Content area
Full Text
Your ideal position is when you are present and not noticed. -Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence, 19171
THE LAST THING I ever expected was to go to war in my 27th and 28th years of service. Oh, sure, I'd done the shadow-boxing in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in 1990 and in Haiti for a few days in 1995, but those hardly counted. Like most Americans, I hadn't heard much about this Osama bin-Laden individual and his ilk, though I'd watched as our embassies were attacked in Iran, Lebanon, Kenya, and Tanzania; had seen the Marines pay the ultimate price one ugly Sunday in 1983; and knew what had happened in Mogadishu on another Sunday 10 Octobers later. I definitely understood that Saddam Hussein had his fingers in some of this rotten stuff, aside from the outrages he had inflicted on his own suffering people. Of course, I knew all of that, at least as some kind of barely noticed backdrop, heat lightning playing on the horizon of a summer evening. So off I went to Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) rotations and joint duty and various exercises, all great experiences, and all pretty familiar to anyone in our Army in the 1980s and 1990s. But America's terrorist enemies had their timetables regardless of mine or yours. On 11 September 2001, they moved with horrific results. This time they hit our home, and hit us hard. We have been at war since that bright September morning.
If you look at the beginning of the latest Quadrennial Defense Review, you'll see this flat declaration: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."2 The passive voice might be kind of awkward, but I think we all get that one quite clearly. This Long War, the Global War on Terror, World War IV, or whatever you want to call it, has fully encompassed all of us in uniform. It will do so for many years to come. Such a stark reality carries some freight.
Our enemies are cunning, ruthless, and numerous. They move in the dark corners of many regions of the world. They lash out on their schedules, not ours. Because of those characteristics, they defy conventional solutions. Smacking such foes with Aegis...