Will Rogers was asked how he would defeat the Nazi U-boat menace. "Simple", he said, "just raise the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to the boiling point." The reporter agreed this would destroy all the enemy submarines, but wondered how Will would heat up the ocean. With his famous self-deprecating grin, Will replied, "I'm a concept man, not a detail guy."

It is hard to find anything objectionable in your indirect approach. In some ways it is a larger version of classic COIN strategy - dry up the sea that the insurgent fish swim in and they will be, at the least, inconvenienced. And while we have been doing some version of this for decades, our modern system of combatant commands should facilitate a measured, consistent, long-term approach to applying such a strategy. Finally, world-wide stability in the most basic sense - i.e., the absence of violence in normal civil society - is a goal only various lunatic fringes would oppose.

A couple of questions arise.

First, I wonder if there is a direct link between failed or vulnerable states and terrorism. Taking a long view, some of the most persistent, dangerous terrorist movements arise from stable, powerful, even enlightened states. Japan, Spain, Germany, and the UK have all generated significant home-grown terrorist threats. No one can accuse Saudi Arabia of being enlightened or, in most senses, modern, but it does have a pervasive and stable security apparatus. Yet as a society it supplied money, leadership, organization, motivation, and recruits to our current set of foes. I guess there is some harm done and mischief generated in places like the Horn of Africa and parts of Central Asia, but it seems to me that their importance as training bases and sanctuaries are overblown. Terrorists (as opposed to your garden-variety insurgents) have access to sufficient training, money, and weapons within modern stable states; they don't need secret bases in some God-forsaken hellhole. In fact, I suppose, one could argue that terrorism is a peculiarly modern product of increasing stability. It is a tactic of last resort when you have no other outlet, or when your cause is so unpopular you can never gain support for it through legitimate means. Is it possible to imagine that, were Saudi Arabia a participatory democracy, Osama would be running for office rather than running for his life?

Secondly, in your slides you show SFA as nested within larger political and economic efforts. One could argue that it would, in many areas of the developing world, be working at cross-purposes rather than supporting the other elements of national power. In essence, as presented we would be strengthening security forces in societies that are otherwise undergoing radical political, cultural, and economic changes. It seems to be a Metternichian approach to preserving order.