Austin Bay

Enemy actions confirm the brutal truth: America’s homicidal foes make America a battleground.

Globally they target U.S. allies and interests. Locally they target American lives and civil society.

9/11 demonstrated terrorists can and will kill en masse on American soil. Their goals are absolute. We learned the only way to stop them is to kill them. We killed Osama bin Laden, but the war against Islamist terror flickers in Syria, Yemen and Africa.

The complex war against civil society is more deadly. The drug fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction. In 2021 over 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl-related causes. Drug addiction afflicts all state, but San Francisco, LA, Portland? Combine drug addiction with “woke” policies like defund the police and — behold — wastelands. Major corporations have fled downtown San Francisco. They left vacant buildings, not their hearts.

Enemy anti-American Society drug operations start in Myanmar’s Golden Triangle, Afghanistan’s poppy fields, Colombia’s cocaine producers and Chinese pharmaceutical labs. Mexican drug cartels bring it over the border and distribute, from Texas and California to Canada.

As I argued in last week’s column, America confronts a new type of war with Foreign Adversary Collaborating Hybrid-Warfare Organizations. The key foreign adversary: communist China, but Iran is an accessory evil.

FACHWO is a clunky acronym, but American policy and smart leaders need it because fighting them justifies the use of all tools of American power — especially military power since a foreign enemy uses them as an operational line of attack.

This week in Washington Beltway antics shows why.

Defense News reported that House defense appropriations Chairman Ken Calvert, R-Calif., wants to reorganize deck chairs on the Titanic. Calvert: “To prioritize combating the trafficking of fentanyl by Mexican drug cartels, we are transferring Mexico from the jurisdiction of Northcom to Southcom, which has a long history of successful international and interagency counter drug operations.”

Calvert wants to transfer Mexico to Sitcom’s area of operations.

Note this is the Appropriations Committee, not the Armed Services Committee or Committee on Homeland Security. Calvert may well be a security expert. Southcom has done an admirable job in counter drug operations.

For the record, Northcom’s Joint Task Force North (formally JTF6, located in El Paso, Texas) has coordinated Defense Department counter-drug operations since 1989. Its authority extends to the Bahamas and Florida Straits. At one time JTF6 coordinated with a surveillance task force in Key West, Florida. Big difference: Northcom, unlike Southcom, is on Mexico’s border. It also has active liaison with vetted Mexican military authorities.

What stymies JTF-North will also stymie Southcom task forces: Immigration policies, open border advocates and the failure to use all elements of American power to combat human trafficking, illegal drugs, illegal smuggling of goods and illegal immigration.

And inept political leadership.

Since January 2021 — when the Biden administration started directing policy — some 4 to 5 million illegal immigrants have entered the U.S. The illegal surge shatters social safety nets created for American citizens. Even the most liberal sanctuary cities are buckling, especially the crime-ridden cities who defunded the police in the name of equity and other tyrannical Marxist utopian notions.

Fair question: who funded the “defund the police” movement and similar chaos-seeding, socially destructive policies? No matter their claimed motivation, their policies weaken American society. The social destruction operation is right out of Chinese strategic theorists Qiao Liang’s and Wang Xiangsui’s treatise “Unrestricted Warfare.”

We don’t have a question of Southcom versus Northcom. In war, both headquarters have access to all military and civilian defense assets.

Here’s what we’re missing: a warfighting awareness. The U.S. homefront has become a war zone under persistent attack by adversaries who employ an array of weapons and execute operations exploiting stealth, ambush, naivete and, in many cases, utter stupidity.

Austin Bay is a syndicated columnist and author.