Solution to the "Two Wars" Strategy Problem

The National Security Staff must make a decision today on what to do with the phrase "two wars."

In my opinion, the new national security strategy can be characterized as a shift from "containment" (1942-1980) to "entanglement" (1980-2028). A recent John Arquila article in Prism helps explain this transition away from "force-on-force" conflict to "network-embedded-with-network" conflict. Similarly, Elaine Bunn at National Defense University has advocated "tailored" nuclear strategies -- theater by theater. Today's Early Bird has three articles on Yemen, which is not one of the "two wars." We need to continue to migrate away from the "one big war" model of Bush-Cheney-Rice, through the "two manageable wars" model of Obama-Biden-Jones, toward a tailored portfolio of decreasingly-toxic entanglements throughout the world.

So a step toward that strategy is to admit to ourselves -- finally -- that we are actually fighting three wars at the moment: the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates (worldwide), the War in Iraq (against Sunni and Shia extremist insurgents), and the War in Afghanistan-Pakistan (against the Taliban).

Bottom Line: Instead of changing the rhetoric from "two wars" to "one war" (a false indicator of success), the President should change from "two wars" to "three wars" (an accurate portrayal of the current situation). This would necessitate a major foreign policy speech to explain that fighting one endless war against vague "Islamic Jihad" is less intelligent than fighting three bounded wars against specific targets with specific objectives and specific end-states.