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CNN Live At Daybreak

America's New War: President Vows to Wipe Out Terrorism

Aired September 21, 2001 - 07:03   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush is vowing to wipe out terrorism and the U.S. military appears to be the president's tool of choice. Deployment is now underway for a possible U.S. response from the air, the land and the sea. We'll take a look at all three this morning, but let's begin with Bob Franken at the Pentagon for an overview.

Bob, yesterday the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had some difficulty really coming up with words to describe this campaign. It really is -- this is a cliche, but it's a paradigm shift, isn't it?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is. I would never say paradigm shift. What he said, though, was I thought we're going to have to come up with a new vocabulary and I think that that really hit the nail on the head. We're dealing with a new reality here, but the interesting thing is that the response that we're seeing is the traditional response. We're seeing the call up of the reserves. The first part of that 35,000 call up of troop reserves was an Air National Guard -- an air reserve call up of about 5,000 people from 29 states. There will be other announcements made later on that.

We've seen the Army now is being called up, particularly the Special Forces units. We're seeing the big military aircraft deployment with everything from B-1s and B-52s to the AWACS -- the AWACS planes and all of that. And of course we're seeing the major deployment of the flotilla. So we're seeing the traditional way of reacting to things in what everybody insists is a nontraditional kind of war.

O'BRIEN: Well, you know it's interesting, the other problem of course here, from the perspective of the Pentagon, is trying to keep things under wraps. And when you start moving around aircraft carrier battle groups, it's difficult to do just that. You get the sense that the Pentagon would like to keep this and not make this a Persian Gulf- type war with daily television briefings and at the same time, it's difficult to avoid not having these kind of troop movements in the media.

FRANKEN: Well actually, I think that they want two what seem to be contradictory things. On the one hand, they do want to operate in secrecy and not let people what's -- know what's going on.

On the other hand, they want to let people know, to a certain extent, what is going on because they have to continue to rally public support. So they have to balance those two, but that's always been a public policy issue.

We, of course, have no idea what else is going on. We have no idea what's operating, for instance, in the cyber world. That world where so much damage can be done and so much cyber warfare can be fought. We have no idea. We can't see that going on. We have no idea if any military troops, to put it in a more realistic basis, have been snuck into any particular area. I can tell you during the Persian Gulf War there were units, I was one of them, that snuck into areas long before the public announcements were made. We would go in and then only later were allowed to say we had been at X place. Now imagine what's going on when there are no journalists along. We have no idea.

O'BRIEN: All right. CNN's Bob Franken, thank you very much. Something we're not used to at all and he's helping keeping us informed throughout all of this.

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