FOR OVER 200 years, the military academy at West Point has schooled future Army officers in the ways of large-scale industrial war and, as the old joke goes, has established a reputation of having 200 years of history, untouched by progress. But with the United States the world's only remaining military superpower, and with insurgent-directed Fourth Generation warfare seemingly the order of the day in 21st century conflict, times have changed.
One of the West Point instructors taking a proactive view of this new environment is Lt. Col. Joe Felter. A 1987 West Point grad who spent the 1990s as a Special Forces operator, Felter has returned to his alma mater as director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a privately-funded think tank that offers valuable instruction to the corps of cadets about the enemy they'll encounter once they march out of the academy's Thayer Gate for the last time. Sitting in his office this past spring, Felter reflected on how the role of young officers has changed from when he graduated. In his day, "if you paid attention during your infantry basic course and your Ranger school you would have a good feel for what you're supposed to do," he said. "But these new lieutenants, they're literally the mayors of towns. They have to work with multiple U.S. government agencies, international agencies, host nation folks, tribal leaders--the threat environment is really complex, and more than ever they need to be prepared for that."
Occupying a clutch of nondescript offices in Lincoln Hall, the Combating Terrorism Center's modest accommodations don't give much hint of the impact it is having on the Long War, but it does give the impression that the CTC is an arm of the military's academic wing. It isn't. Set up through private donations in 2003, the center's twenty-odd civilian staff, fellows, and associates perform a dual role--instructing the academy's cadets on the intellectual history of terrorism while producing original research, for public consumption, on contemporary terrorism structures, goals and ideology.
Just as the fight against non-state actors often seems an ad hoc affair, the decision to embed CTC at West Point also owes much to circumstance. By the time darkness descended on the evening of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the nation was up against an enemy that it knew little, if anything, about. Into the breach stepped Vincent Viola, chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, who quickly set about putting the funding together to establish a center to study this new enemy. A class of '77 West Point grad, Viola wanted the center based at his alma mater so that the young cadets could be at the vanguard of this research. He personally donated $2 million to the cause, while rounding up a small group of deep-pocketed private citizens that included Ross Perot to kick in the rest of the seed money needed to get the program off the ground.
Four years after the program got off the ground, the CTC continues to be funded by a coterie of wealthy donors. While none of the staffers I spoke with this past spring would come out and say that the constant need to raise funds was a strain--indeed, they all said that keeping the Pentagon's regulation-happy mitts off the operation was one of the keys to its success--it was a topic brought up at several staff meetings, and remains an obvious, and ongoing, concern.
Staying out of the government's bureaucratic turf wars and off the Pentagon's increasingly strained wartime funding stream has worked both ways. Having to go out and find money to keep the center open takes time and energy, and it only allows the center to offer relatively short-term contracts, since they don't know what the funding situation will be like from year to year. Brian Fishman, an associate and manager of the CTC's Alfred P. Sloan bioterrorism program, says that being privately funded "is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we're given a lot of freedom, we're not at anyone's beck and call. At the same time we have to talk to donors and play nice like an NGO." Several other staffers told me said the CTC's outsider role is useful--they don't threaten anybody's turf, and in the internecine skirmishes that break out regularly among military brass, that's no small thing.
Dr. James Forrest, head of the CTC's Terrorism Studies program, says that even though staffers have top-secret clearance, "we also keep our academic credentials solid by not presenting ourselves as spokespersons [for the military]. This is meant to be an academically diverse contribution to the debate." He says that the CTC is kind of like "the academic equivalent of a special ops unit . . . you hire good people and trust them to do the right thing."
