Naked to Terrorism

Sometime over the next quarter-century a direct terrorist attack “against American citizens on American soil” with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons is likely, and the nation has few defenses against such a threat. That assertion by the congressionally mandated Commission on National Security is not alarmist but realistic, and it should be treated by the Bush administration and Congress with the seriousness it merits.

The commission, headed by former Sens. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) and Gary Hart (D-Colo.), seeks far-reaching changes in national security institutions, including the State and Defense departments and the National Security Council, all of which the panel concludes have become bureaucratically bloated and unfocused. It further seeks to meld the resources of the Coast Guard, Border Patrol and Federal Emergency Management Agency into a single Cabinet-level security body to coordinate defenses and responses against terrorism.

The chances that Congress would order the radical restructuring the commission recommends, or that the departments and agencies affected wouldn’t fight to the last ditch to maintain the bureaucratic status quo, seem minimal at best. But the imperative to recognize the danger remains. “The combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack. . . . In the face of this threat our nation has no coherent or integrated governmental structure.”

The Bush administration is ready to spend $60 billion and more to build an unproven missile defense system, out of a dubious concern that North Korea, Iraq, Iran or some other third-rate power might invite national suicide by launching rockets against the United States. The far more credible peril is that an attack will come--as terrorist attacks do--without warning and with its origins disguised, across the nation’s porous borders or along its coasts. The threat, as Rudman says, is “asymmetric and we’re not prepared for it.” It has been more than 50 years since national security was redesigned to deal with Cold War dangers. Now there are new dangers, and new ways of organizing against them are urgently needed.