The Neglected Home Front

Stephen E. Flynn

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary:  The Bush administration has waged an aggressive war against terrorists abroad, but it has neglected to protect the homeland, even though Americans in the United States are the ones most vulnerable to future attacks. The government must do more to safeguard critical U.S. infrastructure and mobilize the American public to help. For starters, it should create a semi-independent federal agency tapping into private resources that would develop and enforce security standards.

Stephen E. Flynn is Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This article draws from "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism" (HarperCollins, 2004).

The degree to which the Bush administration is willing to invest in conventional national security spending relative to basic domestic security measures is considerable. Although the CIA has concluded that the most likely way weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would enter the United States is by sea, the federal government is spending more every three days to finance the war in Iraq than it has provided over the past three years to prop up the security of all 361 U.S. commercial seaports. This myopic focus on conventional military forces at the expense of domestic security even extends to making the physical security at U.S. military bases a higher budget priority than protecting the nation's most critical infrastructure. In fiscal year 2005, Congress will give the Pentagon $7.6 billion to improve security at military bases. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security will receive just $2.6 billion to protect all the vital systems throughout the country that sustain a modern society.

Much of the nation's critical infrastructure is in densely populated areas, so if the country is attacked, average U.S. citizens, not uniformed military personnel, will be the most likely casualties. Yet the federal effort to promote civil defense has gone quiet after a rocky start that generated a run on plastic sheeting and duct tape and provided fodder for the late-night comedy shows. Police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians will be the first on the scene of any attack; they will have to operate largely on their own for at least the first 12 to 24 hours. Yet on average, U.S. fire departments have only enough radios to equip half their firefighters on a shift, and breathing apparatus for only a third. Police departments in cities across the country do not have the protective gear to safely secure a site following a WMD attack. And most emergency medical technicians lack the tools to determine which chemical or biological agent may have been used.

The deadly weapons that local emergency responders are so poorly equipped to cope with do not need to be imported. But although the Bush administration has made a top priority of preventing the spread of WMD overseas, it has slashed funds to dispose of commercially held radioactive materials (such as cesium-137, cobalt-60, and americium), which could be used in constructing dirty bombs, within the United States. The release of a biological agent on U.S. soil would be even deadlier, yet there is no federal program to provide ongoing oversight of how lethal pathogens are handled. Many university research labs around the country hold highly contagious specimens, and post-September 11 inspections have documented significant lapses in control over access to the labs and the securing of dangerous materials. Meanwhile, half of the federal scientific and medical personnel that the nation would turn to in the event of a bioterrorism attack will be eligible to retire within five years, and there is no comprehensive plan to address this looming personnel crisis.

Finally, even though the most tempting targets for terrorists are those that can produce widespread economic and social disruption, the White House has declared that safeguarding the nation's critical infrastructure is not a federal responsibility. According to President Bush's 2002 National Homeland Security Strategy, "The government should only address those activities that the market does not adequately provide -- for example, national defense or border security. ... For other aspects of homeland security, sufficient incentives exist in the private market to supply protection." Unfortunately, this expression of faith has not been borne out. According to a survey commissioned by the Washington-based Council on Competitiveness just one year after September 11, 92 percent of executives did not believe that terrorists would target their companies, and only 53 percent of the respondents indicated that their companies had increased security spending between 2001 and 2002. With the passing of each week without a new attack, the reluctance of companies to invest in security has only grown.

SECURITY MATURITY

If improving homeland security requires that the U.S. government reconsider many of its assumptions and priorities, it also requires a population that acknowledges that security must become everyone's business. The starting point for engaging civil society in this enterprise is a willingness to accept that there will never be a permanent victory in a war on terrorism by overseas military campaigns. Terrorism is simply too cheap, too available, and too tempting to ever be totally eradicated. And U.S. borders will never serve as a last line of defense for a determined terrorist. What is required is that everyday citizens develop both the maturity to live with the risk of future attacks and the willingness to invest in reasonable measures to mitigate that risk.

This is not a defeatist position. Improving the United States' protections and its resilience to withstand acts of catastrophic terrorism has both tactical value in preventing these attacks and strategic value in deterring them in the first place. Radical jihadist groups do not have unlimited resources. When they strike they want to be reasonably confident that they will be successful. They also want to inflict real damage that will generate political pressure to adopt draconian measures in response to a traumatized public.

Today's terrorist masterminds know that the main benefit of attacks on critical infrastructure is not the immediate damage they inflict, but the collateral consequences of eroding the public's trust in services on which it depends. Certainly this lesson has not been lost on Osama bin Laden, who holds a degree in economics. On October 21, 2001, in an interview with an Al Jazeera reporter, bin Laden remarked that his attacks generated billions of dollars in losses to Wall Street, in the daily income of Americans, in building costs, and to the airline industry. All this damage, he pointed out, was "due to an attack that happened with the success of Allah lasting one hour only."

What if the next terrorist strike were on the American food supply system? The attack itself might kill only a handful of people, but without measures in place to reassure the public that follow-on attacks could be prevented or at least contained, consumers at home and abroad would become distrustful of a sector that accounts for more than ten percent of U.S. GDP. Similarly, a dirty bomb smuggled in a container and set off in a seaport would likely kill only a few unfortunate longshoremen and contaminate several acres of valuable waterfront property. But if there is no credible security system to restore the public's confidence that other containers are safe, mayors and governors throughout the country, as well as the president, will come under withering political pressure to order the shutdown of the intermodal transportation system. Examining cargo in tens of thousands of trucks, trains, and ships to ensure it poses no threat would have devastating economic consequences. When containers stop moving, assembly plants go idle, retail shelves go bare, and workers end up in unemployment lines. A three-week shutdown could well spawn a global recession.