Recently in Defense & Nantional Security Category

Thanks to David Henderson for raising an issue that gets far too little attention: the problem isn't so much WHICH government (Democratic or Republican) can protect us but how well equiped government is to protect us in the first place. As we know from economics, and as David Henderson reminds us in this column entitled "Maybe Clarke and Rice Are Both Right," there are limits to central planning. I'm not suggesting that we scrap centrally planned national security, but we should be aware of its limitations and act accordingly. Here's an excerpt in which Henderson refers to Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek:

Central economic planning can't work, explained Hayek, because no small number of people at the top, however brilliant or informed, can aggregate all the trillions of pieces of data needed to plan an economy well. The main information that matters in real time is what Hayek called "knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place" and this information is necessarily decentralized: it exists only fleetingly in the minds of millions of people. Forbid people from acting on their information, argued Hayek, and the information won't be used. That, plus lack of incentives, is why crops rotted while waiting for railway cars and why the wrong sizes and types of steel were produced regularly in the Soviet economy. In a free-market economy, by contrast, people have both the incentive and the ability to use their information. For instance, the shipper who earns his living by using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp steamers is performing a useful function based on special fleeting knowledge not known to others.

Hayek's argument applies whether the good being produced is food, steel, or internal security.

I toured the Tarawa, which is docked in the San Francisco Bay, yesterday and met their impressive CO Jay Bowling. An amazing ship whose primary mission is to deliver US Marines to the theater. It is the first ship after 9/11 to allow public tours. If you are in San Francisco and want a tour of a lifetime, please visit it today--it is docked on the Embarcadero, just north of Pac Bell Park.

If there was ever a clear example of why it's so difficult to innovate in government, it's the example of the Darpa's ill-fated idea for a futures market on terrorism (see WSJ.com - Pentagon Retreats From Terror Futures.) Excerpt:

Republican reaction to the program Tuesday was as fierce as the response from Democrats when they disclosed it at a Monday news conference. Some lawmakers said they had known about it but didn't realize money was at stake. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) ordered that funding for the program be cut off. "I can't disagree more with the approach," said Sen. Pat Roberts (R., Kan.), chairman of an armed-services subcommittee. He said his panel would seek to hold hearings to "fully explore" how the idea came about.

The Pentagon's aim was to help create an alternative way of anticipating events in one of the world's most volatile regions. Middle East specialists would buy and sell futures contracts from self-financed accounts, and defense officials would monitor their trading patterns to glean insights into the likelihood of certain events.

Darpa and the defense department are charged with coming up with innovative ways of providing for our national security. The problems with centrally run, heavily bureaucratic intelligence regimes are almost all we read in the papers these days and yet here is an innovative approach, based on market principles and it is roundly condemned. Why? Certainly not because of any thoughtful critique after careful study of the costs and benefits. (And there may be some reasonable critiques of the system, though thse aren't the ones made by the senators.) No. The problem with this is that it sounds morbid--imagine people profiting from betting on the likelihood of terrorism!--no politician could ever support it on optics alone.

But this clever idea is no more radical--only more straight forward--of things we all to everyday. We all make our judgments about the future--considering small trends and large--and make our bets. Certainly it was the expectation of future attacks, among other factors, that kept markets so weak after 9/11. Much of that fear was misplaced, it turns out, and wouldn't it have been nice to be able to more accurately judge the likelihood of future terrorist attacks?

We all make bets about things we hope won't come to pass. Any of you estate plan? Ever bought life insurance? Medical insurance? Heck, any insurance?

In addition to potentially being a useful source of intelligence on the likelihood of attacks, such a futures market could have economic benefits. If I am in the airline or travel industry (or invest in those industries) I may wish to hedge against a terrorist attack and so find futures a useful index.

The good news is that, while there may have been justification for this being a Darpa project, it can clearly be a privately run service (unless the politicians decide they want more air time in banning this sort of activity.) The private sector will most probably succeed where the government has failed. I can't think of anything more wonderful than competition to our woeful intelligence agencies from the private sector--tapping, as markets will do, the power of dispersed data and complex systems.

It may be politically incorrect to be so straightforward about assessing and betting on the risks we face as a society, but should that be what we are striving for? It may be uncomfortable and perhaps unseemly to bet on tragedy, but the discomfort is cause by the tragedy itself—and denial false comfort.

