The U.S. Armed Forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the shadows and emerge only briefly to set off bombs. Rooting them out requires getting inside their minds. But there's no machine that can pull off such a feat, at least not yet.
We need smart people, not smart bombs — Americans who are familiar with foreign languages and cultures and proficient in such disciplines as intelligence collection and interrogation. Yet these are precisely the areas in which the U.S. government is the weakest.
The Iraq war has brutally exposed the cost of these shortcomings and led to a belated recognition by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his "transformation" agenda needs to incorporate the skills needed for peacekeeping, nation building and related tasks — what the Pentagon calls stability operations...
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