Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
major economic damage in both cases (in which they were quite successful...) and to elicit an excessive response.
I think the intent was to elicit a very specific response: they wanted us to invade and occupy Muslim lands, providing them with an opportunity to put out the call for jihad and engage us in a war of attrition: the only type of war in which they could hope to win. Whether that response was or was not excessive is debatable; there is no doubt that it served AQ's interests.

Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Had we better prepared our response capability in the 90s as many wished, we could have surprised them even more...
This I'm not so sure of. Our ability to remove governments and occupy land was more than adequate. I'm not sure that any response capability that was desired in the 90s would have given us the ability to manage the post-occupation challenges.

Way back when I was ranting against the idea of invading Iraq, a friend asked me what I thought should be the guiding principle of what they were already calling "GWOT". I told him the principle I'd want to follow would be "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee". Hardly original, but I think useful. "Float like a butterfly" meaning, above all, do not ever occupy territory.

This has been my objection from the start to the whole clear/hold/build/transfer idea. When we're clearing, we have the initiative. We decide where we will clear, and when, and how, forcing the enemy to respond to us. Once we go to hold, that reverses. We're static, they're maneuvering around us. They decide where to engage, and when, and how. That's not good. Beyond that, our ability to build and transfer depends on our ability to conjure up a viable entity to which things will be transferred... and that is probably something we haven't the capacity to do.

I suppose it's restating the obvious, but I don't think we went about this in a very sensible way.