Coda: I think the fear that terrorists will now have a way to profit from their deeds is overblown. Firstly, they can already do this in a variety of ways—by shorting airline stocks for example. Secondly, if indeed terrorists attempt to profit from terror attacks by buying up (or selling—not sure how the mechanics will work) futures, well then the market will work: that will provide an indicator that a terrorist attempt is more likely. We should be so fortunate for terrorists to signal to the market what their intentions are—and we’d have a paper trail right to the culprits.

Vice President Dick Cheney's address to AEI describes the motivation for war clearly: to ignore the Iraqi threat, in the wake of 9/11, would have "irresponsible in the extreme." Worth reading the entire text or watching the streaming video, but here is an excerpt:

Now the regime of Saddam Hussein is gone forever. And at a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq. The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths of our democracy. But those who do so have an obligation to answer this question: How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?

Last October, the Director of Central Intelligence issued a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's Continuing Programs of Weapons of Mass Destruction. That document contained the consensus judgments of the intelligence community, based upon the best information available about the Iraqi threat. The NIE declared--quote: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of UN Resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." End quote.

Those charged with the security of this nation could not read such an assessment and pretend that it did not exist. Ignoring such information, or trying to wish it away, would be irresponsible in the extreme. And our President did not ignore that information--he faced it. He sought to eliminate the threat by peaceful, diplomatic means and, when all else failed, he acted forcefully to remove the danger. ...

Critics of the liberation of Iraq must also answer another question: what would that country look like today if we had failed to act? If we had not acted, Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be in power. If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation; the prison cells for children would still be filled; the mass graves would still be undiscovered; the terror network would still enjoy the support and protection of the regime; Iraq would still be making payments to the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel; and Saddam Hussein would still control vast wealth to spend on his chemical, biological, and nuclear ambitions.

Thanks to Robert Bartley for providing some useful perspective on the whole uranium issue. Let's be clear: Saddam may have in fact been seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The intelligence community is split on the issue. The administration has acknowledged, however, that the intelligence did not rise to the level needed for this assertion to be included in a state of the union speech, and George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, has taken the blame for this error. No one, not even the French, denies that Saddam Hussein has had nuclear ambitions in the past and no one, not even the French, has given a clear reason why or proof that these ambitions abated. Bush made the assertion that "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option," in the state of the union and nothing in this uranium issue would change the wisdom of that approach. Was this strategy (i.e. not to trust Saddam) the right one? Voters have the right to hold Bush accountable for the results of his strategy--and they should do so in 2004. What those results will be and how people will evaluate them remains to be seen. But trying to make political hay out of the innate haziness of intelligence is counter-productive.

Here is a worthwhile speech given by James R. Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (with an introduction by Congressman Bob Barr) at the Restoration Weekend on November 16, 2002. The entire transcript is worth a read but I'll excerpt the concluding remarks:

I don’t believe this terror war is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle East. Now, that is a tall order. But, it’s not as tall an order as what we have already done. In 1917, Europe was largely monarchies, empires, and autocracies. Today, outside Belarus and Ukraine, it is largely democratic, even including Russia.

These changes that have taken place over the course of the last 85 years are a remarkable achievement. The ones that still have to be undertaken in a part of the world that has historically not had democracy, which has reacted angrily against intrusions from the outside, particularly the Arab Middle East, presents a huge challenge.

But, I would say this. Both to the terrorists and to the pathological predators such as Saddam Hussein and to the autocrats as well, the barbarics, the Saudi royal family. They have to realize that now for the fourth time in 100 years, we’ve been awakened and this country is on the march. We didn’t choose this fight, but we’re in it. And being on the march, there’s only one way we’re going to be able to win it. It’s the way we won World War I fighting for Wilson’s 14 points. The way we won World War II fighting for Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter and the way we won World War III fighting for the noble ideas I think best expressed by President Reagan, but also very importantly at the beginning by President Truman, that this was not a war of us against them. It was not a war of countries. It was a war of freedom against tyranny. We have to convince the people of the Middle East that we are on their side, as we convinced Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on their side.

This will take time. It will be difficult. But I think we need to say to both the terrorists and the dictators and also to the autocrats who from time to time are friendly with us, that we know, we understand we are going to make you nervous.

We want you to be nervous. We want you to realize now for the fourth time in 100 years, this country is on the march and we are on the side of those whom you most fear, your own people.

