The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said
recently that the world is more unsettled and unpredictable than at any time
during his 41-year military career.
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey sat down with
DoD News to discuss his four-year tenure as chairman. He retires at the end of
the month.
He said one constant throughout his term as
chairman has been the increasing complexity of the world situation.
Complex
World Situation
“It has always been the case that there
have been threats to our national interests, and in some cases in the past, at
home,” the general said. “What’s different about this period is that we’ve got
this kind of convergence of both state actors who threaten us and we have the
persistent threat of, let’s call it sub-state or non-state groups like the
Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant.”
ISIL and the other “alphabet soup” of
terrorist organizations bring a new aspect to the fight, he said. These groups share
a common interest in changing the American way of life and propagating theirs,
the chairman said.
Over his career it has been one or the
other. When the chairman was commissioned out of West Point in 1974, the
superpower rivalry between America and the Soviet Union dominated strategic
thinking.
New
Threats Emerge
From 2001 to 2011, al-Qaida and its
affiliates dominated the threat spectrum. The U.S. military concentrated on
counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, Dempsey said.
“What’s happened, I think, that increases
the instability now is you’ve got state actors who are asserting themselves and
trying to change the international order, and you’ve got the persistent threat
from these non- and sub-state groups,” he said. “It’s the combination of those
that makes it difficult to distribute the force, … because each kind of threat
requires a different kind of military instrument.”
Dempsey noted
the cliché that every problem looks like a nail if the only tool you’ve got in
your tool bag is a hammer. “Well, we’ve got nails, we’ve got screws, we got
bolts, we got, you know, thumbtacks,” he said. “There are a lot of problems out
there.”
Confronting these threats -- especially the
threat of violent extremism -- will be a generational struggle, he said. Some critics
have said the United States doesn’t have the patience for such an effort.
Struggle
in the Middle East
“It doesn’t matter whether we have the
patience -- our adversaries have the patience,” Dempsey said. “It is a generational
struggle, because the underlying causes of this violence in the Middle East have
a lot to do with demographic shifts and tribal and, of course, religion, economic
disparity, bad, bad politics and governance.”
He added, “Those underlying issues are not
going to be resolved for a generation or more.”
Overcoming such issues are key to defeating
the threat of groups like al-Qaida or ISIL or whatever comes next, Dempsey
said. Just addressing the threat posed by current groups without addressing the
underlying causes of their popularity means that another group will rise and
take its place, he said. Good governance, economic hope, and laws justly
enforced are just as important in the fight against terror as bullets and
bombs, the chairman said.
The adversary exploits the underlying
issues, the exploitation of social media and the perversion of religion to
create “a very dangerous, volatile situation that’s going to take a very long
time to overcome,” he said.
“Now, we are getting it done,” Dempsey said.
“We’ve got great leaders at every level from lieutenant and ensign all the way
up to general and admiral, and we’re figuring it out.”
(Follow Jim Garamone on Twitter: @GaramoneDoDNews)