“The post-Cold War era ended on September 11th,” quotes Joe Klein: Closework

The United States military has accumulated a storehouse of spectacularly lethal equipment, which it has been willing to use from great distances — perhaps too often — over the past decade; it is probably the most effective conventional-war fighting force in history. But the basic assumptions, the culture, of the military-intelligence complex seem suddenly anachronistic. The nexus of national-defense and intelligence agencies may be as unsuited for a long-term offensive anti-terrorist campaign as they were unprepared to defend New York and Washington against the aerial attacks of September 11th. “The history of the American military ever since Ulysses S. Grant has been about the use of mass and firepower and ‘redundancy’ — the application of overwhelming force,” said Larry K Smith, a defense strategist who was Counsellor to both Les Aspin and William Perry, the Secretaries of Defense during Bill Clinton’s first term. “Overwhelming force implies, almost by definition, a lack of precision. That won’t work now. What we’re going to need is a much greater emphasis on the concentrated application of street smarts. I call these sorts of operations ‘closework.’ They are extremely precise missions that are used when the results are absolutely crucial. They demand the very highest standards of intelligence, of training, of preparation, of timing and execution. We haven’t been particularly good at this in the past.”

Indeed, there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy — from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership — has been marked by exactly the kind of institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance that would inhibit the “closework” that Smith proposes. New Yorker

Klein goes on to point fingers (one of the things we’re going to see accelerating now that we’ve sustained our patriotic detente and comraderie about as long as might be expected, and 20-20 hindsight takes over), and largely at the Clinton administration’s unpreparedness. But, as Joshua Micah Marshall points out in his Talking Points ‘mezine’, this “makes you wonder, of course, why the only big foreign policy player (beside CIA Director George Tenet) the Bush administration kept on from the Clinton team was Richard Clarke, head of counter-terrorism at NSC.”