Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead

by Chet Richards

From the author's executive

Events since Sept. 11, 2001, have introduced the world to a new type of threat, one not tied to a particular country and one that doesn’t field conventional armies to challenge us on the battlefield. Al-Qaida and its kin have taken the techniques of guerrilla warfare, added new technologies such as the Internet, and brought war to the homelands of the United States and Western Europe. Despite spending on defense that equals the rest of the world, combined, and initiating a war in Iraq that will likely surpass Vietnam in cost, the United States has yet either to destroy al-Qaida or to defeat a group of ragtag insurgents concentrated in the areas around Baghdad. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), designed to defeat the Soviet Union, is not only unsuited for this new form of conflict, it cannot be transformed into an organization that is. It is time for DoD to be abolished to make way for new approaches.

Among these would be a restructuring of the Armed Services to eliminate not only our large, heavy formations but the mindsets that accompany them. In their place, we should consider forces that blur the boundary between "civilian" and "military" as well as between government and private industry. We can be sure that our opponents have not ruled out any form of organization, and if we are to win, we must be at least as creative.

Forces, even radically re-created ones, can be effective only as part of a coherent national strategy. There are two generic approaches for building such a rollback, where we intervene to eliminate regimes that harbor or might harbor terrorists, and containment, where we take measures to protect ourselves from attack, but otherwise limit involvement to intelligence, police, and diplomatic measures. This book sympathizes with the goal of rollback, but considering its costs and lack of success in places like Iraq, recommends containment as the strategy most likely to protect against terrorists acts, while not making life in the developing world more dangerous than it already is.

Paperback

Published January 31, 2006

About the author

Chet Richards was a close associate of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd from the mid-1970s until Boyd s death in 1997. Boyd had asked him to review the mathematical portions of his first civilian paper, Destruction and Creation, and this led to a collaboration that eventually included applications to the business world.

Chet Richards career began at the Pentagon in 1971, and has included employment with Northrop, the professional services company CACI in Washington DC, and Lockheed. A consultant since 1999, he maintains his practice in strategy for business, marketing, and communications through Tarkenton & Addams, Inc., a public relations firm in Atlanta, GA.

Chet is the author of several publications all involving applications of Boyd s strategies. His most recent, A Swift, Elusive Sword, addresses how we can re-fashion the US Defense Department to defend ourselves against the types of non-traditional enemies we will likely face in the 21st Century. It was published by the Centers for Defense Information shortly before 9/11, has been translated into Russian, and is now in its second printing. He has lectured on this subject to commercial organizations in the US and abroad, including the US Army Command and Staff College and the Air War College, and is the only person to have delivered Boyd s Patterns of Conflict since Boyd s death.

Chet is also a retired colonel in the US Air Force Reserve, where he served for many years as the Reserve Air Attaché to Saudi Arabia. Prior to that, he was a reservist on the Air Staff in Washington, where he built computer models of fighter aircraft effectiveness. He was commissioned in 1969 through the Army ROTC program at the University of Mississippi.

Chet and his wife, Ginger, live in Atlanta, where, in addition to their work with Tarkenton & Addams, they build custom web sites to support the marketing communications needs of their clients. They also own and operate two sites devoted to John Boyd s strategic legacy, Defense and the National Interest (http://www.d-n-i.net) and Belisarius.com (http://www.belisarius.com.) They have two daughters who, as this is written, are both in graduate school in Georgia, and one very overweight cat.

(Barnes and Noble)