Musings on Globalization

With Richard Gates new strategy to revitalize our efforts to achieve success in our War on Terror, as well as his previous experience as the head of the CIA, it is becoming more and more apparent that his efforts as Secretary of Defense will indeed bear fruition. Additionally, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, Gates already has established a healthy relationship with the United States Military, in order to better accomplish his new and comparatively more aggressive strategy. Finally, with the recent shift in power in America’s legislative branch that now favors a sooner withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; Gates new plan for action in the Middle Eastern theatre will be met with much less resistance than many of Rumsfelds proposals, as they promote expediting the path to victory in those respective theatres, thus helping to facilitate a sooner overall withdrawal. It seems, unlike some critics might like to propose; that the overall situation that the new Secretary of Defense Richard Gates finds himself in is one that seems better bound for success than his predecessor, a success that will dually satisfy his critics and the American public at large (ostensibly speaking), at least in relation to America’s sentiments towards the War on Terror’s current predicament, as well as our foreign policy abroad.

Soon after making this part of his overall strategy known, Richard Gates has come under fire from various analysts and members of the press who doubt the impact that the aforementioned military units can have on conflict of such magnitude. At a press conference last week, Secretary of Defense Gates was lambasted for the aforementioned aspect of his overall plan for changing the face of the War on Terror. The commonly held sentiment among the associated press is that in two separate conflicts where the regular, large-scale deployment of the U.S. Military has perceivably failed to stem the tide of terrorism/insurgency; how can the increased deployment of America’s Special Forces units make a large impact in the overall picture in Iraq and
Afghanistan? To many among the press, and to the better part of the American public surveyed in a recent poll by Navy Times; it seems improbable that such small (even though extremely specialized) military units will be able to make a decent impact on what most perceive as a losing effort to stem the global tide of terrorism and wrap up both the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts that we are engaged in, and that Gates is merely introducing a new Rumsfeld-esque scheme that will sound great, use a lot of government funding, and ultimately bear no fruit.

            However, if our Special Forces are deployed as Gates proposes, the effect will be a polar opposite from what the American press and public expects. Using recently de-classified government files to present a better perspective to the press in last weeks press conference, Richard Gates proposed the fact that our current state of engagement in both Afghanistan and Iraq seemingly prevents large scale military deployment from ultimately combating and ridding those respective countries of the myriad terrorist cells the plague them; and that the continuous and unilateral deployment of our Special Forces (namely Delta Force and S.E.A.L. Team Six) will serve as a better military asset to us in our hopes of achieving stability and peace before enacting a timely military withdrawal from the aforementioned countries. As it is the express purpose of Delta Force to combat and annihilate terrorist cells, it can be deduced that by the increased deployment of Delta Force into an environment such as Iraq’s urban centers that seem to be the breeding grounds of the Iraqi insurgency, we could possibly expect some very positive results in that field. Unlike his predecessor Rumsfeld, who kept Delta Force within the
United States largely for intelligence purposes; Gates proposes a more aggressive overall strategy to combat and lastingly suppress Iraqi and Afghani terrorism/insurgency. With Delta Force and S.E.A.L. Team Six largely deployed to the Middle Eastern conflicts that the US and Coalition forces are engaged in, the American public’s desire for a quicker and less costly (in terms of lives lost) end to the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts can be achieved due to the aforementioned units superior ability to locate, adequately infiltrate, and destroy terrorist cells with a comparative ease when compared to the current strategy of larger scale troop deployments that cover whole areas of a city in order to ostensibly find a single terrorist cell, often to no avail.