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Authors: Aki Peritz,Eric Rosenbach

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This energetic national security capability, which did not exist a decade before, now stands as a core component of the strategy the US deploys to defeat its adversaries. The new doctrine for national security is based on dramatically improved drone technology, close cooperation by civilian and military organizations and with host-nation intelligence services, lethal Special Forces, and a modern interpretation of the law of war that allows for the targeting of militants. The attacks on 9/11 were the catalyst for a radical restructuring of America’s attitudes toward security and stability, especially toward the protean threat of international terrorism. The revolution in counterterrorism operations began in 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan, which demonstrated the power of coordinated intelligence and military operations. Later, both Afghanistan and Iraq served as the laboratories for developing the capacity to suppress terrorism abroad and at home.
THE COLOSSUS SHIFTS ITS FOOTING
 
For much of American history, when the US looked to take on foreign threats it focused on the menace of hostile nation-states. With rare exceptions—such as when Thomas Jefferson sent US naval forces to battle the Barbary pirates in the early nineteenth century, or when Woodrow Wilson authorized the US Army to (unsuccessfully) hunt for Pancho Villa in Mexico in the early twentieth century—the US has understood the primary threat to its security interests as coming from national adversaries.
No longer. The 9/11 attacks brutally exposed an inability to detect and disrupt a small, highly disciplined, well-trained group of individuals bent on massive destruction. Understandably, America’s efforts in the decade since have been refocused on targeting people and small groups who seek to find ways to disturb America’s advantaged position.
This shift, however, has affected US national security strategy beyond the immediate concern of eliminating the so-called terrorist threat. Developing the ability to target individuals has proven critical to achieving other national security priorities. The policy debate about the future of Afghanistan policy that occurred within the Obama administration in 2009 represented the formal arrival of a new strategic option: focused, small footprint counterterrorism operations aimed at crippling al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the end, President Obama chose to pursue a more expansive counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The COIN strategy in Afghanistan, or some variant, was appropriate to achieving a long-term solution to a conflict. But it required—more than guns, troops, or briefcases of cash—a long-term commitment from the American people. But polling in 2010 suggested that public support for the fight was declining, and by 2011 President Obama had announced the beginning of a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Yet the terrorism threat emanating from South Asia did not simply evaporate. Until 2011 COIN represented the strategy for the main effort, but parallel targeted counterterrorism operations increased dramatically on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border whose object was to find, fix, and finish the adversaries that threatened America’s national interests.
FIND, FIX, AND FINISH
 
The idea of “find, fix, finish” is not new, Indeed, it has a classic American military heritage. In the 1950s General Matthew Ridgway rallied his demoralized troops during the Korean War by repeatedly exhorting his commanders to “Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!”
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Ridgway reportedly based his maxim on a study of General Ulysses S. Grant, who said, “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can as often as you can, and keep moving on.”
Following the Korean War, General Ridgway’s exhortations evolved into national security policy during the cold war:
FIND: Find the enemy
FIX: Ensure the enemy stays (is fixed) in that location
FINISH: Defeat the enemy
 
The find-fix-finish mantra helped shape the cold war worldview of the adversary: the Soviet Union and its proxies. A bipolar world was a simple world, and the long-term US goal was to defeat the USSR, or at least hold Soviet power in check. The intelligence community knew its targets and its mission: finding and fixing Red Army divisions, strategic bombers, nuclear assets, and the like. Locating the enemy was the easy part; the Soviet Union had cities, citizens, and interests to defend. Finishing the Soviet Union militarily was a much greater challenge, one the US never undertook because of the threat of mutually assured destruction.
But once terrorist groups, not nations, were viewed as the main threat, the rules of engagement that had evolved under the bipolar system of nuclear powers—deterrence, containment, reassurance—were less relevant. There was no tangible adversary, no army of uniformed soldiers, no arsenal regulated by carefully negotiated arms agreements, and certainly no state leader with whom to negotiate.
The fundamental assumption of the cold war—that neither side wanted to risk annihilation—was null and void, since the terrorists were willing to martyr themselves. Since the adversaries had changed, the find-fix-finish doctrine had to evolve as well. Now finishing the enemy would be relatively simple, but finding and fixing an individual or small cell became devilishly hard.
A number of intelligence professionals had begun to draw attention to this shift in strategic thinking. “For most of, certainly, my professional life, most of our work was out there on fix and finish,” said former CIA director Michael Hayden in 2007. “The world has turned upside down . . . the finishing is relatively easy. In this world it’s the finding that’s the hardest-to-do function, it’s the intelligence thing. And we now have to treat those sources and methods with the same almost sacred respect we treated the secrecy of troops movements and operational plans in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s,’70s, and ’80s, because it’s those things at the front-end, the fine point, that have become the critical piece of that ‘find, fix, finish’ equation.”
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The current director of national intelligence, Lt. General James Clapper, elaborated on this point in mid-2009. “Many aspects of the intelligence community today, including some investments and practices, are legacies of the Cold War era and anachronistic,” mused Clapper. “Nowadays, with the kind of targets being pursued, the antithesis is true. Today’s targets are very elusive and therefore quite hard to find, yet once they are found, they are very easy to finish. This reality has a very profound effect on the way intelligence is done today.”
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Find
 
