The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, delivered a warning on 3 August that al-Qaida was still a threat to the United States. This followed the broadcast of a tape, reportedly from a senior al-Qaida official possibly Osama bin Ladens deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri threatening retaliation for any punishments delivered to prisoners at Guatanamo Bay.
In response, John Ashcroft confirmed the view of the US government that al-Qaida remained active and would even seek to inflict further attacks on the United States itself. His warning came only two days before the bomb attack on the US-owned Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Afghan troubles
The warning also came at a time of renewed Taliban activity in Afghanistan, particularly around the city of Kandahar. In the course of July 2003, two police officers were killed, including a district police chief, and five were injured; in the most recent major incident, five government officials were killed. Most foreign aid organisations have now left the city.
According to Human Rights Watch, the US military policy of maintaining control of Afghanistan partly through supporting warlords has resulted in those warlords terrorising much of the country, with gunmen intimidating journalists and political opponents as well as robbing and detaining ordinary Afghans.
The security situation is clearly much improved in Kabul, but the government has little power or influence outside the capital. Despite the presence of over 10,000 US troops in the country, progress in post-war reconstruction across much of Afghanistan is painfully slow. One of the root problems is the continued refusal of the Pentagon to countenance the expansion of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) beyond Kabul to the country as a whole, and even the impending involvement of Nato in Isaf is unlikely to change that.
Iraqi casualties
Meanwhile, the violence continues in Iraq, with repeated attacks on US units. Some of the other forces involved in Iraq, notably the British, are only too anxious to distance themselves from the manner of US military operations in and around Baghdad. The US death toll in combat is up to 52 since President Bush declared the war officially over on 1 May, but this underestimates the true cost in a number of ways.
For example, non-combat deaths are very high, with deaths from all causes in these three months as many as 112. There have been numerous deaths as a result of firearms incidents, many of them believed to be friendly fire accidents because troops are so jittery as they face ambushes. There are also large numbers of deaths and injuries due to road accidents, many of them stemming from speeding, again because of the risk of ambush.
In all, it is reported that US forces have suffered 827 serious injuries since the war started, though unofficial counts double that. There are twice-weekly medivac flights back to the United States, and the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington is reported to have had to clear non-emergency wards to deal with the casualties.
The Pentagon: more of the same
Behind these immediate problems are of course wider strategic concerns for the United States. It is reasonable to conclude that the US policy of vigorous attack and pre-emption in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, has not only failed to counter the al-Qaida effect, but has resulted in American troops getting tied down in such large numbers as to stretch the resources of the entire US military.
In such circumstances, it might be appropriate to start to rethink. Recent developments in the Pentagon suggest that this is not on the agenda; a review of nuclear strategy and plans for a new global reach weapon system both indicate that it is very much business as usual.
FALCON: global reach
The global reach project is termed Falcon (Force Application and Launch from the Continental US), and is being established by the Pentagons Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) as an incremental programme designed to produce pilotless aircraft capable of flying remarkably fast and able to deliver a range of weaponry over global distances.
The thinking behind this is that the US military must have the ability to attack moveable targets anywhere in the world with great speed. According to Darpa, one of the goals is to free the U.S. military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to destabilizing or threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organizations (Robert Wall, Global Strike, Aviation Week, 14 July).
Falcon therefore fits in exactly with the policy of pre-empting threats. It aims to have a demonstration capability ready within three years, although a true global reach will take much longer. The eventual aim is to develop a reusable pilotless vehicle that can deliver a weapons payload of around 5 tons over a range of 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometres). It would be a hypersonic plane that could take off and land from a conventional runway and would fly at speeds of around 5,000 miles per hour, effectively enabling it to reach anywhere in the world from the United States within two hours.
The propulsion system would almost certainly be a scramjet (supersonic combustion ram jet) in which a booster rocket launches the vehicle and gets it up to speed, at which the sheer compression of air into the scramjet provides enough oxygen for the fuel to burn, even at very high altitudes.
Nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) attempted to develop a scramjet system for its X-43A project during the late 1990s, but the first test in 2001 failed when the booster rocket went wrong and the vehicle had to be destroyed by the range safety officer. Last week, Nasa announced that a new test flight has been scheduled for mid-November, with the hope that the X-43A will actually come close to flying at 5,000 mph.
Nasas programme is actually designed principally to produce a cheap booster to help get satellites into orbit but, as so often happens, any work of this kind will be hugely useful to the military and the Falcon project as they develop their plans for global strike.
New nukes
These attitudes are also shown by the other recent development, the scheduling of a meeting of US Strategic Command (Stratcom) in August 2003, with one of the major items being the discussion of new nuclear weapons for the United States (Robert Wall, Nuke Push, Aviation Week, 21 July 2003).
What is now becoming clear, from activities in Congress, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy and Stratcom, is that there is general enthusiasm for developing entirely new nuclear weapons for the first time in over a decade. It is true that in the mid-1990s, an existing tactical nuclear weapon, the B61, was heavily modified to give it a limited capability to destroy underground targets. Scores of the B61-11 are already deployed. But the intention now is to go back to the drawing board and produce entirely new systems; indeed there are suspicions that much of the work is already underway.
Support in Congress is not absolute the fiscal year 2004 defence budget provides funding for a custom-built earthquake bomb, but voting was close. Design work for what is termed a robust deep penetrator and low-yield nuclear weapon with yields under 5 kilotons will go ahead, but Congress has not yet agreed to its production.
Opponents of such programmes argue that developing new nuclear weapons when the US already has an arsenal of many thousands, sends the worst possible signal to other countries, especially if the new warheads have to be tested. There are, for example, indications that the Russians would use a US resumption of nuclear tests as a reason to do the same.
Critics also argue that small nuclear warheads intended for specific functions lower the threshold of use, making it more likely that it becomes acceptable to fight small nuclear wars in far-off places.
This cuts little ice with supporters who say that the more credible a threat, the more likely it is that rogue states and others will be deterred from even trying to build nuclear, chemical or biological weapons that might be immediately vulnerable to targeting.
No turning back
Both the Falcon project and the plans for new nuclear weapons are powerful indicators that the US militarys dream of full spectrum dominance across the world, in support of the desire for complete security, is still running its course. The fact that early efforts at such dominance, including Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider war on terror are hardly having the desired effects has so far made little impact. The momentum is there and few signs exist that wiser counsel will prevail.
