Even before the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the study of terrorism was a rich field of inquiry.
Five years after 9-11, with terrorism having served as the focal point of national security studies all over
the world, it is difficult to find new approaches to the subject. The approach used by CCMR is indeed new,
and we are anxious to share it with government officials around the world. The term that best describes what
we do is "focused education," and we have chosen to express it in the form graduate-level seminars. We titled
this series of seminars, all of which are tailored to regional or national needs, "Civil-Military Responses
to Terrorism" with the hope that such a rubric would describe the common ground necessary to stimulate meaningful,
collaborative thought. Each nation represented in our classrooms shares the challenge of constructing effective
responses to terrorism, and those responses will always require a mix of civilian and military government instruments.
From this premise, we have engaged professionals representing more than 90 governments in detailed discussions
of theory and practice, aimed at developing insights into what might constitute the most effective responses in
their home countries.
The teaching portion of a seminar is only the beginning of the learning process; discussion is the key.
In order to stimulate the kind of discussion needed, our presentations first had to be sanitized of
US-centric explanations and prescriptions. While the US point of view is important, what our colleagues
really needed was a spectrum of concepts and principles that seem to work in the general case, and might
be applied successfully in their specific cases. Each government confronts the same basic challenges,
but every government manages those challenges according to its own historical, cultural, and political
circumstances. Even within the growing democratic family of nations, governments diverge quite a bit
in their approaches to similar problems. Indeed, this is the major strength of democracy as a system—
the ability to reform itself, adapting to ever-changing conditions. Democratic governments do this by tapping
into a steady stream of domestic and international sources of new ideas.
We wanted to be one of the international sources of new ideas democratic governments could turn to. Laying out
a program based upon concepts and principles, and leaving sufficient time for discussion, we found an effective
formula for generating this flow. Diversity in the faculty as well as the audience, Socratic methods of extracting
personal views, case studies of selected government responses, and small discussion groups to analyze specific
problems were all thrown into the mix. By getting smart people in the door (or going to them) and tossing around
good ideas from many different governments, we have been pleased to see participants leave with more intellectual
capital than they brought. Our faculty can also be described as facilitators or consultants, with a deliverable
product—better ideas with which to defeat the dangerous ideas and calamities terrorism has visited upon our
societies.
Beyond a few core principles, there are not very many right or wrong answers in combating terrorism.
Manichean-minded Americans tend to search for "school solutions" to ambiguous problems, apply those solutions,
and move on to another problem. The problem of terrorism does not lend itself to such doctrinaire thinking.
Terrorism will be with us for a long time, and the responses to it are neither simple nor obvious. Strategy against
terrorism is a continuous exercise in out-of-the-box thinking, measuring effectiveness, and adjusting our approaches.
This has presented the United States government with the notion that we should educate members of the global
coalition against terrorism in addition to training them. Whereas training focuses the mind on a specific task,
education opens the mind to a more complete understanding of why, when, where, and how to apply that training.
As faculty members of The Naval Postgraduate School, we embraced the role of education.
There are two broad areas on which to target such education: national strategy and regional collective efforts.
Governments cannot any longer contain or defeat terrorism alone. They must first learn to make the decisions needed
to mobilize the tools available to them; then they must learn how to work together against a threat that places
the whole region at risk. One without the other will not work. Since the core competency of The Center for
Civil-Military Relations has always been to assist foreign nations make better defense decisions, combating
terrorism fell naturally into our set of responsibilities. Our challenge was to help friendly nations improve
their capabilities, helping them assist each other in regional and global coalitions against terrorism. To achieve
these goals, we have worked to construct seminars for groups of countries in definable regions and sub-regions,
as well as globally sourced audiences.
It soon became clear that we were learning even more than our audiences about how governments can respond
to terrorism. There was a natural desire to share that knowledge, not only in successive seminars, but also
beyond the classroom. We encourage our graduates to extend the CCMR experience into a continuing on-line
discussion after they (or we) go home. In this way, we hope to develop the "fellowship" aspect of this program
as much as possible. Relationships are more important than events, and we want to nurture the close ties that
emerge during our seminars.
It is easy for governments to make terrorism worse; we want to give them the intellectual tools they need
to collectively banish terrorism to the very fringes of modern society, alongside piracy, slavery, and genocide.
It may not be possible to rid the world of terrorism completely, but civilized nations must be willing to try.
One thing is certain; if we do not approach the challenges of terrorism collectively, terrorists will continue
to intimidate us into changing the way we live. It is our challenge to convince terrorists—by persuasion or
by force—to change the way they live.
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