Defense Chief Turns Eye to Internal Risk

For months before last week’s attacks on the United States, senior Bush administration officials had been increasingly preoccupied with the possibility of threats to the U.S. homeland.

In addition to urging the development of a Space Age antimissile shield, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had been calling since early in the year for vastly expanding the military’s role in defending against computer, biological and chemical warfare waged at home.

Rumsfeld and senior aides had also been discussing whether to pull some reserve and National Guard troops out of foreign trouble spots so they could be prepared to respond to attacks on U.S. soil.

Although it is unclear whether those plans were motivated by intelligence assessments of a threat in the near term, they were notable for their stark contrast with several decades of military doctrine that had focused on deploying American forces abroad.

“This administration is more serious about actually doing something about those threats,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an August interview with The Times.

“I think the country as a whole is getting a growing sense of the danger from a variety of hostile countries and non-government groups that are beginning to have those capabilities. And I think it’s not only a matter of being prepared if they use them but of being prepared to persuade them not to use them.”

The rising concerns among policymakers over securing the nation’s material resources, land and skies date to the Clinton administration, when terrorist incidents in the United States and abroad, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, began to bring the issue to prominence. But in an era in which spending on defense was falling, talk about making homeland defense a priority went nowhere.

When the Bush administration came to power this year, however, many of its top policymakers viewed the United States as considerably more vulnerable than did their immediate predecessors.

In July, defense of the American homeland was incorporated for the first time into guidelines for American military strategy used to request money for the military. The elevation of homeland defense into one of the four main military capabilities referred mostly to administration plans to spend billions on developing a high-tech missile defense.

But it also officially gave the military domestic duties in battling terrorism waged at home.

“We’re unlikely to be attacked on the high seas because of the power of our Navy, and if . . . the past is prologue . . . we’re unlikely to be surpassed in the air,” Rumsfeld told reporters in July, shortly after the new guidelines were released. “Clearly, it is the asymmetric threats that are a risk, and they include terrorism, they include ballistic missiles, they include cyber-attacks.”

The Pentagon was not alone in worrying about attacks on Americans at home. In February, a 14-member bipartisan commission reported that the United States was vulnerable to terrorist attack and had inadequate homeland defenses.

The commission, which included former Sens. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), made 50 specific recommendations for building up homeland defense. Most notable was a plan to establish a Cabinet-level agency including elements from the National Guard and the Coast Guard.

“We must assume that the events of Tuesday were not the end,” Hart told reporters last week. “I think we must assume further attacks. We are not prepared to prevent them or to address them when they have occurred.”

The Pentagon had also been formulating a similar plan to beef up interagency coordination.

“The government is just not organized to deal with catastrophes on that scale, and when we do have catastrophes on that scale we inevitably end up turning to the military,” Wolfowitz said.

“There is an absolute dead certainty that if that sort of catastrophe happens, the people in the government will end up turning to this department and saying, ‘What can you do to help?’ And if the answer is, ‘Well, gee, that isn’t our job. We only defend our allies, we don’t defend Americans,’--excuse me, I’d hate to be the secretary of Defense that has to give that answer.”

As the outlines of the thinking became known, the motives of Rumsfeld and his advisors were greeted with skepticism. Many critics assumed that homeland defense was being given higher priority only to justify increased spending on missile defense.

“The military likes it because it gives them something to do in the absence of the Soviet Union,” Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, said in an August interview. “The Republican politicians like it because it justifies national missile defense as a component.”

Suddenly, with the theoretical transformed into reality, the challenge for the Pentagon is no longer how to sell the idea of homeland defense politically. It is how to make it work.

“We spent the 20th century focused on well-defined external threats,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. “This new posture of danger that Rumsfeld perceives is more nebulous, it’s more pervasive, it’s really hard for the existing military structure to come to grips with.”