What would Clausewitz say?

Geitner Simmon writes to point out -

". . . the hashish-using Assassins operated out of Iran and came up with ingenious murder methods that terrorized the elites in many Islamic countries. It seemed like the Assassins couldn't be stopped. But when the Mongols rolled across Southwest Asia, they hunted the Assassins down and shattered their organization. Of course, the Assassins were headquartered in a castle fortress in Iran; when the Mongols destroyed the fortress, the Assassins suffered a huge setback. Al-Qaida, in contrast, is an explicitly decentralized institution.

The Western way of war for the last two centuries has been heavily influenced by the work of the German military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz, whose seminal work, On War is still studied in military schools around the world.

Clausewitz emphasized finding the enemy's "center of gravity," which he defined as, "a centre of power and movement . . . on which everything depends; and against this centre of gravity of the enemy, the concentrated blow of all the forces must be directed."

Geitner's point raises the question, "What is the center of gravity of our terrorist enemy?" The destruction of the Taliban/al Qaeda field forces in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan was not the destruction of the terrorists' center of gravity. (However, the Taliban are probably through, but the Taliban were not, in themselves, our chief enemy.) The reason is that a field force was never the bin Laden's means of attacking the West.

Clausewitz says more about where lies the enemy's center:

. . . in a confederacy, it lies in the unity of interests; in a national insurrection, in the person of the chief leader, and in public opinion; against these points the blow must be directed. If the enemy by this loses his balance, no time must be allowed for him to recover it; the blow must be persistently repeated in the same direction, or, in other words, the conqueror must always direct his blows upon the mass, but not against a fraction of the enemy.

Interestingly, von C. understood that not all military actions would be directed solely against field armies, although he did emphasize such operations as "the surest commencement" to success.

What is it that is al Qaeda's sin qua non for continued operations? Against that we must direct our main efforts. This is in keeping with the principle of war of economy of force, which holds that the main effort must be directed against the main objective, and peripheral efforts, even if important, must be "economized." That is why most the Terror War's operations against al Qaeda are not and will not be overtly military. In fact, over time I expect that military operations will decline in frequency and intensity.