It is the oldest and most persistent plague to infect Washington’s national security bureaucracy. Faced with a fresh threat, strategic planners and weapons buyers nonetheless “fight the last war” — that is, build intelligence and military capabilities to combat a threat that has already faded in its potential to do America harm.
Twenty years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, it remains the most potent lesson of that horrific morning. The Pentagon and CIA were still acquiring high-end fighters for air-to-air combat against a non-existent Soviet Union and prioritising cold-war-era intelligence targets — and failed to see the “next war” coming against Islamist terrorism.
With all eyes in the capital focused on the ignominious end of America’s presence in Afghanistan, it seems an appropriate time to ask if two decades of retooling the US Army for irregular warfare and hiring scores of Arabic-language specialists in Langley has become another case of fighting the last war — and whether the US is overlooking the next threat.