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And what will they do, all these fighting men and women, with their guns and their rockets, their bayonets and bombs? For a start, they'll be very, very careful. Four years ago, during a war game at the Army War College, the U.S. and its allies were unable to eradicate a terrorist group that resembled al-Qaeda. "These new terror groups are built the way the Internet is built," says an officer who took part in the exercise. "Every time you destroyed one chunk, the rest stepped in to fill the gap." Initially, air strikes against Afghan targets are likely; but Pentagon sources stress that a massive carpet-bombing exercise isn't in the cards. "There isn't that much to hit in Afghanistan," says an Air Force planner, "and we want every bomb to count." A huge bombing campaign, says another officer, "would be more for show than effect." Instead, planners hope that a sustained campaign will cripple the al-Qaeda camps and — if the forces are lucky — smoke out bin Laden so that someone can nab him.
That's why, last Monday morning, Bush entered a secure room at the Pentagon for a briefing by Major General Del Dailey, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs the military's most secretive units. The special forces — including the 800-strong Delta Force, Navy SEALS, and Army and Air Force commandos — are likely to be central to the first phase of the war. Special forces always have a hard time getting the attention of the brass leading conventional forces — they operated under very restrictive rules during the Gulf War — and they have had their setbacks. A Delta Force team was chewed up in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, when it tried to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid. And in Afghanistan, where the terrain is about as unforgiving as any on earth, and the population as warlike, they won't be able to hold territory for long.
Nonetheless, some hit-and-run operations are likely, to hold an airport, raid a terrorist camp, or snatch a top target. But military analysts are bluntly realistic about the challenges facing them. In a sense, the U.S. military is a victim of its own success. The Gulf War, says Charles Dunlap Jr., an Air Force colonel, "was an object lesson to military planners around the globe of the futility of attempting to confront the U.S. symmetrically, that is, with like forces and orthodox tactics." The attacks on the World Trade Center were classic examples of "asymmetric" warfare, using small fanatical teams to inflict maximum psychological damage on a chained Gulliver. And there isn't an army in the rich world that knows, with confidence, how to defeat such a foe. "When you're fighting someone who wants to die," says a Marine colonel, "those old-fashioned rules of war seem rather quaint."
In Bush's newfangled war, in which some successes may be secret, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. Beyond his own instincts, his closest advisers, his officers of state and his superb armed forces, Bush has had to reach out to others, who can help him win the financial and economic battle against terrorism, and win hearts and minds to his cause.