Needed: A Homeland Security Strategy
by Edwin Dorn
September 27, 2002
President Bush's proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before the President stated what most of us already knew: the war against domestic terrorism needs the legal mandate and budgetary authority of a statutory agency.
Just as inevitable as the President's proposal is the subsequent debate over the agency's functions and components. Creating any new agency is difficult, but the proposed Department of Homeland Security is the largest, most complex reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Congressional hearings on the President's proposal will feature the usual amounts of bickering and grandstanding, but in the end, the agency that Congress creates will be better than the rough sketch that emerged from the hurried efforts of a small group of White House staffers.
The problem is that, once the new department is established, it will not have a strategy. In theory, strategy precedes organization. In reality, organization usually comes first. That is because organizations are concrete: they consist of people and buildings and line- and block-charts. Strategy, on the other hand, is abstract. Strategy poses hard intellectual challenges and forces us to make tough political choices.
At its core, a homeland security strategy involves the allocation of resources against a spectrum of risks. In this case, "risk" is defined as the relationship between the probability of a particular incident and the consequence of that incident. This is easy to envision as a two-dimensional graph. On one axis is a scale of probabilities, from low to high. On the other axis is a scale of consequences, from low to high.
Generally, we think of risk as being distributed in such a way that the things that are most likely to occur have relatively low consequence, while the things that have a low probability of occurring have very high consequence. For example, a well-planned attack such as 9/11 produces enormous destruction, but the probability of such an incident is very low. Terrorist acts such as car bombings could happen frequently, but the amount of carnage from each incident would be relatively small.
The calculation of risk can be complicated. Consider the example of a biological agent injected into the food supply. That could cause great damage -- not so much in the numbers of deaths, but in the loss of public confidence in our food supply and in the consequent economic losses. The good news here is that such an incident has a low probability of occurrence. But here's a twist: hundreds of people die in the United States every year from food poisoning. That's hundreds of opportunities for terrorists to start panic-inducing rumors. How do we calculate that?
Even after we have figured out what spectrum of risks looks like, we still need to confront the problem of how to allocate resources. How much effort, translated into people and technology, should we invest in protecting our food supply, as opposed to protecting office buildings, power stations and commuter trains? Another key issue is, who should pay the bill? Which aspects of homeland security should be paid for primarily by the federal government, which by state and local governments, which by private businesses?
These questions are too important to be left to policy experts and political leaders. The American public must be involved in figuring out the strategy, because both our security and our liberty are at issue.
For example, many of us have concerns about current airline security procedures. Some of us may view them as not good enough, while some of us may view them as overly intrusive. The real question is, do we as a people believe it makes sense to spend billions of dollars to improve airline security, but to spend virtually nothing to improve the security of trains, buses and ferries?
Further, how much individual privacy and liberty are we willing to risk in order to improve security? Do we as a people believe it is reasonable to imprison somebody without charging him with a crime and without letting him see a lawyer? These are important and difficult questions.
So far, the federal government has fulfilled its obligation to provide for the common defense. However, we the people have not fulfilled our obligation to provide informed consent. Polls show widespread public support for the war against terrorism; but that support is based more on patriotic reflex than on serious reflection.
Terrorism is not new on these shores: southern blacks lived in its hideous shadow for generations. But today's threat is unprecedented in its magnitude, and may call for unprecedented sacrifices by the American people. This is a war in which, at any time, any one of us could become a casualty or a combatant. This is why the homeland security strategy is too important to be left to experts and politicians. We the people need to decide which kind of protection we want and how much we're willing to pay for it.
