The grim specter of Americans dying by the thousands at their offices in Manhattan and northern Virginia at the hands of fanatical terrorists — who next time may unleash chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons — looms so large as to eclipse practically everything on the threat horizon. A new “designated enemy” has etched itself into the national psyche, and has irretrievably altered the course of American defense policy and planning.

There now is no doubt that terrorism poses grave danger to the American homeland. Internal security and emergency management capabilities will be redoubled. But America will not adopt a fortress mentality. Effective protection inevitably will require overseas military intervention, as well as diplomatic and economic pressure to uproot the network of international terrorism at its source.

The people and states that aid and abet terror will not receive a pass; they will be indicted and targeted along with those who perpetrate the terrorist acts, in accordance with international law and respect for non-combatants.

For those here in Washington charged with planning and preparing for the nation’s security, today’s stale blueprint has gone out the window. The debate about the defense budget and the QDR raging during the last month has been shown intellectually shallow and politically fake. Defenders of the status quo have gone on the defensive. Flogging the old threats no longer will wash.

Defense business as usual, with its hidebound commitment to large, heavy arsenals designed to challenge peer competitors overseas, invites increasing skepticism in the face of massive American casualties inflicted by a small band of knife-wielding terrorists. A wide array of expensive military hardware now seems nearly irrelevant to the major threat of global terrorism.

Spending billions on bean-counting reconnaissance satellites that lack any ability to peer into Afghani caves or eavesdrop on small conclaves of radicals plotting the destruction of America seems a dubious investment, as does throwing billions of dollars at missile-defense projects meant to deal with imaginary intercontinental missiles fired against the American homeland.

Last Tuesday’s glimpse into the fanatical terrorist mind may reinforce the thinking of those who insist there is a serious prospect of an irrational launch of ballistic missiles by a rogue leader at the United States. But the American public will demand that its leaders deal more seriously with the threat so obvious today.

A high-tech, costly national missile defense program no longer will be politically tenable if it threatens to sponge up scarce resources so clearly needed to deal with low-tech terrorism.

The advocates of broad military reform, aimed at creating new types of forces designed to counter asymmetrical warfare — weapons and methods of delivery that simply befuddle the muscle-bound American military of today — now have proof that their arguments of the past decade have been sound.

The major growth stock in the American security portfolio is human intelligence, targeted at terrorists and their sponsors. Field operatives with linguistic, cultural and political sophistication stand a far better chance than futuristic gizmos of detecting unfolding conspiracies against U.S. interests.

Another growth area is special operations: using agile, lethal fighters to take out terrorists in their own backyards. Non-proliferation programs further must be redoubled to thwart the nuclear, chemical, and biological aspirations of many terrorist organizations and their sponsoring governments.

Strengthening domestic capabilities to respond to disasters and mitigate their consequences, through programs to train and equip civilian personnel, also should fare well in the budgetary sweeps.

As these and many other specific new defense priorities are sorted out, the whole will vastly exceed the sum of the parts. A fundamental transformation of America’s defense needs is being driven by the current national trauma, and is gaining momentum independent of the U.S. security establishment.

Security is as much a state of mind as it is a physical condition. The metamorphosis of terrorism from remote abstraction to barbaric reality is creating a completely new organizing framework for U.S. national security planning and programming.

America’s sense of security has been turned inside out. The psychological conversion has happened. It is the sort of sweeping reconceptualization of national defense that most observers believed impossible, given the traditional budgetary and institutional politics supporting the status quo of a massive U.S. force structure based on lumbering tanks, aircraft and ships designed to fight wars of the past.

The defense bureaucracy now must follow up with details of a new national security agenda, new military doctrine and new budget priorities. To do otherwise would be simply unacceptable to the American people.

[This article first appeared in Defense News, Sept. 17, 2001]

By Dr. Bruce G. Blair
CDI President
bblair@cdi.org
 

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