Edwin Dorn: Different kind of war needs different kind of military
The following remarks were made October 19 in Burdine Hall at a meeting of the UT De Tocqueville Society and were reproduced with permission from The Alcalde. They appeared on page 40 of the January/February 2002 edition.
The United States spends more on defense than all of our NATO allies combined and spends many times more than our most likely military adversaries: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North Korea. So while we have seen an instant increase in defense spending in response to the terrorist attack, the issue is probably not, over the long run, a lack of money.
The problem in the Defense Department is the difficulty of switching priorities to address this kind of threat. One reason it is very difficult to switch priorities is personified by Tom Ridge and by the recent creation of the new homeland security organization. (By the way, I hate that term, because "homeland" reminds me of "Vaterland", but I guess there's nothing we can do about it now).
Last spring and summer, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made a number of statements in which he included a pitch for homeland security. I think it is reasonable to surmise that Secretary Rumsfeld expected the Office of Homeland Security to wind up in the Department of Defense. That makes a certain amount of sense for a couple of reasons. First, that's where an initiative to improve homeland security began during the Clinton Administration several years ago. And second, a lot of the infrastructure needed to make it work is lodged in the Defense Department. That would include the National Guard.
Now that homeland security has its own home outside the Defense Department, I think what you will find less interest by Secretary Rumsfeld to increase spending on that issue and considerably less interest on the part of the senior active-duty military. If you are running an air force or an army, your obligation is to get resources for the air force or the army. You are not particularly interested - for obvious bureaucratic reasons, but also for cultural reasons - in diverting resources elsewhere.
Big countries, big armies, and big wars - that's the way the Defense Department is structured. It is not structured, and it is not culturally prepared, to address the kinds of problems we're dealing with now. That's not to say that it is completely unprepared. For example, we have special forces units are sophisticated in terms of the training needed to deal with other cultures.
In the short term, one of the things to watch very closely is whether or not Congress actually authorizes, that is, gives legal sanction to, the Office of Homeland Security. If it does not, then the other agencies don't have a whole lot to worry about, because, however enthusiastic the president may be, the reality is that if you ain't got money, and you ain't got legal sanction, then you ain't got diddly in terms of getting things done over the long term.
The short-term priorities have to do with suppressing terrorism, both in the United States and at its origins. One of the scariest aspects of this is not the possibility that we will become mired and that Afghanistan will become another Vietnam. I'm not even sure it's the possibility that this will come to look like a conflict between the Western world and the Arab world. What I worry about, and what some of the folks at the Defense Department and the CIA are most worried about, is this: What happens if we discover that the Iraqis have stored in an accessible, identifiable place a rather large cache of chemical or biological agents? How would we address that problem? One entirely viable option is to use nuclear weapons, because those are the only weapons that will achieve sufficient heat to guarantee incineration of the agents. That is in my view one of the scary possibilities, and that is one of the things I suspect that our policy makers are hoping they do not find, because that would present a very, very difficult choice. ...
We are or have become a rather smug people. There are very few places you can go in the world where you cannot find a Nike swoosh or a Coca Cola label or some article of clothing that smacks of American economics and culture. We like seeing those symbols of American culture when we travel in foreign lands. We actually began to like the idea that Coca Cola and Nike and other symbols of American economic power were our ambassadors of good will - that they represented the best that we had to offer. Over the coming months and years, however, we'll begin to question that smug attitude. Do we have more in terms of culture and values to offer than can be captured in the logo of a product? And if so, how do we get that across? Is this merely a matter of spending a few hundred million more dollars on Voice of America? Is it merely a matter of spending more money on international relief agencies? It certainly is not going to be a matter of air-dropping peanut butter onto Afghan peasants from 30,000 feet.
The tension we're confronting, and I think that we all feel it, is that on the one hand we are being told that we are engaged in a huge conflict - that we have been the victims of an atrocity, that we are at war, and that, by damn, we're going to win it. But meanwhile, don't put away your Nordstrom card. In fact, find your nearest shopping center and do what you can for your country.
It's an interesting question of how long the American public can deal with that tension between the idea of emergency and the idea of needing to shop until you drop.
