Resident Scholar  Michael Rubin

Less than three weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked passenger jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued his first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Report. He wrote that it was imperative that the U.S. military plan not only for conventional wars, but that it should also develop strategies to "deter and defeat adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives." Rather than plan for large military operations, or even small wars limited to specific nation-states, the Pentagon should develop strategies to tackle unconventional threats from both state and non-state actors who might seek to attack U.S. interests.

Asymmetric threats are not new, nor are strategists' attention to them. In every era, from the pre-modern to the present day, weak forces utilize surprise, technology, innovative tactics, or what some might consider violations of military etiquette to challenge the strong. The 1991 Iraq War and subsequent al-Qaeda terrorism shattered notions that the collapse of the Soviet Union would usher in an age of peace or an end to history. In order to ensure cohesion in both appropriations and strategy, Congress in 1996 passed legislation requiring the Pentagon to conduct quadrennial defense reviews. In the first report the following year, then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen identified "asymmetric challenges" and "asymmetric means" as a major component of future threats. Adversaries, the report found, "are likely to seek advantage over the United States by using unconventional approaches to circumvent or undermine our strengths while exploiting our vulnerabilities."

Identifying the existence of asymmetrical threats is far easier than to define them. While asymmetry focuses on how to place one strengths against an adversary's weaknesses, even where the overall correlation of forces may favor the adversary, there remains no consensus about the nature of the asymmetric threat concept. Stephen J. Lambakis, a senior analyst in space power and policy studies at the National Institute for Public Policy, questions the usefulness of the concept, given the lack of consensus over its meaning. Such logic, however, falls flat. After all, that there exists no consensus about the definition of terrorism does not mean that government should not develop counter-terrorism strategies. . . .

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Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI.