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October 15, 2004
This a good pice of work. Paul Monk contests the standard argument in Australian strategic thinking advanced by Paul Dibb, that dealing with terorism after 9/11 is a police matter not a military one for nation states.
Monk argues this by considering Philip Bobbitt's' thesis advanced in his 'The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History.' Bobbitt argues that the dangers which have arisen in recent years are every bit as great as those we have just faced down. They are all the more so for being of a different nature to the threats faced down in the Cold War and characterized by unprecedented uncertainty. Bobbitt argues that the new dangers will compel profound reassessments of the nature of ‘national’ security itself and, with it, the civil laws, force structures and rules of engagement that buttress such security.
This means that our classical strategies of deterrence based on retaliation will have to be rethought. Bobbitt says that we need to move our thinking from:
"... threat-based strategies that rely on knowing precisely who our enemy is and where he lives, to vulnerability-based strategies that try to make our infrastructure more slippery, more redundant, more versatile, more difficult to attack…There will be no final victory in such a war. Rather, victory will consist in having the resources and the ingenuity to avoid defeat. So long, however, as states rely on a deterrence and retaliation model for their strategic paradigms – that is, a model that requires a threat-based analysis – they will inevitably neglect those steps, including enhanced intelligence collection, pre-emption, the development of defensive systems (including sensors), vaccinations, the pre-positioning of medical supplies and advanced methods of deception that provide the basis for operating within a different paradigm, one that relies on a vulnerability analysis.”
He suggest that unless such changes begin, in anticipation of what could now happen at any time, we could face a catastrophic breakdown in global order.
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