"In Search of National Security in the 21st Century" continued:
Of the three resources required by terrorists -- money, weapons and people -- the resource most vital is people. Our "war on terrorism" should aim to dry up the swamp of despair found in refugee camps, favelas and impoverished villages throughout the world. As the writer Robert Kaplan has pointed out, for millions of young people from this swamp, barracks life and terrorist training camps are a step up. Though the first suicidal attackers did not come from refugee camps, it is a safe bet that the next wave will.
The military component, however, necessarily remains at the center of national security. But the military of the 21st century must look and perform much differently from that of the 20th. Paradoxically enough, it will be more technological but it will also be more human. Technologically, our military will expand into space. But that component must be defensive, not offensive. The 21st century military will also involve more precision-guided munitions. In the Persian Gulf war 10 percent of munitions were precision-guided, and even those were not as consistently accurate as we were led to believe. In the Afghan war, 90 percent of our munitions were precision-guided. But that dramatic increase did not prevent us from bombing the wrong targets. Once again, precision is an asset only if the human factor, accurate intelligence, controls.
We are indeed in a "revolution of military affairs" largely driven by technology but dependent on intelligence collected and analyzed by humans. Our fighting forces are increasingly directed by and through a complex web of command, control and communications networks, all interwoven and interrelated. The first Persian Gulf war was directed from a makeshift headquarters in Saudi Arabia. A decade later the Afghan war was directed from Central Command in Florida. We are relying on UAVs, unmanned air vehicles, and UCAVs, unmanned combat air vehicles, as fast as we can produce them. The commander in chief can monitor real-time pictures from these vehicles in the White House.
But high technology can be both extremely vulnerable to and dependent on the human actor. Exotic Pentagon communications networks are vulnerable to 21-year-old hackers. And the precision-guided munitions onboard planes flying from Diego Garcia or aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean were guided by Delta Force personnel wearing civilian clothes and riding mules across the hills of Afghanistan. And wedding parties are wiped out because of the failure of human intelligence.
Even in the age of terrorism and "crime/war," we will need expeditionary forces. But they must be lighter and swifter. Getting there fast is now more important than getting there big. And ultra-sophisticated, post-Cold War conventional weapons systems -- ships, planes and tanks -- will have to be different. Despite our enormous wealth, we can no longer afford to integrate technology so closely to platforms that the platform must be replaced when technology changes -- as it does with lightning speed. We cannot afford ships, planes and tanks that are outdated the year they come into service. Platforms -- once again, ships, planes and tanks -- must be built for durability and long life. The weapons and sensors we place on them must be "plugged in" -- that is, readily removable when new ones become available.
The two illustrations are, of course, the venerable B-52 bomber and the aircraft carrier. The B-52, now in its sixth decade of life, is still performing -- even though it's older than the fathers of the pilots who fly it. And we keep aircraft carriers in service for over half a century. The platform doesn't change. But the technological sensors and weapons change almost overnight these days. Even then, human ingenuity trumps everything. Delta Force, as I mentioned, used a 3,000-year-old transportation system, the mule, to direct 21st century technology.
The roots of Secretary Rumsfeld's current uneven attempts to transition from 20th century weapons and warfare to preparation for what some have called the "fourth generation of warfare" of the 21st century trace to the military reform movement of the late 1970s. Even then, we reformers were advocating unit cohesion and officer initiative, maneuver strategy and tactics, and lighter, faster, more replicable weapons. Without attention to new people policies and innovative strategy, tactics and doctrine, the cancellation of weapons such as the Crusader artillery piece will by itself not transform the military sufficiently for a new kind of conflict.
Paradoxically, once again, the most technologically superior superpower in human history is now dependent on human ingenuity more than ever. If intelligence fails, as it did one year ago, all the technology in the world cannot save us. To know when, where and how terrorists intend to strike, and what they intend to use to do so, is almost entirely dependent upon human intelligence collection. Electronic surveillance, intercepts and wiretaps, bugging and pursuing, cannot altogether replace the human agent.
There is every reason now to believe that, within days, American forces -- possibly with token support from allies -- will invade Iraq. Under these circumstances, and acknowledging the unity of America behind our forces once committed, any attempt to outline a national security policy for the future, such as I undertake here, requires several observations to be made.
The American people deserve to know the costs of this commitment. They deserve to know which members of the international community openly support us, including with military resources. They deserve to know, most of all, casualty estimates on both sides. We have been told none of these things. It cost us 50,000 American lives in Vietnam to learn the lesson that the American people must not be misled, lied to, or treated as incompetent on military engagements.
The United States military does not belong to the president; it belongs to the American people. Our support for its commitment to combat is crucial for its success. That support cannot be granted in the dark and without a candid statement by the commander in chief regarding the probable costs in human lives and national treasure of its commitment.
There is yet another assurance the president must give -- that we are prepared for what the secretary of defense, among others, believes will be virtually inevitable retaliatory terrorist attacks on the United States for our invasion of an Islamic country. As recently as three months ago the Council on Foreign Relations task force that I co-chaired reported that we are woefully unprepared for, and still at risk of, future terrorist attacks. It is imprudent in the extreme to attack a nation in a region seething with hostile suicidal forces when we are vulnerable to their retaliation.
