Stop Fighting a War Against a Tactic | Small Wars Journal

Terrorism often arises out of failed states. When we fight wars, sometimes failed states are created. We think we can win every war and implement democracy in all the wars. The Soviets tried Total War on the Taliban but failed. We are using limited war against the Taliban and that will fail as well. Like in Vietnam, we don't own the land, know all the enemy movements, can't change the will of the people, deny them the resources to wage war, and provide Afghanistan with a legitimate government free of corruption.

Terrorist networks should be disrupted and eventually destroyed by identifying critical persons within them that enable those networks to carry out attacks and then capturing or killing those specific persons. (For example, the Israeli targeting of a Hamas bomb-designer and trainer, Yahya Ayyash in the 1990s.) That should be done by parts of the military and the intelligence community. It seems to me that we tried the law enforcement and partnership approach back in the 90s and what we got was 9/11 in 2001.

I don't see any evidence that the "United States is at greater risk today from homegrown terrorists than foreign terrorist groups." However, not paying attention to security concerns with regard to immigration would certainly allow a foreign threat to more easily establish a presence within our borders.

I don't consider Russian election interference to be a "traditional threat" or even an issue that could be addressed by the military in any case. (I do consider what looks like an oddly-frequent occurrence of connections between people in Washington DC and the government of Russia to be disturbing - but that seems like a counterintelligence issue more than a military issue.) With regard to North Korean nukes, that seems to be a diplomatic effort at the moment - though there's reports in the news that make seem a dubious effort at best.

A counter-idea, then:
A. Combating Terrorism: As described above, identify, locate, and remove the more competent members of terror networks in order to degrade their capabilities and force them to take difficult security precautions that hamper their activities.
B. Big-War Threats: Develop and maintain the ability to quickly and thoroughly defeat any enemy in open warfare. I think this should focus on destroying enemy capabilities and on targeting enemy political leadership from the very outset. (So, the message being, "If you, as a foreign political figure, start a war with the US or its treaty-partners, you personally will not survive that conflict.")
C. Defeating Hybrid Warfare Threats: Develop the military and intelligence capabilities of our allies. It seems to me that if you can disrupt the political aspects (for instance, when an adversary is laying the groundwork for the conflict among certain elements of the population - if you disrupt that) then the likelihood of it progressing into armed conflict is much lower. At the same time, if we adequately develop the lethality and readiness of our allies that are potentially at risk of being threatened in this way, then it will call into question (in the minds of the adversary's leadership) whether aggression against that country is feasible. It seems to me that our adversaries cannot afford much loss of face. So, they will seek easy wins almost exclusively.