One of the French revolution’s biggest contributions to military history was the idea of a “nation in arms” to set against the smaller professional armies that beset it. This theme crops up over and over in history. The idea that you can mobilize the resources of a nation to fight a “people’s war” is an evergreen one. World War 2 was to some extent, an example of the “nation in arms” against the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

The War on Terror has taken the form of Leaving It To the Government. This is in part because nobody wants to embark on hostilities against an entity like the Islamic World. We are only at war against the “bad guys” amid the “religion of peace”. Therefore the season is closed except to badged and licensed rangers who will carefully pick out the bad guys among the good. Very well.

But the enemy may not be so discreet. The Jihad is by definition a kind of people’s war; the Faithful versus the Infidel. So to some extent it will mobilize private participation far more readily and sometimes more creatively than War-By-Government. In truth, this in part conceals a failure in policy making by the West. War should be guided by policy, not by targeting and maybe what we are occasionally seeing is targeting being substituted for policy. But clear targeting is not always a direct replacement for muddled policy.

If one could step back, one might re-architecture the whole war. Well the whole former war, because in the age of Obama, we’ve made policy even fuzzier to some extent and yet more targeted at the same time. There is no more war. Only individual acts of crime which must be punished after the fact. The potential perps are still not prosecutable because they haven’t done anything yet. Warfare is about anticipation. Crime is about retribution. We’ll always be slightly behind the curve in this situation. But that’s a failure of policy, not one of targeting.