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Miller Opening Statement for Hearing on “Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, today released the following prepared remarks for the subcommittee’s hearing on challenges and opportunities facing the United States from terrorism and irregular warfare:
“We have realized a significant paradigm shift in our view of national security since entering the new millennium. This is not to say that we have not faced similar challenges before –we certainly experienced a number of conventional conflicts last century, from World War I to Desert Storm. Guerrilla warfare, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies pockmarked the globe from El Salvador to Zimbabwe to Mongolia. Terrorism frequented nightly news reports and the daily papers with hijackings, bombings, hostage taking and murders. While these challenges ran the spectrum of conflict, our national military strategy continued along Cold War lines of thinking, focusing on the need to respond to major conventional conflicts. Terrorism was treated as a law enforcement issue, and national security responsibilities remained fairly well delineated among agencies, with little cross over or communication.
“In the aftermath of 9/11, we began to see the shortcomings of our previous approach and realized the need to translate our national strategy into a whole of government effort that interconnects agencies that previously had significant barriers between them and jealously guarded turf. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our military adapted its tactics and strategy to operate in counter-insurgency environments and to work with other agencies in ways previously unseen. In facing al Qaeda, our ability to bring interagency capabilities together has proved extremely effective in disrupting the group’s operations. The State Department has sought to become more expeditionary, while the military has moved to expand ‘special operations’-like capabilities and leverage partner nation capabilities.
“We are increasingly cognizant of the asymmetric aspect of conflict today. In its September 2007 Joint Operating Concept for Irregular Warfare, the Department of Defense defined Irregular Warfare as ‘a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations’ and further explained that that Irregular Warfare ‘favors indirect and asymmetric approaches,’ potentially in combination with more traditional military capabilities, to erode the opponent’s power, influence and will.
"Conflict is about breaking the power and will of an adversary—be it a conventional opponent or a non-state actor—and we cannot limit our view of Irregular Warfare to violent groups like al-Qaeda. In Unrestricted Warfare, written before the 9/11 attacks, Chinese military authors Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui point to Desert Storm as showcasing the dominance of the United States on the conventional battlefield and the necessity for the use of unconventional approaches in the face of such overwhelming conventional capability as the U.S. possesses. In recent years, we have seen the use of ‘unconventional’ methods to counter conventional advantages—from using small, fast boats to swarm conventional naval vessels to combining cyber attacks with military action. So we should not consider Irregular Warfare to be limited to insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism and counterterrorism.
“Ultimately, we are in a thinking man’s game, or, as T.E. Lawrence put it, ‘Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.’ We cannot charge forward expecting to face a purely conventional threat on the battlefield. We will have to carefully balance investments in conventional and unconventional capabilities to meet the range of threats our nation faces. Secretary Gates said so much in his February article in Foreign Affairs. The challenge will be finding what that appropriate balance is. Today’s hearing should provide us excellent food for thought as we wait to see how Secretary Gates’ vision is articulated in the President’s budget. I look forward to your testimony and your thoughts on how we best strike a balance in military investments and capabilities.”