FOR OVER 200 years, the military academy at West Point has schooled future Army officers in the ways of large-scale industrial war and, as the old joke goes, has established a reputation of having 200 years of history, untouched by progress. But with the United States the world's only remaining military superpower, and with insurgent-directed Fourth Generation warfare seemingly the order of the day in 21st century conflict, times have changed.
One of the West Point instructors taking a proactive view of this new environment is Lt. Col. Joe Felter. A 1987 West Point grad who spent the 1990s as a Special Forces operator, Felter has returned to his alma mater as director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a privately-funded think tank that offers valuable instruction to the corps of cadets about the enemy they'll encounter once they march out of the academy's Thayer Gate for the last time. Sitting in his office this past spring, Felter reflected on how the role of young officers has changed from when he graduated. In his day, "if you paid attention during your infantry basic course and your Ranger school you would have a good feel for what you're supposed to do," he said. "But these new lieutenants, they're literally the mayors of towns. They have to work with multiple U.S. government agencies, international agencies, host nation folks, tribal leaders--the threat environment is really complex, and more than ever they need to be prepared for that."
Occupying a clutch of nondescript offices in Lincoln Hall, the Combating Terrorism Center's modest accommodations don't give much hint of the impact it is having on the Long War, but it does give the impression that the CTC is an arm of the military's academic wing. It isn't. Set up through private donations in 2003, the center's twenty-odd civilian staff, fellows, and associates perform a dual role--instructing the academy's cadets on the intellectual history of terrorism while producing original research, for public consumption, on contemporary terrorism structures, goals and ideology.
Just as the fight against non-state actors often seems an ad hoc affair, the decision to embed CTC at West Point also owes much to circumstance. By the time darkness descended on the evening of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the nation was up against an enemy that it knew little, if anything, about. Into the breach stepped Vincent Viola, chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, who quickly set about putting the funding together to establish a center to study this new enemy. A class of '77 West Point grad, Viola wanted the center based at his alma mater so that the young cadets could be at the vanguard of this research. He personally donated $2 million to the cause, while rounding up a small group of deep-pocketed private citizens that included Ross Perot to kick in the rest of the seed money needed to get the program off the ground.
Four years after the program got off the ground, the CTC continues to be funded by a coterie of wealthy donors. While none of the staffers I spoke with this past spring would come out and say that the constant need to raise funds was a strain--indeed, they all said that keeping the Pentagon's regulation-happy mitts off the operation was one of the keys to its success--it was a topic brought up at several staff meetings, and remains an obvious, and ongoing, concern.
Staying out of the government's bureaucratic turf wars and off the Pentagon's increasingly strained wartime funding stream has worked both ways. Having to go out and find money to keep the center open takes time and energy, and it only allows the center to offer relatively short-term contracts, since they don't know what the funding situation will be like from year to year. Brian Fishman, an associate and manager of the CTC's Alfred P. Sloan bioterrorism program, says that being privately funded "is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we're given a lot of freedom, we're not at anyone's beck and call. At the same time we have to talk to donors and play nice like an NGO." Several other staffers told me said the CTC's outsider role is useful--they don't threaten anybody's turf, and in the internecine skirmishes that break out regularly among military brass, that's no small thing.
Dr. James Forrest, head of the CTC's Terrorism Studies program, says that even though staffers have top-secret clearance, "we also keep our academic credentials solid by not presenting ourselves as spokespersons [for the military]. This is meant to be an academically diverse contribution to the debate." He says that the CTC is kind of like "the academic equivalent of a special ops unit . . . you hire good people and trust them to do the right thing."
This cultivated outsider status has allowed the CTC to offer intensive counterterrorism training to the FBI, (the center has six "FBI Fellows" on staff), the Homeland Security department, and police and fire departments across the country--something they insist they could not do if they were part of the military. At the same time, the Pentagon has taken notice. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the authors of the new Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, says that he made use of the CTC's research reports while he was serving as a military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense. The CTC's research "helps inform how we understand the problem of terrorism, or the global Islamic insurgency," he says.
Here again, it all comes down to being outside of the system. "We've found that [not officially being part of the Department of Defense] gives us some flexibility to do programs like the FBI," Dr. Jarrett Brachman, head of research at the CTC told me.
Dr. Forrest passed along an interesting anecdote about how scattershot the uniformed military has sometimes been in admitting that it needs to spend more time on studying terrorism. During a visit some time back by a group from the Army War College, one of the officers told him that while the college wasn't yet offering courses on terrorism and insurgency, courses that touched on the topic were drawing on CTC research reports. The CTC's reports have also been assigned reading for many military educational programs at Ft. Leavenworth and the National Defense University, and the center's February 2006 report, "Stealing Al-Qai'da's Playbook" became mandatory reading for then-CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid's staff.
The report, written by Dr. Brachman and William F. McCants, encapsulates perfectly what the CTC does. The paper mines a selection of academic and philosophical jihadi texts found online, (being a supremely open-source operation, al Qeada keeps an open-source virtual "library" of all its important texts online). The two conclude that the key to defeating these groups may be found in the texts themselves, since jihadi scholars are very frank about their own weaknesses. It's just a matter of looking. But looking can sometimes bring some unwelcome surprises. While trolling extremist Web sites in July 2006, Fishman stumbled upon his photo and contact information on an Islamist message board, along with a post warning participants that he was reading their posts. Sitting in his office this past spring, he pulled the page up, shrugging, "Army counterintelligence called and I talked to them about it, but there were no emails, no phone calls." Still, it's a stark reminder that in the information war, there is no such thing as a front line.
One of the CTC's other big successes has its "Islamic Imagery Project," which pulled one hundred images off jihadi Web sites and analyzed them for key motifs and visual propaganda. The report--to the surprise of CTC staffers who thought that war fighting units would make the most use of it--became a useful tool for border agents who were coming across items featuring Islamic imagery and didn't know what to make of them.
But what of the cadets? How much of this knowledge are they able to squeeze into their already busy schedules? Second Lieutenant Christopher Coda, a 21-year-old 2007 grad from Pinetops, North Carolina, currently assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy, says that the CTC's classes give cadets a more realistic picture of the enemy than what the mainstream media and official government missives often report. Another 2007 grad, Second Lieutenant Cody Rogers, who grew up on Marine posts across the country and who is now with the 555th Engineers at Ft. Lewis, Washington, says that while he wasn't all that interested in studying terrorism when he came to West Point in 2003, after taking a "Terrorism Studies" course, he realized that without the class, he wouldn't understand the terrorist threat nearly as well, "which is unfortunate because the vast majority of cadets don't get to take courses at the CTC, they just don't have the manpower."
Be that as it may, West Point, despite its reputation, has shown some admirable agility as of late and has allowed the CTC to offer cadets the first minor in the institution's history--Terrorism Studies.
While the academy and the Army have at times been painfully slow in crafting instruction to account for the new realities facing soldiers on the ground, the CTC is doing a remarkable job of picking up the slack.
As 2LT Coda said in an email this past summer, "The sad truth is that many officials in both the military and government do not have a proper idea of our foe--they latch onto an easily describable 'sound bite' idea to represent terrorist groups like al-Qa'ida and others--I think that we are not spending enough time or money to counteract jihadists' message, partially because we don't know where jihadists get their message." If the instructors at the CTC continue to find funding for their work, a whole generation of frontline officers will know, and that's a good start in a war that has only just begun.
Paul McLeary is a writer at Columbia Journalism Review.