Free Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker

deterrence theory could be updated to manage unpredictable rogue states, like Iran or North Korea, with emerging nuclear capabilities. Matt Kroenig was assigned to lead the effort that colleagues told him was the least likely to succeed: how to deter terrorist networks from attacking the United States or its allies.
    It was a widely accepted premise in President Bush’s war cabinet that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out deadly terrorist missions with weapons of mass destruction or of mass disruption. To the president’s top national security advisers, the answer was a matter of military action solely, of capturing or killing terrorist leaders and their foot soldiers. There was no middle ground and no interest in finding one.
    But Kroenig was undaunted. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then of course every problem looks like a nail. Kroenig had planned to stay at the Pentagon for just a few months before returning to California to write his dissertation, so why not take on this complex assignment and view the terrorist threat through fresh eyes? Working in a windowless cubicle in a nondescript office, in a few days he completed a draft that combined his studies on classic deterrence theory with his growing knowledge of global terrorism, gleaned from highly classified assessments by the CIA, the NSA, and the rest of the American intelligence community. Kroenig and Pavel crafted a briefing to make the case that a combination of efforts—economic, diplomatic, military, political, and psychological, some highly classified and some carried out in the broad daylight of public debate—could in fact establish a new strategy and create a new and effective posture of deterrence against terrorist groups.
    “People at the time thought that terrorists weren’t deterrable, that they were irrational, that we had no control over the things they valued, so we couldn’t threaten to hold it at risk,” Kroenig said. “But terrorists are deterrable. While they may have a preference structure that’s different than ours, they do value things—things that we could hold at risk—and we can, therefore, influence their decisions.”
    Kroenig argued that terrorists value operational success, personal glory, their reputation and honor, and their support in the broader Muslim population. Undermining or sowing doubt among those motivated by any one of those values, or a combination of them, could help dissuade terrorists, or the people helping them, from carrying out an attack. But the efforts to advocate for such strategies encountered several roadblocks. Skeptical midlevel Pentagon bureaucrats refused to pass the “new deterrence” concept up the chain of command. Partly, it was fear of the new; it was also obvious that this proposed strategy contradicted the Bush administration’s public line, that is, until Rumsfeld exploded one day. In the midsummer of 2005, the defense secretary had received a briefing from top military commanders on how many megatons of nuclear bombs they could drop on an array of targets. Rumsfeld, furious at what he said was Cold War thinking, cut short the briefing and threw the generals out of his office. “Isn’t anyone doing anything relevant, like thinking about deterring terrorists?” Rumsfeld bellowed at his aides.
    The next morning, Feith, who was aware of Pavel and Kroenig’s work but had not read the latest drafts, asked to see the current version. He liked it and ordered the briefing, with a few changes, sent to Rumsfeld as soon as possible. “I just remember it intellectually being a very good piece of work—creative, well presented, rigorous, just good stuff,” Feith said.
    Perhaps he was pleased because the work followed a path that Feith himself had started to explore three years earlier in a speech in April 2002 to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s major pro-Israel lobby. In that address, Feith spoke of what terrorists