Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom Foreword (by The Honorable Christopher Cox) Download PDF

Everyone knows the tragic story. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda transformed passenger airlines into missiles, targeting our nation’s financial, political, and military centers, but also intending to reduce the American people’s confidence in their government and in their own commitment to freedom at home and abroad. Nineteen hijackers attacked icons of America’s public and private sectors, and inflicted a catastrophic loss of innocent human life.

The terrorists developed a network across 60 countries to attack a U.S. government that was not networked. They knew more about our world than we did about theirs. As the 9/11 Commission made clear, they defeated America’s intelligence system—both our advanced technical collection capabilities and our worldwide human resources. Our elaborate immigration processes and our layered security systems—all of which should have defeated them—barely slowed them down.

There is no longer any doubt that America has a new mortal enemy. This enemy has no fixed address, but has global access to information, finance, and weapons. Defeating this enemy will require a new U.S. counterterrorism strategy— one that coordinates our military, diplomatic, and intelligence resources through better intelligence, more integrated analysis, greater interagency interoperability and collaboration, and broader application of existing and new technologies. The goals of this new strategy are to stop terrorists before they can strike, to frustrate their attacks by hardening our critical infrastructure, and to be prepared to respond and recover if another attack is successful in spite of these efforts.

The long-term threat posed by international terrorists is alarming, because eventually they will have access to weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Yet this is hardly the first time the United States has faced a strategic threat from an adversary with WMD. In the Cold War, as James Carafano and Paul Rosenzweig remind us, dealing with the Soviet Union required a comprehensive strategy including explicit military, diplomatic, and intelligence elements. The U.S. government was structured to win that long war—and did so. Americans, confronted with the threat of nuclear annihilation, were forced to define and defend their values as a free people—and did so. This Cold War experience, despite the many differences between the twentieth century Soviet threat and the twentyfirst century terrorist threat, has valuable lessons for us. We are the same free people, and our challenge is to preserve our democratic way of life.

Our national, state, and local governments have made dramatic changes since 9/11. The private sector, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical professionals, and public works employees have all emerged as new stakeholders in U.S. national security.

Nine days after the terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush created a new White House Office of Homeland Security. On March 1, 2003, Secretary Tom Ridge took the helm at the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the executive branch since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. Congress passed the USA Patriot Act to give intelligence and law enforcement better tools to combat terrorism. In January 2003, Congress established the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, which I chaired, to oversee what was already the fourth-largest Cabinet department. In the 109th Congress, that committee has been made permanent, and I will be proud to serve as its chairman.

Our nation has used its military force to launch a strong offensive against terrorists. President Bush, applying the lessons of past just wars, pursued al- Qaeda, its leaders, and its enablers throughout the world. This aggressive hunt for terrorists abroad destroyed the al-Qaeda infrastructure in Afghanistan and drove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. The message to terrorists is now clear: If you attack America, we will come after you—wherever you run and however long it takes.

Despite setbacks suffered at the hands of America and her allies, terrorists continue to threaten us, and will do so for the foreseeable future. They expect that our nation will become paralyzed by fear. They seek to force upon us a defensive response that will weaken our economy, erode our freedoms, and force an American retreat from global leadership.

The terrorist threat is dynamic and continuously adapts to our countermeasures. Therefore, we must constantly adjust and strengthen our security. In this long-term struggle to stay ahead of the enemy, we must focus on the intersection of our greatest vulnerabilities and the terrorists’ most serious threats. At the same time, we must live within spending boundaries that are sustainable, protect our civil liberties, and give priority to security measures that also contribute to our productivity and our economic growth. Dr. Carafano and Mr. Rosenzweig help to stimulate discussion on the correct issues to get us to that point.

