Free Find, Fix, Finish by Aki Peritz, Eric Rosenbach Page A

groups who seek to find ways to disturb America’s advantaged position.
    This shift, however, has affected US national security strategy beyond the immediate concern of eliminating the so-called terrorist threat. Developing the ability to target individuals has proven critical to achieving other national security priorities. The policy debate about the future of Afghanistan policy that occurred within the Obama administration in 2009 represented the formal arrival of a new strategic option: focused, small footprint counterterrorism operations aimed at crippling al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the end, President Obama chose to pursue a more expansive counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The COIN strategy in Afghanistan, or some variant, was appropriate to achieving a long-term solution to a conflict. But it required—more than guns, troops, or briefcases of cash—a long-term commitment from the American people. But polling in 2010 suggested that public support for the fight was declining, and by 2011 President Obama had announced the beginning of a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan.
    Yet the terrorism threat emanating from South Asia did not simply evaporate. Until 2011 COIN represented the strategy for the main effort, but parallel targeted counterterrorism operations increased dramatically on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border whose object was to find, fix, and finish the adversaries that threatened America’s national interests.

FIND, FIX, AND FINISH
     
    The idea of “find, fix, finish” is not new, Indeed, it has a classic American military heritage. In the 1950s General Matthew Ridgway rallied his demoralized troops during the Korean War by repeatedly exhorting his commanders to “Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!” 8 Ridgway reportedly based his maxim on a study of General Ulysses S. Grant, who said, “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can as often as you can, and keep moving on.”
    Following the Korean War, General Ridgway’s exhortations evolved into national security policy during the cold war:
    FIND: Find the enemy
FIX: Ensure the enemy stays (is fixed) in that location
FINISH: Defeat the enemy
     
    The find-fix-finish mantra helped shape the cold war worldview of the adversary: the Soviet Union and its proxies. A bipolar world was a simple world, and the long-term US goal was to defeat the USSR, or at least hold Soviet power in check. The intelligence community knew its targets and its mission: finding and fixing Red Army divisions, strategic bombers, nuclear assets, and the like. Locating the enemy was the easy part; the Soviet Union had cities, citizens, and interests to defend. Finishing the Soviet Union militarily was a much greater challenge, one the US never undertook because of the threat of mutually assured destruction.
    But once terrorist groups, not nations, were viewed as the main threat, the rules of engagement that had evolved under the bipolar system of nuclear powers—deterrence, containment, reassurance—were less relevant. There was no tangible adversary, no army of uniformed soldiers, no arsenal regulated by carefully negotiated arms agreements, and certainly no state leader with whom to negotiate.
    The fundamental assumption of the cold war—that neither side wanted to risk annihilation—was null and void, since the terrorists were willing to martyr themselves. Since the adversaries had changed, the find-fix-finish doctrine had to evolve as well. Now finishing the enemy would be relatively simple, but finding and fixing an individual or small cell became devilishly hard.
    A number of intelligence professionals had begun to draw attention to this shift in strategic thinking. “For most of, certainly, my professional life, most of our work was out there on fix and finish,” said former CIA director Michael Hayden in 2007. “The world has turned upside down . . .