NEWPORT, RI -- The Bush administration’s term “global war on terrorism” is an “inaccurate” label for what is truly a war against an insurgency, according to the three-star general in charge of Marine Corps forces in the Pacific region.
Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson said winning the “profoundly complex human conflict” depends not on killing and capturing enemies but on winning the hearts and minds of people around the world, particularly by improving the lives of the destitute and the poor living in troubled parts of the globe. He spoke June 15 at the Naval War College’s Current Strategy Forum.
The United States and its allies are fighting a networked, global insurgency led by extremist Muslims, he said. The insurgent leaders do not speak for all of Islam, but they threaten to hijack the religion for their own purposes, he said. The United States needs to be on the side of moderate Islam and avoid being set up as an enemy of Islam, he said.
“This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate,” said Gregson. “Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics . . . Words have meaning. And these words our leading us down to the wrong concept.”
Gregson added, “What we’re fighting is an insurgency defined as a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence, subversion, propaganda, terrorism or other military action. But it’s different from other national insurgencies that we’ve known in the past. This one is networked thanks to the wonders of technology. It’s primarily ideologically driven, fundamentalist and extremist.”
A new class of regional and global actors have linked these movements in a global network of ideology, financiers, document forgers, transportation experts and propagandists, he said. This includes al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah and other affiliated theater movements, he said.
“It’s a collection or a confederation of movements empowered by regional and global fundamentalist extremist insurgents,” Gregson said. “You can borrow an old phrase and say they think globally and act locally.”
Winning the war will require more than just victory on the battlefield, he said.
“The center of gravity, the decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world,” he said. “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people.”
After 1973, the U.S. military quickly dropped the study of insurgency and turned back to so-called “real war,” he said, but now officials need to study this form of warfare, “not as it once was, but as it is now.”
Following Gregson’s initial remarks, a member of the audience noted in the Middle East the term “war on terrorism” gets morphed into “war against Islam,” and suggested the term “war on insurgency” should be used instead.
“I would certainly concur,” Gregson replied. “The global networked enemy that we’re fighting is doing, very, very, very well in the information ops area and portraying our actions as anti-Islamic, anti-Islam, anti-Muslim. And we have to find some way to counter that.” U.S. Central Command has recently started “engaging very heavily with Al Jazeera with interviews and speakers and low and behold Al Jazeera’s coverage has considerably changed,” he added. “We need to do more of that.”
In answering the question Gregson said, “The main thrust of my remarks was that we know we’re stuck with the name, it’s going to be the global war on terrorism. . . . But even though we’ve got that name out there, we’ve got to at least in the security community and then further on through the greater world . . . explain what we’re about here and get it into something that is properly categorized and puts us on the side of the angels in various areas.”
