Stevenson doesn’t claim to have seen it coming, either. But he does offer a "third way" to the vexing problem of deterring those who see punishment in a positive light. Rather than appeasing or dominating Muslims, he suggests "a new way of thinking about American power and place" that accepts the uncomfortable fact that American power is less relevant in this kind of war than it was during RAND’s glory years. He proposes reviving a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy–one that is more respectful of "other ways of being in the world," to use Louis Menand’s phrase, and one that takes advantage of America’s more positive and progressive vision of the future. Such an approach could, over time, help reverse the economic and political misfortunes of Islam as a whole.

This is interesting and helpful, and also somewhat general; Stevenson does not develop the ideas as fully as he could. The part of the solution he fleshes out most fully, perhaps unsurprisingly in a book that focuses on think tanks, is the creation of a new institution to examine the causes of radical Islamic extremism, the objectives of that creed, its likely avenues and tools, how to mitigate its effects, and ultimately how to defang the serpent. One may argue that we have such places already, like the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and RAND. But the NCTC is an operations center, and its daily responsibilities preclude it from doing the primary research required to form an intellectual base for prosecuting the Long War more effectively. And though RAND itself has done some work on Islamic terrorism, Stevenson finds the work unsatisfying. He argues–somewhat unconvincingly–that existing think tanks are too wedded to bureaucratic practices to allow "new stream thinkers" to do the radical reevaluations of American policy that are necessary.

He proposes, instead, creating a Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation, or FFRDC, dedicated to thinking about the Islamic terror threat in the same way that RAND thought about the Soviet nuclear threat. Stevenson suggests the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a model. It is undeniably a good and long-overdue idea, with likely payoffs hugely exceeding the few hundred million dollars such an organization would cost the taxpayer every year. But beyond the basics, Stevenson is working from the wrong mould. RAND was so influential not least because it was the brains behind an enormously large and powerful set of muscles called the Strategic Air Command, where peace was a profession and war just a hobby; DARPA provides thinking that feeds the mammoth U.S. defense industry. Stevenson’s proposed think tank would need similar need bone and muscle. But unlike the Strategic Air Command or the Department of Defense, the muscle we need today would motivate soft power, rather than hard steel.

It is not for me, a scribbler in a think tank, to denigrate the idea of creating another one. In fact, an underreported cause of the recent turnaround in Iraq has been General David Petraeus’ creation of his own brain trust consisting of many of the military’s brightest strategic thinkers on the challenges of insurgency [See Rachel Kleinfeld, "Petraeus the Progressive," on page 107 of this issue]. If Petraeus could do so much on his own, just with thinkers he knew personally, imagine what the nation could do with a call to service by a president who valued thinking hard about problems?

The first step would be to eliminate the phrase "Global War on Terror" from the lexicon. Counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen is one of many scholars who correctly notes the difficulties inherent in declaring war on an idea. He recommends that, instead, "We must distinguish Al Qaeda and the broader militant movements it symbolizes–entities that use terrorism–from the tactic of terrorism itself." But important as new thinking can be, it is insufficient. What we need now, as Stevenson notes, is what the Wizards of Armageddon enjoyed then: "A sense of mission wedded to national purpose."

If we did, in fact, have the sense of mission that the murder of 3,000 Americans deserves, we could now be waging a true total war on Islamic extremists, rather than relying all but exclusively on an overstretched military instrument of power. This is war on the cheap from the national perspective, war carried on the backs of just the relatively few who have volunteered to perform military service in a time of war. Instead of a nation with a sense of mission, driven by national purpose, we are, in Stevenson’s sad words, "Still Behind the Curve." Seven years after the attacks of September 11, we have not mobilized the American nation for war. We have not taken appropriate cautions as a result of realistic fears. We have not put our best minds to work, in an organized way, to think about the problems of this new age of terror. Stevenson’s book, in short, is a useful primer on the nuts and bolts of constructing the tools to wage a better war. But a dedicated think tank is only the first step.

A true total war against radical Islamic extremism would call upon all elements of U.S. national power. Philip Bobbitt, in his book Terror and Consent, notes the fundamental inadequacy of an international law of war designed to govern the conduct of war between states, not the new challenges of today. Bobbitt criticizes the American government, which, "rather than seeking legal reform" to address the new challenges of terrorism, "has used the inadequacy of currently prevailing law as a basis for avoiding legal restrictions on government entirely." A better answer would be an international conference leading to an updated Geneva Accords, focusing on state sponsors of terrorism. It would hold that any state that actively or passively enabled terrorist organizations acting on its soil would share responsibility for the terrorist activity, to include financial liability; states could also be held responsible for control of fissile material produced inside their borders. Because deterrence is a function of both capability to punish and credibility that threats will be fulfilled, an international consensus on state responsibility for terror would be far more useful than threats to attack Islam’s holy cities, without the added negative second-order effect of inspiring additional jihadis to fight us to defend them.

But winning this war will take more than changes in international law; it will take new or renewed national institutions. As part of a true total war on Islamic extremists, the United States Information Agency, which played such an important role in winning the war of ideas during the Cold War, should be reinstituted. A total war would include a new Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan to get at the roots of the economic despair, one of the primary causes of the Taliban’s appeal. The lack of a coordinated economic, political, diplomatic, and military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is one of the reasons that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, recently and correctly told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "I’m not convinced we’re winning it in Afghanistan. I am convinced we can." The United States cannot win the war against Al Qaeda and its associated movements by itself; a strategy for this war requires that we train and equip our friends for this long fight. Military training teams that embed inside Afghan National Army battalions may seem a long distance from nuclear strategists–but, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has noted, these are the wars we are in, and these are the wars that we have to win.

Herman Kahn’s gravestone in Chappaqua, New York is inscribed with one of his favorite sayings: "Barring bad luck and bad management." In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, Stevenson has reminded us that we once put some of the nation’s best minds to work attempting to minimize the possibility of bad management of a capability that could literally destroy humankind. If the threat we face today is not as immediate and all-consuming as it once was–at least for those who lived in Omaha–it is certainly worth much more hard thinking and doing than we have given it thus far. Stevenson’s book is a good place to start.