Counter Poised

by John Spikenard

  Is there a point to strategic deterrence any more? “What a waste,” said George. “What a waste.”

  George sounded two short blasts of the horn and within a minute Buffalo emerged, briefcase in one hand and a large travel mug full of hot coffee in the other. At six-foot two, Buffalo was tall by submarine standards. In fact, he towered somewhat over George at five-foot nine-and-a-half. Although not particularly muscular, Buffalo kept himself in pretty good shape. He and George worked out at the navy base gym at least twice a week and jogged around the base on alternate days. On Friday evenings after work, when the members of the SUBLANT staff visited the Officers’ Club bar, the women they met there always seemed to favor Buffalo’s tall, slender physique and wavy brown locks over George’s short, stocky build and short-cropped reddish-blond hair. It was like an attractiveness contest between a young Ronald Reagan and John McCain. The women went for Reagan every time!

  George watched the pretty boy on the SUBLANT staff approach the car.

  Buffalo threw himself into the front passenger’s seat, closed the door, and wearily let out a long moan.

  George laughed and said, “Let’s go strap on the boar hog.” The reference, of course, was to the old saying about being “as useless as teats on a boar hog.”

  Buffalo moaned again and said, “Well, you’re sure in a good mood today.”

  “Sorry, I get this way every time I drink out of that darn Annapolis coffee mug.”

  “Well, you do it every day, so you must enjoy feeling like crap.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I take a lot of pride in the contribution the Annapolis made and the contribution the whole submarine force made to protecting America and keeping the world at peace for many years. Then a bunch of politicians decide my boat is to blame for the destruction of Washington DC. It pisses me off!”

  “I know, George. Long deployments at sea are tough, both on the individual crewmembers and on their families. It’s a shame your good crew had to have that albatross unfairly hung around their necks.”

  “You know, I still remember a speech that I heard the commanding officer of a boomer give to some of his crew when I was a midshipman. He told them they had to think about the greater mission they were performing. He said something like, ‘If you’re in this for the money, or the experience, or to get promoted, it won’t be worth it. It’s much too hard. The hours are too long; the work is too demanding; the quarters are too close. You’re crammed into a little cylinder under the water for sixty days at a time, cut off from the world and out of communication with your wife, your children, your family, and friends. You’ve got no personal space and no personal time. You can’t even meet someone in a passageway without having to turn sideways and squeeze by. If you have a medical crisis, tough! You’re going to have to trust your life to our corpsman!’”

  “Hey, that’s no joke!” Buffalo interjected. “We had a guy come down with appendicitis on one of my patrols, and the corpsman could only pump him full of antibiotics and hope the appendix didn’t burst before we got home!”

  “Did he make it?”

  “Yeah. Saved the guy’s life, I guess. So what else did that CO have to say to his crew?”

  “Well, I think the critical part was when he said, ‘You’re constantly drilling and preparing for emergencies, and you’re always preparing to do the unthinkable—launch nuclear ballistic missiles, which will kill millions of people. When you finally get home, your reward for doing a good job is that you get to do it again! There has to be more to it than that. You have to feel you’re making a greater contribution to peace and to mankind through your dedication and your sacrifice.’” George paused and glanced at Buffalo. “Fifteen or twenty years ago, it made a lot of sense.”

  “Yeah, during the Cold War it made a lot of sense,” Buffalo responded. “Our strategic assets provided the U.S. with a convincing deterrent force when there was an identifiable enemy we could hit in a retaliatory strike.”

  “But the terrorist strike on Washington DC changed all that,” George continued. “The strike made us impotent and worthless. Now, all of the great power of the United States of America, all of its ICBMs, all of its long-range strategic bombers, and all of its ballistic missile submarines are useless. You can’t use those to strike back at terrorists!”

  “Teats on a boar hog,” responded Buffalo, mimicking George.

  “With terrorists hiding in dispersed countries around the world, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is dead. If terrorists hit us with a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon of mass destruction, we can’t strike back. Like you said, there’s no identifiable target.”

  “Teats on a boar hog,” Buffalo repeated. “You’re preaching to the choir, you know.”

  George continued unabated, “The U.S. is a lumbering giant—unable to change its course, unable to adapt its strategy to changing circumstances. We continue to deploy our boomers. Our crews continue to endure the separation and sacrifices of sixty-day submerged patrols. For what? Who are we deterring? We’re certainly not deterring the terrorists—they’ve shown us that.”

  “Teats on a boar hog,” said Buffalo, hoping his repetitive responses would finally shut George up, but it took their arrival at their next stop to do that.

  The third and final member of their carpool, Commander Lannis Wayne, served as the intelligence officer on the SUBLANT staff. George really didn’t like Lannis, and their opinions differed on almost everything. But there wasn’t really any polite way to exclude him from the carpool. Lannis lived just a few blocks away from Buffalo.

  As George pulled up in front of Lannis’s house, he gave a long blast on the horn, knowing the neighbors would complain to Lannis later for this pre-dawn awakening. Lannis came out of the house and hurried toward the car, no doubt hoping to prevent another horn blast by George. Lannis was not exactly the poster-child image of a military man. He was five foot seven at the most, with a slight build, big ears, and round horn-rimmed glasses. George’s best analogy was that Lannis had to be the spitting image of a young Ross Perot.