Serious work remains. Early in 2004, for example, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a series of bottom-line goals as part of its strategic plan. The House Homeland Security Committee pointed out that a strategic plan must go beyond mere aspirations: It must include clear-cut objectives (supported by specific steps toward their attainment) to be completed within unambiguous timelines. The President himself has, over the past two years, issued a definitive homeland security strategy, several homeland security policy directives, and a number of sector-specific strategic documents. It will fall to the Department of Homeland Security to realize the objectives identified in each of these, even as it completes the merger process from which it was created.

Although we should applaud the Department of Homeland Security for its significant accomplishments, we must also focus on improving its functionality. The Department of Homeland Security must integrate and serve all the homeland stakeholders—including state, local, and private entities—and do so in a manner that does not repeat the decades of bureaucratic torpor experienced by the Department of Defense in the decades following its creation.

In the long war against terrorism to which we are now committed, federal, state, and local officials must be equal players. The notion that the federal government is the source of everything worth knowing is no longer just an annoyance— it is a dangerous fallacy, which, if indulged, will kill us. Federal agencies must learn to listen. State and local governments, as well as private businesses, are sources of key information. They are also, now, among the intelligence community’s key customers. Serving them well is largely the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. It is not an act of largesse for the federal government to share threat-related information with state and local officials: It is essential—and the Homeland Security Act requires it.

The 9/11 attacks showed that the failure to share information among federal, state, local, and private sector entities is an exploitable vulnerability. That information gap enabled al-Qaeda terrorists to defeat our law enforcement, intelligence, immigration, and airport security systems at multiple levels. It was a tragic irony that valuable information that our tax dollars had procured—often at considerable risk to those who obtained it—was not analyzed comprehensively in context and shared quickly with those who needed it to help protect us.

Eliminating this vulnerability requires that we discard the common assumption that the most important information is classified. In this new world, it may not be. The long-haul trucker in the small hours of the night may be the only one who sees the critical, anomalous act that indicates a possible terrorist attack. That information may be the critical, missing piece of a complex puzzle. Likewise, sharing classified information with state and local officials can no longer be considered some grand gesture of noblesse oblige by a privileged coterie of federal agencies. State and local law enforcement and first responders need access to classified information in order to protect us. They must have it—period. Mere presidential speeches or congressional mandates, however, will not be enough to ensure that this kind of information sharing actually occurs. Dr. Carafano recognizes that rigorous, focused, and relentless congressional attention will also be necessary. He has repeatedly stressed the importance of a homeland security committee with primary legislative and oversight jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. This is necessary, he realized, if both the department and the broader homeland security mission are to succeed.

The diffusion of legislative jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security in its early days weakened the ability of Congress to perform these needed oversight and law-making functions. Again and again, Dr. Carafano encouraged the congressional leadership to establish a permanent Committee on Homeland Security. When the Speaker of the House decided to do exactly that in late 2004, Dr. Carafano stressed the need to give the new committee the legislative jurisdiction necessary to do its job. This meant, he said, that legislative authority and responsibility should not be diffused among many committees primarily concerned with other matters. Here again, he hit the nail precisely on the head.

“Homeland security” describes a myriad set of elements at the intersection of domestic and foreign policy, law enforcement and intelligence, government and the economy that supports it, and professional specialties ranging from warfighting to medicine to computer technology to counterproliferation. These many ingredients of our national response to terrorism must be integrated explicitly in our consideration of a great many public and private policy questions that previously have been deemed unrelated. Therefore, for example, immigration can no longer be a question only of our social, economic, and foreign policies—it is now a component of our national security. We must now recognize that the failure to enforce our immigration laws will, over time, have a growing impact on the security of the American people in their own territory. However, this is not to say that homeland security lacks discrete boundaries. For our nation to become adept in this wide-ranging new discipline means not that one Cabinet department or congressional committee will henceforth be responsible for all aspects of our domestic, foreign, and security policies, but rather that there needs to be a deliberate focus on the many connected elements that cut across traditional boundaries.

