Whether or not we welcome the prospect, counterinsurgency operations are in our future. Statebuilding and counterinsurgency are primary tasks for U.S. Armed Forces. As U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni has noted, "[M]ilitary conflict has changed and we have been reluctant to recognize it. Defeating nation-state forces in conventional battle is not the task for the 21st century. Odd missions to defeat transnational threats or rebuild nations are the order of the day, but we haven't yet adapted." For Zinni, statebuilding, peacekeeping, and counterinsurgency are not military operations other than war; they are war. In The Pentagon's New Map, Thomas Barnett argues that to extinguish terrorism we must integrate the entire world into the global economy and thus give everyone a stake in it, which amounts to saying that if the terrorists are on the train they will not want to blow up the tracks. Barnett adds that when incentives fail in a quest for the greater good, we might have to force reluctant regimes to get on board. This would require maneuver forces to execute a coerced regime change, followed by statebuilding to create stability and security in the face of some level of insurgency.
展开▼