  The drive at once turned silent when Lannis got in the car. They continued toward the Naval Station Norfolk in the dim, predawn light. Lannis sat in the backseat reading the New York Times with a flashlight. After several minutes, Lannis broke the silence.

  “There was another subway bombing in Europe. This time in Paris.”

  “Oh yeah?” responded Buffalo. “Let me guess who’s claiming responsibility—”

  “Who do you think? Al-Qaeda, of course,” answered Lannis. “Those guys will never stop, and they don’t seem to care who they attack.”

  George glanced at Lannis in the rearview mirror and provokingly said, “Kind of odd they would attack the French, though. The French have been nonexistent in the War on Terrorism.”

  “It just shows you appeasement doesn’t work with terrorists,” retorted Buffalo. “There’s nothing the French or anyone else can do to satisfy those nuts—they’ll attack anybody and everybody.”

  George agreed and added, “Back in 2001, after 9/11, I thought the terrorists had made a huge strategic mistake by attacking the United States. Historically, Western democracies have shown it’s impossible to defeat them militarily. In fact, democratic societies throughout history have shown they will fiercely defend themselves against outside military invaders. We showed that resolve by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 to eliminate the terrorists’ safe havens. But now, attacking us doesn’t seem like such a bad strategy, especially if you have lots of time…which they do.”

  “I don’t get it,” replied Lannis. “Counting Afghanistan and Iraq, we must have killed a hundred thousand Islamic extremists in response to 9/11. How could you possibly conclude that attacking us was a good strategy for them?” Lannis asked in a condescending tone.

  “Lannis,” Buffalo interjected, “You can achieve almost anything if you have an inexhaustible supply of expendable foot soldiers! The death of a hundred thousand men m
eans nothing to the al-Qaeda leadership. All they have to do is to continue to convince millions of impressionable young Muslim men they will be martyrs—that they’ll go straight to heaven where Allah has made seventy-two virgins especially for them—and they’ll line up all day long saying, “Let me die next, PLEASE!” Hey, just look at their alternative—under Islamic law, they won’t even see a woman’s arm until they’re married!”

  George ignored Buffalo’s comments and continued, “Lannis, it’s good strategy for them to attack us because over time we find every way we can to help them succeed. The problem with democratic societies is that in the name of equal rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and privacy rights, we’ll pave the way for them to attack us. We’ll roll out the red carpet!”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Look at what happened after 9/11. Our initial reaction was good. We attacked the terrorists in their strongholds. Politically, we passed the Patriot Act, which gave our law enforcement agencies the kind of powers they needed to identify and eliminate terrorist sleeper cells in our midst. The president was given broader executive powers, and he used the National Security Agency to monitor communications of suspected terrorists and to analyze international calls to detect calling patterns that could indicate particular individuals had ties to terrorist organizations. In addition, whenever there was a period of tightened security because of an increased threat of terrorist attacks, the NSA employed sophisticated techniques to monitor mosques and Muslim businesses. That’s all just good common sense. After all, it was Muslims who attacked us on 9/11.”

  “Oh, but let me guess, though,” Buffalo interrupted, “we were violating their civil rights!”

  “Exactly,” continued George. “So four years later, the New York Times, that bastion of freedom—”

  “You mean bastards of freedom, don’t you?” interrupted Buffalo.

  “The New York Times,” George continued, ignoring Buffalo, “went public with a story detailing the Bush administration’s use of wiretaps to monitor phone calls without judicial warrants. The editors timed the release of the story so that it came out just before Congress voted on extending the Patriot Act for four more years. As a result, Congress weakened the act because they feared the loss of civil liberties. After that, our ability to find the terrorists before they acted was severely restricted. In my opinion, it was one of the direct causes of the lapse in intelligence that allowed al-Qaeda to destroy DC.”

  Lannis, an intelligence officer, a liberal Democrat, and a New York Times fan bristled at George’s comments. “Yeah, well as I’ve heard it, it wasn’t just Intel that screwed up, George.”

  The comment was a direct jab at George, and he knew it. In the days after the Washington attack, a search of Mahfouz al-Bedawi’s apartment in Falls Church, Virginia had provided clues indicating a submarine had smuggled both the warhead and an al-Qaeda weapons expert into the country less than a month before the attack. This fact had become well known. What was less well known was that George’s submarine, the USS Annapolis, had been on East Coast patrol at the time. They had picked up a faint and intermittent sonar contact identified as a possible Kiloclass diesel-electric boat. They had lost the contact, and as the XO, George had ordered the Annapolis to abandon the search and proceed on course. He had spoken to the commanding officer, and they had agreed that the faint contact was probably biologics, the term submariners used to refer to the noise generated by various forms of sea life. After all, they had questioned, why would a Kilo, normally used for shallow-water patrols around the countries that owned them, be all the way across the ocean off the coast of the U.S.?

