition, reports of enough AK-47 automatic weapons to equip an army division have turned up in Columbus, Ohio, imported from Russia. Russia's need for hard U.S. currency is behind this activity. In the case of China, the rifles have been traced to a company closely associated with China's military, Norinco. The Chinese sold 55 million rounds of ammunition for these rifles in the United States in 1992, at a retail cost of about 10 cents a round, less than a third of its American equivalents. These weapons and ammunition are not going to "gun hobbyists" and "sportsmen."  They are available to the criminal element, gangs, and terrorists who have already infiltrated our society. The United States does not have a security apparatus or military force of sufficient magnitude nor training to handle this internal threat to our security.

       Many such vulnerabilities arise in America from the centralization of the systems on which we rely for the distribution of jobs, food, electric power, gasoline, natural gas, water, transportation and banking. Our borders are sufficiently vast and unguardable that they can be infiltrated at will by small groups which would do us harm. Our legal immigration and asylum barriers are like sieves. Nevertheless, even with the advent of nuclear devices in the hands of those who are not friendly to us, this problem is manageable. But its management will require vast internal manpower resources, eternal citizen vigilance and cooperation, and (unfortunately) a voluntary restraint on our personal freedoms. The personal freedom that we give up by allowing ourselves to be searched before boarding an airliner is only the first of many that will be required to neutralize the threat of terrorist attack on vulnerable parts of America. We must take action to organize and plan for the kind of security which would guarantee against widespread terrorist attack, attack carried out under the auspices of international terrorism on U.S. soil. This is the major external threat to the survival of our nation.

       Many nations have been involved in what Martin Van Creveld, the noted Israeli military historian and author of the book, 'The Transformation of War,' called nontrinitarian warfare since the end of the Cold War in 1991. Included in this world scene are nations of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, in Mexico, as well as in African third-world countries.  In addition, low level nuclear threats will exist in China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and several former Soviet republics, now free, and others.  The nuclear bomb will be in the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists within two short decades.  Indeed, the next nuclear weapon fired in anger will not be by a "super power," but by some third-world nation in a regional conflict or a terrorist organization which would duplicate the "World Trade Center" bombing but with a tremendous nuclear fireball. Indeed, after convicting four Muslim extremists who bombed the World Trade Center, U.S. prosecutors now will try to prove that the attack was just the start of a planned "war of urban terrorism" meant to bring down the U.S. government.  The next time, a nuclear device in the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists could unleash the kind of loss of authority over a population in the United States as has been seen in other nations via other means.

       Since our nation depends entirely on sophisticated distribution networks for food, water, electrical power, banking and the other necessities, we are particularly vulnerable to such widespread disruption of vital services.

Summary
       Martin Van Creveld, in an aside in his seminal book on "The Transformation of War," presents a penetrating insight into the likely result of allowing our women to engage in combat.  It is not an encouraging prediction for the path on which the United States is embarking. It is, however, quite illuminating. It succinctly summarizes the subject treated in this book.  He provides a quite balanced view of women-in-combat.  It confirms the negative view.

       Van Creveld sagely observes that women, as well as men, have a great stake in the outcome of any war. "To understand the nature of armed conflict, consider the part played -- or not played -- in it by the females of the species. Were war simply a rational instrument for the attainment of rational social ends, then the role of women should have been just as great as that of the men; after all they comprise half of humanity, and by no means its least important half. To the extent that war is indeed an instrument for increasing or safeguarding society's welfare, women's stake in it is no smaller than that of men.  This is true in general, and also because defeat is likely to create a situation in which they, and their children, will be among the fist victims." This is written in full view of the fact that Van Creveld believes that future wars will be far different in many ways than past wars. He believes that wars will be fought for objectives that have been unheard of for over 300 years -- treasure, women, hatred, and religion.  For example, "Rwanda somehow has gone way off the charts of international 'norms' in times of conflict.  It's a plunge deep, deep into the heart of darkness, bringing back images from the worst days of genocide...There is no ideology or religious zeal at work -- just raw HATRED." Another example is the northern Sudanese, Moslems, civil war with the Christian and animist southern Sudanese. Van Creveld believes that there is every prospect that religious attitudes, beliefs, and fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict than it has, in the West at any rate, for the last 300 years.

       Already, the fastest growing religion in the world is Islam.  Its very militancy is one factor behind its spread. Islam does not shy away from fighting to achieve its aims. People in many parts of the world -- including downtrodden groups in the developed world -- are finding Islam attractive precisely because it is prepared to fight. In addition, the triumph of nationalism has brought about a situation where people do not occupy a piece of land because it is valuable; on the contrary, a piece of land however remote or desolate is considered valuable because it is occupied by this people or that. For example, Armenian strongholds (150,000 in the mountains) within Azerbaijan (population of 7.3 million) are winning a guerrilla war. Serbs in Bosnia are winning a war against the Croat and Muslim populations.

       The lessons here are obvious. The emerging nature of warfare -- nontrinitarian low-level conflict over objectives that have not been paramount in over 300 years -- and the diminished effectiveness of our traditional high-tech armed forces in such warfare will, with the addition of women-in-combat, result in a complete dissolution of our armed forces as we now recognize them. In their place, if we are prescient enough to accomplish it, will be a new and differently constituted armed force of 'warriors' trained in the counter-insurgency kinds of warfare that are even today erupting in our urban centers.  This armed force will be as described in previous sections of this report.  The decay and dissolution of our traditional armed forces is preordained by the nature of future warfare and the forces of nature at work when we place women as a large fraction of our 'fighting troops.'  When men voluntarily shun such conventional fighting forces, they will more likely gravitate toward the more 'violent' and potentially brutal and savage kinds of warfare that will be required to protect our citizens from the nontrinitarian threats we will face. These new forces will be more like the 'Seal Teams,' 'Rangers,' 'Commandos,' 'Special Forces,' and 'Secret Service' than the forces that are now being joined in droves by women for glorious 'careers.'

       Women must not serve in combat roles in these new forces. If they do, our young men will not join. If our young men do not rise to take the risks and meet the challenges of the changing nature of warfare in the twenty-first century, our brief experiment with democracy -- a constitutional republic -- will perish.


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