Fighting the Next War
The case for a new national security act
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| The Heads of State |
In 1947, after three years of debate and considerable controversy, Congress passed the National Security Act, which President Truman signed on July 26. That law unified the separate Army and Navy Departments, including the Marine Corps, into what became the Department of Defense; created the new United States Air Force from the previous Army Air Forces; and established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Along with the various memoranda and directives that implemented its intentions, the act became the guidepost for the conduct of the Cold War.
The Cold War, of course, ended two decades ago. It is time to consider a new national security act—one more appropriate for a multipolar world. The twin revolutions of globalization and information are remaking economic and political structures. New threats to security—failing states, the rise of stateless nations, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism, climate degradation, mass South-North migrations, global pandemics, fragile energy networks, and resource competition, to name a few—generally don’t lend themselves to military solution. No one nation, not even the United States, can deal with them alone.
Warfare itself is changing. Organized violence by nation-states, though still plausible, is diminishing. Instead, unconventional conflicts involving stateless nations, tribes, clans, gangs, ethnic nationalists, and religious fundamentalists are clearly rising. Sooner or later some lethal combination of drug cartels, arms syndicates, international mafias, and terrorist groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction.
All of these factors require a more sophisticated understanding of security than that which defined the Cold War. Neither al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Taliban in Pakistan, the mafia in Russia, nor the drug cartels in Mexico fear our strategic weapons, large Army divisions, or carrier task groups. We need a new statutory basis to do for 21st-century security what the National Security Act of 1947 did: lay the legal groundwork for defensive policies that address the realities of a new era.
Laws are not panaceas. But simply drafting and debating a National Security Act of 2011 would offer the therapy of reflection. Where are we now? Where are we trying to go? Who can help us get there? Whom should we realistically be afraid of? How might they threaten us? What are the limits of military power? Most of all: what can we do now to reduce threats in the future?
Underlying these questions are foundational issues like civilian-military relations, chains of command, and decision-making authority, especially in crises such as 9/11—issues that should be subject to greater public debate.
In November 1993, I wrote to President Bill Clinton suggesting that he stood roughly where Harry Truman did in 1945 and that, using the Truman model, he might ask a small group of advisers to consider a new national security strategy and, if necessary, a new national security act for the post–Cold War era. Not until 1998 did the president join then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in creating the Commission on National Security, and even then we were not given the mandate to consider a new law.
But such a reform is needed now more than ever. The 20th-century equation of national interest with national security produced two results: America’s role in the world was almost totally defined in military and security terms; and the vast defense structure created in 1947 became the overwhelmingly dominant force in defining our national priorities.
This has meant that the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the ever-growing intelligence community all took their share of national resources, and only then was the remainder parceled out for domestic investment needs. If we wanted large-scale investment in education, a national highway system, and national research laboratories, we lumped them all under “national security.”
Even more troubling were the political implications of the security state. If one ideology or party defined itself as the “security” party, it could dominate national power. Whoever dominated national security dominated the state.
The security state also required a constant threat. The Soviet Union served that purpose for 45 years. Now al-Qaeda has to suffice. A new national security apparatus should assume a less mythical and far more manageable profile, and it should no longer focus on the search for monsters to destroy.
In 1947, President Truman established an army of industry. In the 21st century, we must establish an army of intelligence, information, and usable technology. Thomas Jefferson wrote that asking the nation to rely on the laws and policies of one generation for the changing needs of the next was the same as asking a grown man to wear the coat he wore as a boy. The 21st-century United States must lay aside the coat worn by its 20th-century self.
--- Gary Hart, who represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate from 1975 to 1987, is a professor at the University of Denver. He was co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century.
The War Machine
Atomic War or Peace (November 1947)
By Albert Einstein
"I am not saying that the United States should not manufacture and stockpile the bomb," the great physicist wrote just two years after Hiroshima. "But deterrence should be the only purpose of the stockpile of bombs."
An Open Letter to President Kennedy (January 1961)
By William R. Matthews
In a plea to America's newly elected leader, the author insisted that abating the expensive arms race would free up funds to make the whole world more productive.
The Steep Bill for Vietnam (September 1972)
By David Halberstam
Lyndon Johnson's administration intentionally lowballed the cost of the war, hoping to keep the details as secret as possible. In response, the American economy went haywire.
The Spend-Up (July 1986)
By James Fallows
When the Reagan Administration came to Washington, it promised to repair a "decade of neglect" in military spending. Instead, Fallows argued, our military arsenal became more expensive but not larger.
The Rush to Deploy SDI (April 1988)
By Charles E. Bennett
The author argued that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was a misguided effort--defying scientific opinion, bypassing internal Pentagon review procedures, stalling Congress, and pressuring the military.
The American Way of War (June 2002)
By Michael Kelly
With its 12 nuclear aircraft-carrier battle groups, its stealth bombers, its cruise missiles, and its generations-ahead fleet of warplanes, wrote Kelly, the United States stands alone in the world and in history.
Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane (June 2002)
By James Fallows
How Lockheed Martin beat Boeing for the biggest military contract in history--and how that one contract could change the way the military builds and pays for its weapons.