The twenty-first century tool that will prove most useful in transcending these boundaries—real and imagined—is technology. Terrorists who prey upon America are using modern technology to further their efforts against us. Yet our society—the private sector and our government—has an insurmountable technological lead over any terrorists, if only we will exploit it. The information technology revolution that has transformed our economy has also given us the tools, infrastructure, and commercial capabilities to maintain a constant advantage over our terrorist enemies. The consequences of not exploiting that advantage were seen on 9/11. It is almost certain that if then-available information technology tools had been employed, some of the terrorists would have been detained, and some of the plots would possibly have been foiled.

Technology has revolutionized the economy with dramatic productivity improvements. That same technology (e.g., wireless data networks, encryption, powerful miniature computer chips, the global Internet, data mining software, and biosensors) can likewise make our counterterrorism efforts vastly more productive. Nor must our investment in homeland security technology, apart from the protection it provides, be nothing but dead weight economic loss. It is possible that, just as technology investments during the Cold War gave birth to the economic and technological boom of the 1990s, the investments we make today might yield significant economic, health, and public safety benefits.

Indeed, we can ensure this result if we are judicious in our homeland security technology investments. The threshold test for deploying any new security technology at airports and seaports, in the financial sector, in commerce, in agriculture, or in our critical infrastructure should be whether it can also make a positive contribution to the performance of those areas of our economy. The airport security measures hastily contrived after 9/11 clearly fail this test. Yet more recent security investments in electric power infrastructure offer improved reliability, as well as greater protection from terrorist attack. Likewise, technology tools now being employed to track overseas shipments throughout the supply chain will also benefit customers who need real-time data about the location and condition of their cargo. In the future, well-designed security technology will pay for itself by improving the efficiency of the productive systems of which it is a part.

Perhaps the most important point that the authors make is that increased security must not come at the expense of our civil liberties. We must use new technologies and improved information sharing not as a trade off for civil liberties, but to protect those liberties that are the foundation of American life. Congress and the President recognized this imperative when they created the Department of Homeland Security, putting the protection of Americans’ civil rights at the very core of the department’s mission. The Homeland Security Act establishes within the top of department’s management the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties—a unique position within the federal government. No other federal department has a senior official who is appointed by the President, answers directly to the Secretary, and focuses solely on shaping policy in ways that enhance civil liberties.

Because the war against terrorism has no immediately foreseeable end, neither unsustainable spending in its support nor intrusions on our civil rights can be justified as emergency measures that will eventually lapse. Americans will have to live with the policies we adopt to wage the war on terrorism for many years. Sacrificing our economy or our liberties in the name of homeland security, therefore, can only be self-defeating. Indeed, to do this would be to concede gratuitously to Osama bin Laden what he is seeking to accomplish by way of violence. His stated aim is to destroy our economy and our freedom. Defeating him means securing both.

Finally, Dr. Carafano and Mr. Rosenzweig argue that communicating the language of freedom across the globe is an essential aspect of a homeland security strategy, one that is necessarily reliant on support within the international community, and especially on support within the Islamic world. This point is of vital importance because modern-day terrorism is not an accidental occurrence: It is bred. Free people must challenge those who see the deliberate murder of innocents as the preferred instrument of “God’s will” on earth.

America today is not engaged in a clash of civilizations. Rather, we are challenged as never before to extend the dialogue of freedom across a rapidly shrinking world in which technology is providing small bands of terrorists with destructive capabilities previously restricted to nation-states. The true conflict is between the billions of people who together comprise civilization, and the relatively tiny, but lethal, portion of humanity that would annihilate us all. Civilization will win, if only we will marshal our superior energies and resources. In that case, our victory is assured because we are more numerous; because we have superior technology, tools, weapons, and information; and most important of all, because we embrace the essential dignity of man, the nobility of the human spirit, and the ideal of liberty—which, unrestrained, is the most powerful force on earth.

The Honorable Christopher Cox

Chairman,

Committee on Homeland Security

U.S. House of Representatives