WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says that even winning the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will not end the “Long War” against violent extremism and that the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorists should be the nation’s top military priority over coming decades, according to a new National Defense Strategy he approved last month.

The strategy document, which has not been released, calls for the military to master “irregular” warfare rather than focusing on conventional conflicts against other nations, though Gates also recommends partnering with China and Russia in order to blunt their rise as potential adversaries. The strategy is a culmination of Gates’s work since he took over the Pentagon in late 2006 and spells out his view that the nation must harness both military assets and “soft power” to defeat a complex, transnational foe.

“Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism,” according to the 23-page document, provided to The Washington Post by InsideDefense.com, a defense industry news service. “Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is crucial to winning this conflict, but it alone will not bring victory.”

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Pentagon: Terrorism to be threat for decades

Sec. Gates seems to be a master of *the understatement*, a lot like the eggheads that keep saying that California *could* have a massive quake sometime in the next 30 years. Safe bets, hedged bets, they works pretty well, and the probabilities are in your favor.

Terrorism will not go away, even with a full victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorism won’t go away even if radical Islam is totally wiped out. Timothy McVeigh wasn’t an Islamic terrorist.

But maybe Gates is on to something, fighting terrorism with “irregular” warfare tactics?? What a concept! And verbiage is everything, semantics make it all seem so much better.

Irregular Warfare? Wasn’t that what the U.S. Army Unconventional Warfare Manual covered for years? Isn’t irregular warfare, and the necessity of it’s use one of the really important lessons we supposedly learned in Vietnam?

Let’s face facts, we turned up the heat in Iraq, and to do so we drew down our forces in Afghanistan, and there was a fairly rapid resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. We turned up the heat and it now appears that many of the insurgents in Iraq, those not Iraqi themselves, have moved on to easier picking so to speak.

When we ramp up our efforts in Afghanistan, and I feel we must, I hope the DoD doesn’t forget that if we make it too tough on the insurgents there, they’ll simply move on to less challenged areas.