America's Elegant Decline (November 2007)
By Robert D. Kaplan
Our Navy is stretched thin, Kaplan wrote, and the way we manage dwindling naval resources will go a long way toward determining our future standing in the world.
The Last Ace (March 2009)
By Mark Bowden
The U.S. government, wrote Bowden, faces a difficult decision: Should it stock the Air Force with Boeing's expensive, cutting-edge F‑22? Or should it plunge America back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of ace pilots?
- Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He hosts "InstaVision" on PJTV.com.
The Unexpected Return of 'Duck and Cover'
Sixty years ago, in 1951, Ray Maurer and Anthony Rizzo produced a film for the federal government's Civil Defense agency in response to Soviet nuclear tests. Featuring an animated turtle named Bert and real-life schoolchildren from New York, the film, Duck and Cover, became an icon of the Cold War, seen by many as evidence of the absurdity of the government's response to the nuclear threat. Against the threat of a nuclear attack, how much good would diving under a desk really do? Originally aimed at teaching children how to respond to a surprise nuclear strike, by the 1980s Duck and Cover was a piece of 1950s kitsch, mocked in such anti-nuclear films as The Atomic Cafe.
But now "duck and cover" is back, not as kitsch but once again as serious advice from the federal government. Faced with growing concerns about a nuclear attack on one or more major cities -- this time from terrorists, or bombs smuggled instead of dropped by countries like Iran or North Korea -- authorities are once again looking to educate citizens about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. And that advice sounds a lot like what they were saying in my grandfather's day: Duck and cover.
As outlined in a lengthy planning document developed by a federal interagency committee led by the Executive Office of the President and released last summer, national and especially local authorities should be making plans to educate people to take cover and shelter in place after a nuclear detonation.
So was the advice crazy back then, and is it crazy now? The answers are "probably not," and "no." The snark, though understandable, is misplaced.
Even short-term sheltering (a day or two) before attempting to evacuate the area will dramatically increase the number of survivors. The difficulty, as the planning document puts it, will be overcoming people's "natural instincts to run from danger and reunify with family members." Overcoming those instincts will require preparation and education on the part of public health and school authorities.
When Americans think about nuclear war, we tend to think about the apocalyptic scene at the end of Dr. Strangelove, a war involving thousands of megaton-yield hydrogen bombs. (A megaton is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT, or about 60-70 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which had an explosive power of around 15 kilotons, the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT). But in 1951, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet tested a hydrogen bomb, and the duck-and-cover era authorities were basically preparing people for a rerun of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with us on the receiving end of relatively small numbers of (relatively) small nuclear weapons. "Duck and cover" advice is particularly effective there.
An atomic explosion can blind you, burn you, crush you with explosive power, or poison you with radiation. The "duck and cover" advice, based in no small part on the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, was designed to do what could be done to minimize that.
When an atomic bomb explodes, several things happen in short order. First is a flood of "prompt" radiation created by the nuclear fission that produces the explosion. The good news -- if you can call it that -- is that if you are close enough to get a lethal dose of prompt radiation, you're close enough that you're likely to be killed by other bomb effects before it becomes an issue. Next comes the "flash," a brilliant pulse of light created as the air around the bomb is heated to millions of degrees; this starts out as ultraviolet, falls quickly into the visible light range, and then into the heat-ray infrared range within a few seconds. The flash can blind, or burn exposed skin, and start fires. Next comes the blast, as the superheated air expands outward, initially at supersonic speeds. The blast is dangerous on its own, and also because it crushes buildings and creates clouds of flying glass and debris.
Given that light travels almost instantaneously, for everyone outside the immediate vicinity of the bomb the flash will arrive before the blast. Furthermore, the fire-setting infrared part of the flash peaks a few seconds later than the initial burst of light. So those who see a brilliant flash of light -- and know what it means -- have a few seconds to get under some sort of cover to protect themselves from what comes next.
After these "prompt effects" of initial radiation, flash, and blast have passed, there is an additional hazard. A nuclear explosion sucks air, dust -- and, if it's close to the ground, vaporized soil, buildings, etc. -- up into the fireball, where some components are transformed into radioactive isotopes that then fall out of the cloud and back to earth over the next few hours, hence the term "fallout." The radiation from fallout can be severe -- the bigger the bomb, and the closer it is the the ground, the worse the fallout, generally -- but it decays according to a straightforward rule, called the 7/10 rule: Seven hours after the explosion, the radiation is 1/10 the original level; seven times that interval (49 hours, or two days) it is 1/10 of that, or 1/100 the original, and seven times that interval (roughly two weeks) it is 1/1000 the original intensity. Because it is dust, fallout travels with the wind.
A terrorist bomb is likely to be relatively small -- possibly only a fraction of the Hiroshima bomb's explosive power -- and likely exploded at ground level. This means that the area totally destroyed by the explosion is likely to be much smaller than the area exposed to lesser damage or to fallout radiation (this nuclear weapons effects calculator from the Federation of Atomic Scientists will let you see the effect of different sized bombs burst at different heights). Because of this, Homeland Security people in the Obama Administration have been encouraging a duck-and-cover approach, followed by advice to "shelter in place" against fallout rather than trying to evacuate the area.
