Today’s Harsh Global Realities Demand Complex Defenses

There is so much mourning to be done and so many questions to be answered. But the destruction and carnage of Tuesday’s attacks against the people of the United States will find their place soon enough in the debate over ballistic missile defense.

Many will say that this attack proves we are vulnerable to grievous damage from enemies who do not need intercontinental ballistic missiles to strike us. Moreover, awful as the damage is, a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction, such as biological or crude nuclear devices, would be far worse.

Given these stark facts, it is fair to ask whether spending scores of billions of dollars to create a missile defense against a future threat from the likes of North Korea or Iran represents the right set of priorities.

A defense of the U.S. homeland against a repetition of what has happened or worse is going to be expensive. We have talked about this concept for years, and at the intuitive level it isn’t hard to understand the general idea. But notwithstanding the analysis and talks, and despite a considerable amount of money spent, neither the general concept nor the specifics have been worked out very well.

It is clear that we must create a new kind of partnership between the various levels of government. Better organization and better communication systems are just the beginning. We are going to have to strengthen our ability not just to prevent disasters such as this but also to manage the consequences. Just one of the needs that ought to be met is for stand-by capacity to manufacture vaccine in case of a biological weapon attack. Improvement will be the sum of many relatively small steps. But the aggregate cost will run into billions of dollars.

There will be no single magic bullet. Neither is this a matter that will yield to a one-time fix. We face a chronic and serious threat to our security, and in effect we must now absorb an extremely disturbing fact: It is possible to bring war to our country, notwithstanding our possession of the most mighty army, navy and air force on the planet.

Raising the priority of homeland defense would take money away from other priorities, including missile defense. But it would be unfortunate to conclude that the United States cannot afford to continue to explore missile defense, or that money considerations ought to stop us from deploying it if needed to meet a real threat.

The question of what kind of defenses to develop, and under what circumstances to move to deployment, deserves serious bipartisan examination and debate. But first we need to deal with the immediate challenge that faces us as a people today: to grieve with our fellow citizens, to attend to the damage, to find and deal with those responsible, to settle the question of how preparations for this attack escaped the notice of our intelligence and law enforcement systems. Then it will be time to confront the long-range implications. To do that properly means we have to insist that the totality of America’s security interests--not just one element--must be dealt with in a plan for action, and that resources be expended for these in a way that reflects the harsh new realities just demonstrated.