There seems to be a lot of monkey business going on with the reflections here recently and many of them deal with security and international defense. How and why, I'm not certain but I feel obligated to follow the march onto my turf. The reflection on RISK itself will be primarily answered in my substantive blog post for this week so instead how about a brief essay on security?
"American[s] [tend to] militarize counterterrorism, to think of a metaphorical "war on terror" as primarily a literal shooting war, and to respond to an international terrorist threat that knows no territorial boundaries by capturing, bombing, or stabilizing particular pieces of territory."
"Americans expect perfection in counterterrorism, along with the partisanship that causes political opponents to pounce enthusiastically on any failure, regardless of its causes or how much it was or was not avoidable. So there is a strong impetus not only to do whatever possible to avoid another Yemen-originated attack, but also to be perceived to be doing that."
-Paul Pillar, CIA Officer(ret.), Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University
"In a country with millions of people and cars going everywhere, the enemy is going to get a car bomb out there once in a while."
-General James Mattis, Commanding Officer, United States Central Command
There is a curious bit of thinking in the United States political discourse that security needs to be perfect. That not only is perfect security attainable, if at the cost of some elements of legal and civil society, it would be treasonous not to pursue such at all costs. The general thinking appears to be that if there is an attack, it was preventable and it was a failure on the part of the government that needs to be solved. And in the traditional American way, the "solution" is to throw more money at the problem and to expand the power and size of the relevant governmental institutions. The idea that we were one successfully exploded crotch away from a major political crisis should be cause for great concern.
Now, before we should go any further, I suppose we should address the question that my lede begged: Is perfect security possible, and if so, at what cost?
Speaking theoretically, perfect security is possible; just as going to Pluto is possible or making a bad episode of House is theoretically possible. But the uniting characteristic is that all of these are highly improbable or come to an unacceptably high cost. For instance, in the latest publication of Inspire, the occasional publication from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Yahya Ibrahim, a presumed nom de guerre, urged would be terrorists to "keep clean" and avoid traveling to safe havens in Yemen and Pakistan to avoid drawing law enforcement attention. Also suggested was to avoid internet Jihadi sites in favor of getting propaganda from organizations like SITE Intelligence or Middle East Media Reports Initiative (MEMRI). The specific acts advocated are low tech, low casualty but high impact: shooting up a DC area restaurant or welding lawn mower blades to a car to create the "Ultimate Mowing Machine".
This would seem to be advocating when counter-terrorism researcher Marc Sageman wrote about in his book Leaderless Jihad: decentralized, low casualty but frequent terrorist attacks. This emphasizes the terrorists being "clean" and avoiding actions that would raise red flags. The easiest and most promising places to intercept terrorists is when they're traveling abroad to places like Pakistan or Yemen. If someone can be radicalized and be driven to kill from reading reports from MEMRI and still living in DC, what's to prevent him from taking a lawfully purchased firearm and unloading in a DC deli? To prevent that would take such an unbelievable intrusion into personal privacy and liberty that would be unconscionable in America. Simply allowing more intrusion into our daily lives and giving the government more power doesn't keep us safer -- one only needs to look at authoritarian states that suffer from terrorism on a routine basis.
al-Qaeda once had dreams of destroying whole cities and killing thousands, so what explains their current fixation on low impact and unintentionally hilarious tactics like "the Ultimate Mowing Machine" or instructions like "How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom?" There are many reasons, such as the increasing pressure on their safe havens that disrupt their ability to plan and carry out attacks and the stronger and better domestic security in the US. But there is a larger issues, a more fundamental shift of strategy from large, expeditionary attacks in favor of smaller, more numerous locally planned attacks. One only needs to look at the most recent European plot to see this in action. The idea has never been to harm American buildings to necessarily to kill Americans but to use these as a means to force political change in US policy.
The idea is to take advantage of our aforementioned belief in perfect security and political climate. Terrorists know that America's military might is formidable and that our economic might is unrivaled -- there's no way they can change that or do any lasting harm. Even if a nuclear device was detonated in Manhattan tomorrow, the United States would not be destroyed. The biggest danger is our reaction to an attack. Our willingness to sacrifice liberty for security or our willingness to blame public figures and demand resignations. That would cause far more damage to America that some guy welding steak knives to his SUV and chasing down people on the street.
America needs to decide how it wants to fight terrorism, and the choice is essentially between two options that we currently employ to varying degrees: Is terrorism a matter for law enforcement and civilian intelligence agencies? Or is terrorism a matter for the military and a paramilitary intelligence agency? Is terrorism a matter for Federal Court or for Military Tribunals? We currently use a combination of both of these methods, is that sustainable? In 9 years of fighting terrorism with the military, we're no safer, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, lost thousands of soldiers and killed thousands upon thousands of civilians.
Are we willing to accept that every so often a terrorist will succeed and many will die? Are we willing to pay for our individual liberty in blood?
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