A terrorist atomic bomb might be small by Dr. Strangelove standards, but by any other standard its effects would be catastrophic. An area composed of dozens of city blocks would be essentially destroyed; a larger area surrounding it would be heavily damaged and filled with injured people; and an even larger area surrounding that one would be somewhat damaged, with roads blocked, powerlines down, and widespread confusion.
Those few survivors -- mostly badly injured, unless they happened to be inside a bank vault at the time, or something -- in the central area are likely pretty much on their own. The chance that emergency services can get into the zone and find them before the fallout starts to settle is virtually zero. Those in the middle zone may get some help, but not right away. Those in the outer zone, however, will be tempted to flee, and that's what the authorities want to discourage.
The radiation from fallout is blocked by pretty much anything that has mass. (Here's the government's Citizen Corps guide). If you're in the basement of a typical home, you can expect to receive less than a tenth the radiation you'd receive outdoors. If you're in an interior room halfway up a tall building (fallout is dust, and settles on the ground, or on roofs), or in an underground parking garage, you may receive less than a hundredth the radiation. And you can further reduce the dosage by piling up anything heavy (books, furniture, etc.) overhead and by sealing windows and doors with duct tape and plastic to help keep the radioactive dust out. (The government used to publish pamphlets on how to improvise a fallout shelter in your basement; those will probably come back.)
In the face of a Strangelovian apocalypse, this degree of protection might only have produced a slower death, but for those facing a terrorist bomb such protection is likely to be adequate, and much safer than, say, being stuck in traffic on the Beltway when the fallout begins to settle. Also, people sheltering in place won't tie up roads, making it easier for emergency services to get where they're needed. So the Obama Administration wants to encourage people to shelter in place rather than head for the hills in the event of a nuclear attack. Even sheltering for a few hours, or a couple of days, lets radiation levels fall dramatically and avoids road tie-ups for later evacuation.
But will people follow that advice? To follow it, they've first got to hear it, and usual sources of information like radio, TV, and the Internet may not be working. (Not only will power likely go out -- because of those downed powerlines -- but one of the other prompt effects of a nuclear explosion is something called Electro-Magnetic Pulse. A nuclear burst at the edge of the atmosphere could fry electronics over hundreds of miles; a ground-level one does less damage, but makes reliance on electronics near the blast site iffy.). So if you want people to know what to do, you have to tell them in advance.
But telling them in advance has its own risks. To some, duck-and-cover may be amusing kitsch, but when I showed the film to my teenage daughter while researching this piece, she found it terrifying. (Welcome to my Cold War childhood). And, as a recent New York Times article noted, the question of how to educate people without panicking them, or creating political backlash, has generated considerable discussion within the Obama Administration. (One message, using an attack on Las Vegas as an example, was torpedoed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, who thought it bad publicity for a town already hit hard by the recession.)
It has also generated some criticism from those who remember how much flak Bush Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge got for similar proposals -- right down to the duct tape and plastic sheeting -- when the Department of Homeland Security was new. It's understandable that people might snark about that, but physics is no respecter of political differences. That the Obama Administration is pursuing a policy driven by science, rather than by politics, is something that should be praised, not criticized.
Of course, one question not driven -- directly, anyway -- by science is the question of how likely a nuclear attack might be. On that subject, the Obama Administration, presumably, has better intelligence than I do. But I note that the feds seem to be highly interested in an experimental new drug for treating radiation sickness. That's not encouraging.
If the likelihood of a nuclear attack is hard to judge, what's beyond dispute is that we are in many ways much less prepared to deal with one than we used to be. Fallout shelters in public buildings are no longer marked and stocked, and public knowledge about nuclear weapons and their effects isn't what it was during the Cold War era. In the course of teaching nuclear-related cases in my Administrative Law and National Security Law courses, I've observed that most of my students (military veterans and a few emergency-services types excepted) know next to nothing about A-bomb related things that were common knowledge a couple of decades ago. Replenishing that popular knowledge base seems worthwhile, as long as there are nuclear weapons on the planet.
There's something else worthy of praise in the Obama Administration's approach, something that goes well beyond the terrorist-nukes field. The Times article mentioned above includes this quote from Brian Kamoie of the National Security Council: "We're working hard to involve individuals in the effort so they become part of the team in terms of emergency management."
The feds' estimate is that it will be at least a couple of days before significant outside aid arrives at the scene of a terrorist nuclear attack. But as experience from disasters like Katrina demonstrates, outside aid always takes longer to arrive than you expect. A philosophy of empowering individuals, and encouraging preparedness on the part of ordinary citizens, will pay dividends in the event of all sorts of disasters, whether natural or "man-caused."
Encouraging people to take even modest steps to prepare themselves in advance will undoubtedly save lives, even if the terrorist attack never comes and Washington is, instead, struck by an asteroid, an earthquake, or a hurricane. As we head into a 21st century that appears to be a lot less secure than 1990s prognostications suggested, it's probably best to prepare for the worst.