Which leads, of course, right back home to the new age of homeland security. On Jan. 31, 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century strongly recommended to President George Bush that a new National Homeland Security Agency be created to restructure and reorganize federal assets, and well over a year after the first terrorist attack, one is finally being established. This must not become a domestic Pentagon, a bureaucratic behemoth that crushes initiative and imagination. A very large coordinated agency can succeed only if it integrates functions but at the same time rewards individual creative energy. At this moment, that new department is not moving with the sense of urgency it must possess.
Structured from almost two dozen existing federal offices, the new department will have, among its many missions, two crucial ones -- control of our borders and protection of our critical infrastructure: our communications, finance, energy and transportation systems.
But an even greater challenge for the nation itself is the search for a balance between security and liberty. Here the role of the standing military in civil society becomes crucial. The Pentagon is creating a new Northern Command, headquartered in Colorado Springs, whose duties are as yet unclear. The new command will be tasked with coordinating the role of the military in homeland security. The easiest and most obvious solution is to put the entire mission in the Department of Defense.
There are, however, important reasons why it is not that easy. A review of the constitutional debates in 1787 makes clear that the founders understood the danger to a republican form of government from stationing full-time soldiers on the streets of our nation. This was a fear that united the often divided founders. Indeed, this fear led to the passage of a statute, the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, a hundred years later, prohibiting the military from enforcing the laws of the land. Congress wanted to make it clear that there is a great difference in a democracy between protecting our nation from foreign attack and policing our neighborhoods.
Now some in Washington are saying we should "review" this law with an eye to qualifying or even repealing it. Beware. This would be a mistake of dangerous proportions. For then, the very liberties for which we stand and which we are seeking to protect would be in danger. Short of an emergency of catastrophic proportions and a presidential declaration of martial law, we neither want nor need the 82nd Airborne Division on the streets of Cleveland, Boston or Denver. And, schooled in constitutional principles and history, the vast majority of professional military officers do not want that mission either.
But who, in addition to our public safety agencies, our police and fire departments and emergency responders, should help respond to an attack and keep the peace and restore order? Might there not be the need for some kind of military capability? Once again, based upon their understanding of classical history, our founders anticipated the future. They created such an army and called it the militia: citizen-soldiers under the immediate command of the various states that can be deployed in times of emergency. Since the late 19th century these militias have been known as the National Guard, and they were created and given constitutional status as the first responders and the first line of defense in the case of an attack on our homeland.
Our commission on 21st century national security insisted that the National Guard be given the principal mission of response to homeland attack. These are people like us, teachers, office workers, bankers and business people, nurses and medical personnel, who are or quickly can be trained and equipped for the primary homeland security role. They also do not conjure up the danger of military rule so feared by republicans since the Greek city-state.
So now we can begin to see the outlines of a national security structure and a set of strategies, tactics and doctrines necessary to protect us in an age of multiple revolutions. First, we must understand the changing nature of conflict and the concurrently changing nature of security. Second, we must appreciate the nature of threats and respond to the causes of those threats not only with military means but also with economic and diplomatic imagination to reduce the despair that fuels terrorism. Third, the military means we use when necessary will look dramatically different from the recent Cold War age. They will capitalize on our technological superiority but recognize its increasing dependence on skillful human direction. And fourth, homeland security must achieve a balance between security and liberty by constant recognition of our peculiar constitutional heritage and the mandate that heritage provides to rely on citizens and citizen-soldiers devoted to civic virtue and civic duty.
For the first time since 1812, our security has become a function of the community. America will prevail in this new age more because of the strength of its citizens than the power of its arsenal. But our citizens must be engaged in this fight, to a much greater degree than they have been, by the president himself.
The new century of paradox dictates that the world's greatest power must look not to its far-flung branches but to its roots -- not to its elaborate materialistic systems of production and consumption but to its ideals and principles, not to its greed but to its honor. From 1949 until 1991, we lived under the threat of nuclear war and depended on a policy of containment and a doctrine of deterrence to protect us. That was the basis of our national security. I leave to you the task of coining a name for the new national security policy for a new age.
But whatever it is called, we must never forget that those tasked with carrying it out are our neighbors and fellow citizens, men and women with homes and families just like ours. When we take their vigilance and sacrifice for granted, we demean our rich heritage of democratic freedom guaranteed by the bloodshed of generations of Americans who have stood the lonely post far from home to assure our safety and security.
Until we discover ways to eradicate evil from the hearts of those who wish us ill, those who accept the duty of standing that post will risk, and tragically lose, their lives so that we here may enjoy our freedom. Somewhere in the Persian Gulf there is a young sailor who is someone's daughter, a combat pilot who is someone's husband, a young Marine ready to go ashore who is someone's son. For the American nation, they are all our sons and daughters.
War is not an instrument of policy; it is a failure of policy. We cannot here today discuss the use of military power as an instrument of national policy without recognition that it is the lives of our sons and daughters that are most immediately at stake. We all must now earn our rights by performance of our duties. And our duty to our sons and daughters requires our policy makers to hold their lives in sacred trust. Only then will our national security be just as well as strong and only then can we be truly proud of who we are.
Gary Hart |