  Buffalo looked at George and, even in the dawn’s early light, saw his face getting bright red. Hoping to defuse the situation, Buffalo jumped in and gruffly said, “Okay, Lannis, that’s it! Let’s get out right here and let the ass-kicking begin!”

  The way he said it was just enough to get George to chuckle. He took a deep breath and after a few moments responded to Lannis. “The warhead never would have made it to DC from wherever they brought it ashore, if the media had not weakened our defenses.”

  “But George, the media has always played a crucial role in America of keeping politicians honest. I understand more than most the need for intelligence; and I imagine the people in the media do too. But it’s often the media who ensure the intelligence is gathered legally. They’re the watchdogs of our individual freedoms.”

  “In principle, I agree with you, Lannis, but I disagree that the media has always played the role of watchdog. During World War Two, for example, the media did not knowingly print topsecret national security information like they do today. Nor did they keep politicians honest. In fact, they went out of their way to help President Roosevelt conceal the fact that he was disabled because it would have demoralized the country. In other words, they were patriots. They put the well-being of their country ahead of getting a scoop.”

  “That’s bullshit, George. The members of the media still put the country’s well-being first, it’s just a matter of opinion as to what’s best for the country.”

  “No, the evidence says otherwise,” George angrily responded. “The problem with the post-9/11 press was they were still in the Watergate mode instead of wartime mode. Reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post still looked back at Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as their heroes, and they wanted to be just like them. They just didn’t adapt to changing circumstances. They didn’t understand the seriousness of the problem. They didn’t believe that when President Bush said we were in a war, we really were. They just didn’t get it.”

  “I disagree, but even if you’re right, you can’t allow the executive branch to run amok. If you do, they will turn the country into a police state, and then the terrorists have won. They’ve achieved their goal of taking away our freedoms.”

  This kind of thinking really irritated George, and it was one of the main reasons he disliked Lannis so much. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lannis. I may agree that the executive branch needs some checks and balances, but what makes you think the goal of the terrorists is to take away our freedoms? They don’t want to take away our freedoms; they want to kill us! Just look at the freedoms we had already lost before the DC attack. We couldn’t go to a football game without being frisked and searched with a metal detector. The same was true if we wanted to go to the courthouse or into a school. Look at what we had to go through just to get on an airplane back then, even before today’s restrictions were imposed. We had already lost a lot of freedoms, and it didn’t slow down the terrorists one bit. The goal of the terrorists is not to take away our freedoms.”

  “You’re on a roll, boss, keep it up!” urged Buffalo.

  George continued, “And their goal is not to get the U.S. out of the Middle East and away from their oil supplies either, so don’t even go there, Lannis. Ever since President Thornton took over, our country’s policies have been largely isolationist. I remember back when Bush-the-Younger was president, the Democrats in Congress were whining and calling for us to bring home our troops from Iraq before the job was finished. Well, after the Washington attack, Thornton pulled all our troops out of the Middle East, Europe, and Korea. That was pretty shortsighted and naive.”

  “I think it was good policy.”

  “Yeah, well you would. How long have you been an intelligence officer, Lannis?”

  “About five years.”

  “Five years? You’ve been in the navy at least ten years; what the hell did you do before that?”

  “I was a surface warfare officer.”

  “A SWO? You were a line officer—why did you switch to Intel?”

  “It was getting more and more engineering-intensive. They sent us back for a refresher at Surface Warfare Office School. I’m not an engineer.”

  “So what does that mean? You washed out of SWOS or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that? Either you did or you didn’t
. Which one is it?”

  “Okay, I did.”

  George laughed. “I’ve never heard of anyone washing out of SWOS. I mean that’s where people go when they wash out of submarine school or flight training!”

  “Yeah, well there you go, George, bad-mouthing surface warfare officers when you don’t know a thing about the rigors of SWOS,” retorted Lannis.

  George looked at Buffalo for some support, but the only thing he got in return was a look and a shrug that seemed to say, “He’s right, you know.”

  “Okay, okay. I apologize to all the SWOs out there. You’re right—I don’t know anything about it. And now that I think about it, I’m sure surface ships have become just as complex as submarines. But that doesn’t mean I have to apologize to you, because you washed out. I don’t know whether you barely washed out or were a total bumpkin.”

  “Well I can tell you I barely washed out, and when I went to Intelligence Officer School, I was first in my class. We all have our strengths, George. We just have to find where to apply them.”

  There was silence for a minute as they continued to drive toward the naval base. George hated it when Lannis was right! Finally, George broke the silence. “You’re right, Lannis. I was off base with those comments. I’m sure you’re a fine intel officer or you wouldn’t have been selected for the SUBLANT Staff.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I just wonder why you’re such an idiot when it comes to politics and national security!”

  They all laughed.

  “Very funny, George,” said Lannis.

  They drove in silence for several minutes as it grew lighter outside and Buffalo enjoyed the last of his coffee. Finally, Lannis broke the silence.

  “So George, you think President Thornton’s isolationist policies are all wrong? It seems to me the radical Muslims just want to get us out of their neighborhood. What’s wrong with that?”