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).

As long as catastrophic terrorism is assured of generating a huge bang for the buck, current and future U.S. adversaries will make it the first arrow they reach for in attacking the country. Their confidence in their ability to inflict real damage on the world's sole superpower will be directly proportional to the unwillingness of private and public leaders to acknowledge the risk of market failures associated with excessive reliance on unprotected networks that are sophisticated, concentrated, and interdependent. Given the futility of taking on U.S. military forces directly, attacking these networks is not irrational. In warfare, combatants always seek to exploit their adversary's weaknesses.

If terrorist attacks were likely to be detected, intercepted, contained, and managed without doing any measurable damage to the American way of life or quality of life, however, their value as a means of warfare would be depreciated. Since such acts violate widely accepted norms, they will almost certainly invite not just American, but also international, retribution. Most adversaries would probably judge this too high a price to pay if striking civilian targets holds out little chance of causing the desired mass disruption.

A focus on homeland security measures can also improve the effectiveness of more conventional counterterrorism measures. By bolstering the security of critical networks in advance of possible attacks, adversaries must put together more complex operations to target them successfully. The resultant need for terrorists to raise more money, recruit expertise, and lengthen planning cycles and rehearsals would be a boon for intelligence services and law enforcement officials. This is because such pre-execution activities elevate the opportunities for infiltration and raise the odds that terrorist groups will attract attention.

There is an added bit of good news that comes from placing greater emphasis on homeland security. The most effective measures for protecting potential targets or making them more resilient in the face of successful attacks almost always have derivative benefits for other public and private goods. For instance, bolstering the tools to detect and intercept terrorists will enhance the means that authorities have to combat criminal acts such as narcotics trafficking, migrant smuggling, cargo theft, and violations of export controls. Diseases such as SARS, AIDS, West Nile, foot-and-mouth, and mad cow have highlighted the challenges of managing deadly pathogens in a shrinking world. Public health investments to deal with biological agents or attacks on food and water supplies will provide U.S. authorities with more effective tools to manage these global diseases. Measures adopted to protect infrastructure make it more resilient not only to terrorist attacks, but also to acts of God or human and mechanical error. They also invariably reinforce U.S. values that are respected around the world, whereas reliance on aggressive military measures invariably puts those values at risk.

How much security is enough? For the foreseeable future, the threshold for success is when the American people can conclude that a future attack on U.S. soil will be an exceptional event that does not require wholesale changes in how they go about their lives. This means that they should be confident that there are adequate measures in place to confront the danger.

In other words, homeland security should strive to achieve what the aviation industry has done with safety. What sustains air travel despite the periodic horror of airplanes falling out of the sky is the extent to which the industry's long-standing and ongoing investments have convinced the public that it is safe to fly. Public confidence can never be taken for granted after a major jet crash, but private and public aviation officials start from a credible foundation built upon a cooperative effort to incorporate safety into every part of the industry. Every time passengers board a plane, they receive instructions from flight attendants on how to fasten their seatbelts and don oxygen masks -- gentle reminders of the paramount importance that the industry assigns to safety. In the immediate aftermath of airline disasters, the public is reassured by the fact that the lessons learned are quickly compiled and released and that the government and the industry seem willing to take whatever corrective actions are required.

Ongoing and credible efforts to confront risk are essential to the viability of any complex modern enterprise. Aviation safety provides helpful reference points for how to pursue security without turning the United States into a national gated community. First, it demonstrates that Americans do not expect their lives to be risk-free; they just rightfully expect that reasonable measures be in place to manage that risk. Second, managing risk works best if safeguards are integrated as an organic part of a sector's environment and if they are dynamic in adapting to changes in that environment. Third, government plays an essential role in providing incentives and disincentives for people and industry to meet minimum standards. Bluntly stated, security will not happen by itself.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

Washington's hands-off approach to critical infrastructure protection has stemmed not only from an excessive and unmerited faith in U.S. military, intelligence, and law enforcement capabilities. At the heart of the problem is also its misplaced faith in the market. The invisible hand of the free market simply will not provide sufficient economic incentives for private companies to protect from acts of terrorism the global networks that they largely own and operate. This is because their executives worry that such investments would place them at a competitive disadvantage.