Did FDR not only know about Pearl Harbor before the attack, but encourage it? The debate wages on at:

There is a popular fantasy among the academics that jihad is nothing more than an "individual struggle for personal moral behavior," a "struggle without arms," and many "deny that jihad has any military meaning whatsoever."

As Daniel Pipes in Commentary writes:

IT IS an intellectual scandal that, since September 11, 2001, scholars at American universities have repeatedly and all but unanimously issued public statements that avoid or whitewash the primary meaning of jihad in Islamic law and Muslim history. It is quite as if historians of medieval Europe were to deny that the word “crusade” ever had martial overtones, instead pointing to such terms as “crusade on hunger” or “crusade against drugs” to demonstrate that the term signifies an effort to improve society.

Consider some statements from the fantasists:

Roxanne Euben of Wellesley College, the author of The Road to Kandahar: A Genealogy of Jihad in Modern Islamist Political Thought, asserts that “For many Muslims, jihad means to resist temptation and become a better person.” John Parcels, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Georgia Southern University, defines jihad as a struggle “over the appetites and your own will.” For Ned Rinalducci, a professor of sociology at Armstrong Atlantic State University, the goals of jihad are: “Internally, to be a good Muslim. Externally, to create a just society.” And Farid Eseck, professor of Islamic studies at Auburn Seminary in New York City, memorably describes jihad as “resisting apartheid or working for women’s rights.”

But, of course:

THE TROUBLE with this accumulated wisdom of the scholars is simple to state. It suggests that Osama bin Laden had no idea what he was saying when he declared jihad on the United States several years ago and then repeatedly murdered Americans in Somalia, at the U.S. embassies in East Africa, in the port of Aden, and then on September 11, 2001. It implies that organizations with the word “jihad” in their titles, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden’s own “International Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusade[rs],” are grossly misnamed. And what about all the Muslims waging violent and aggressive jihads, under that very name and at this very moment, in Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, Ambon, and other places around the world? Have they not heard that jihad is a matter of controlling one’s anger?

But of course it is bin Laden, Islamic Jihad, and the jihadists worldwide who define the term, not a covey of academic apologists. More importantly, the way the jihadists understand the term is in keeping with its usage through fourteen centuries of Islamic history.

In premodern times, jihad meant mainly one thing among Sunni Muslims, then as now the Islamic majority.* It meant the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims (known in Arabic as dar al-Islam) at the expense of territories ruled by non-Muslims (dar al-harb). In this prevailing conception, the purpose of jihad is political, not religious. It aims not so much to spread the Islamic faith as to extend sovereign Muslim power (though the former has often followed the latter). The goal is boldly offensive, and its ultimate intent is nothing less than to achieve Muslim dominion over the entire world.

The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness Project: Americans Under the Microscope?
Issue #45
November 26, 2002

by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.

The Pentagon assures us we have nothing to fear from its new Total Information Awareness (TIA) counterterrorism project, a colossal effort to assemble and "mine" massive databases of our credit-card purchases, car rentals, airline tickets, official records, and the like. The aim is to monitor the public's whereabouts, movements, and transactions to glean suspicious patterns that indicate terrorist planning and other shenanigans. Well, we shouldn't always trust the assurance of the Pentagon.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which safeguards us against unreasonable searches, forbids a total surveillance society if that's where this project's directors intend to go.

It may be appropriate for the government to make use of readily available public information. Yet even here, it's important to remember that such information, whether driver's license, Social Security, or tax information, is mandated by numerous agencies for specific purposes—not general law enforcement—and should not be routinely combined for such purposes without a specific court order.

Perspective: Say hello to Big Brother
By Declan McCullagh
November 18, 2002, 7:05 AM PT

WASHINGTON--Like it or not, the proposed Department of Homeland Security firmly establishes Washington's central role in computer and network security.

When approved by Congress, perhaps as early as Monday, the massive new bureaucracy will become--among other things--the nation's clearinghouse for developing plans to prevent electronic attacks, thwart them when they occur and release advisories to the public.

According to the version of the bill approved by the House last week, department analysts will have security clearances and work so closely with the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency that they'll even share personnel.

The department will mash together five agencies that currently divvy up responsibility for "critical infrastructure protection." Those are the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Defense Department's National Communications System, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, an Energy Department analysis center and the Federal Computer Incident Response Center.

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