Finding potential threats—figuring out who they are and where they are—is a core requirement of the new doctrine and has proven to be the most difficult aspect of counterterrorism. The intelligence and law enforcement communities have struggled to find regular criminals within American borders. Internationally, locating threats is an even greater task.
In order to accomplish these goals, the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities have evolved significantly in both mind-set and allocation of resources since 2001. Within American borders, the new nature of the threat led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a radical restructuring of the intelligence community, including the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center and the position of the director of national intelligence (DNI). Controversially, law enforcement officials have additionally been given new powers in regard to electronic and physical surveillance.
Intelligence officials have strengthened working relationships with other nations’ intelligence and security services, arguing that the US cannot eliminate the global terrorist threat by itself. In 2005, CIA deputy director for operations Jose Rodriguez told Congress that nearly every capture or killing of a suspected terrorist outside Iraq since 9/11—more than 3,000 in all—was the result of CIA cooperation with foreign intelligence services.
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One CIA official who worked with Pakistan claimed in late 2009 that the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) had captured or killed over six hundred US targets.
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Navigating the new challenges to finding terrorists has not been without incident. Revelations that the Bush administration launched controversial counterterrorism programs such as a warrantless electronic surveillance program riled an already tumultuous political environment. The operational necessity for extensive electronic surveillance of individuals within the US who have connections to terrorists abroad is clear; however, the murky legality of the Bush-era Terrorist Surveillance Program resulted in political controversy that distracted national security professionals from their core mission. Finding the enemy is essential, but at what political, moral, or legal price?
Fix
 
In a global war against small groups of extremists, the US now more than ever places a premium on “actionable intelligence” and has developed new mechanisms to collect fresh tips and refine its dissemination. Whether this perishable information comes from signals intelligence or imagery analysis, from drone-based cameras or from human assets’ lips, US forces require precise input to be proactive. Since the targets are not lumbering armies but highly mobile individuals, the instantaneous and momentary nature of the threat requires much greater speed to generate and synthesize this information than in the past.
The US and other countries struggled for years to “fix” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who arguably became the single most important instigator of sectarian carnage in Iraq from 2003. The fix did not occur until June 2006, three long, bloody years later.
The success was the result of years of trial and error that demanded a massive bureaucratic shift, which has not been fully completed. During the cold war, the intelligence community relied heavily on expensive satellite systems to clarify the capabilities and intent of America’s adversaries. Despite the enormous cost of these systems, disproportionate to their utility in locating terrorist individuals and small groups, the intelligence community has struggled over the past decade to reallocate its resources and budgets.
Technical methods can generate excellent intelligence, but satellite systems and electronic surveillance cannot see into men’s souls or divulge their exact location. Human intelligence is a crucial aspect of the effort to fix terrorists, and the US had to significantly improve its capacity in this area. In 2001, CIA had limited ability to operate in significant terrorist hotspots, including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and Yemen. By the late 1990s, for example, the US still had not replaced intelligence officers in Afghanistan, all of whom had left when the US embassy in Kabul was evacuated in 1989. But over the past decade, the intelligence community has dramatically bolstered the cadre of collectors and informants in the toughest parts of the world. They focus on developing local sources that help the spies attack terrorist cells and provide the actionable details necessary to support capture or kill operations.
The US ability to act swiftly on this information is also rapidly evolving. The need for focused military action in combating smaller targets has led to the rising importance of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and counterterrorism task forces that combine a wide range of military and intelligence resources. For instance, JSOC, with CIA assistance, has increasingly exploited the use of on-the-ground technical analysis of cell phones, computer hard drives, and documents in combination with the debriefing of captured militants to quickly locate new targets for attack.
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Finish
 
US decision makers have struggled, not only to establish a new paradigm for finding and fixing terrorists, but also new strategies for “finishing” them. The US now attempts to neutralize its targets using special military forces, an integrated group of military operators and analysts, high technology, and severe legal sanctions—which keeps US and civilian casualties to a minimum. The mechanics of finishing terrorists may include a combination of lethal action, physical detention, and prosecution. Terrorist suspects are successfully finished when they no longer represent a physical or ideological threat to US interests, not just when they are killed by military strikes or by covert action.
Many intelligence and military officials argue that detaining and interviewing terrorist suspects is the most effective way to finish them, since they can provide information that will allow the find-fix-finish cycle to begin again; the debriefing of one suspect can aid in locating, isolating, capturing, or killing others. After Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM) was arrested in Pakistan, he provided actionable intelligence that was used to arrest the leader and several top members of Jemaah Islamiya, an extremist group in Southeast Asia.
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Still, the brutal circumstances under which KSM provided certain information—for example, after being tortured—proved controversial.
Also notorious was the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan militant captured by the Pakistani military and turned over to the US, which “finished” him by guaranteeing that he remained confined for the rest of his life within US, Egyptian, and Libyan facilities. While al-Libi is better known for providing erroneous information that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had a high-level relationship prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he did provide actionable intelligence about pending attacks against US interests at the beginning of his detention.

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