If you think things are bad now, just wait

By KEVIN HORRIGAN

As if we don’t already have enough to worry about, now comes the military analyst Andrew F. Krepinevich with a new book suggesting that we add the following possibilities to the list:

UWhat happens in the spring of 2013 if Pakistan’s government collapses and its nuclear arsenal falls into the hands of jihadists, aided by Islamist elements within the Pakistani army? Then India, another nuclear state, goes on full military alert?

UWhat happens if, on March 6, 2011, the 175th anniversary of the fall of the Alamo, a nuclear bomb goes off in downtown San Antonio? Say it turns out that a terrorist group has obtained an unknown number of “loose” Russian nukes. In short order, say large parts of Chicago, San Diego and Boston are vaporized. What if the terrorists call with a list of demands?

USay that doesn’t happen, but instead, in the spring of 2011, a huge outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza occurs around the world? China is under martial law, African nations are in chaos. Things are bad in the United States because of the shortage of vaccine, but things are really bad in Mexico, where the government collapses. Eight million Mexican citizens begin storming the U.S. border.

That’s not enough to worry about? Krepinevich’s book, “Seven Deadly Scenarios: a Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century,” throws in a few more options:

UThanks to help from North Korea, say Iran gets The Bomb in September 2011. It starts throwing its weight around the Middle East, helping Hezbollah take over Lebanon. In December 2013, Iran begins sinking Israeli ships and blockading Israeli ports; Hezbollah and Hamas continually rocket Israel. Armageddon looms.

USay that by March 2017, China is facing a severe economic crisis, which it blames on the United States, Japan and Taiwan. But China has spent a lot of money on its army and navy and satellite technology. It imposes a submarine naval blockade on Taiwan; the United States and Japan send ships on a counter-blockade against China, threatening to sever China’s undersea fiber-optic cables. Does the United States risk a wider war over Taiwan?

USay that by the end of 2011 (which is shaping up as a really bad year), world oil supplies have been disrupted. Terrorists begin stepping up attacks on the global supply chain, beginning with Nigerian oil operations, continuing into sinking of supertankers and blowing up pipelines. Terrorists then begin seizing cargo ships, launching cyber-attacks on the world’s computers and even sending a “dirty bomb” into the port of Norfolk, Va. The global economy is crippled.

UWhat if the economic crisis of 2008-2010 persuades the American president rapidly to remove U.S. forces from Iraq. Without their stabilizing presence, Iraq again descends into sectarian warfare. The Shia take control, the Turks invade Kurdish Iraq and Iraqi Sunnis launch attacks on Iran, which they blame for their troubles. As oil heads toward $500 a barrel, the United States turns down Saudi Arabia’s request for help. The Russians and Chinese graciously offer to send troops to stabilize the Middle East.

Whew. Not even Tom Clancy in all his glory ever concocted such a cataclysmic collection of catastrophes. Krepinevich writes his scenarios as if they were history, with the names of fictional presidents and prime ministers mingling with those of historical figures. He combines fictional footnotes and real footnotes. It makes for eerie reading.

But Krepinevich is not a novelist. He is a highly regarded military analyst and historian, a graduate of West Point with a doctorate from Harvard, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He’s not in the entertainment business, unless you consider war-gaming entertainment.

“A number of prominent American strategists have reached the general conclusion that the U.S. government’s capacity to craft national security strategy at anything approaching an acceptable level of competence is highly suspect,” he writes.

Limited resources

The reasons are many, and they include limited resources, inter-service military rivalries, political factors and entrenched bureaucracies — the sorts of things that led the nation to invade Iraq and expect to be greeted as liberators. This, even though in a vast 2002 war game called Millennium Challenge 02, a retired Marine general named Paul Van Riper — delegated to run the “Iranian” military — ran rings around the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command using asymmetrical strategies similar to those that would be employed against U.S. forces in Iraq two years later.

America’s policymakers have plenty on their plates today without imagining what the country will encounter tomorrow. They’d better do it anyway.

X Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.