The Architecture of Government in the Face of Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, the post-Cold War security bubble finally burst. In the preceding ten years, the United States and its major allies failed to identify and invest in the prevention of "A-list" security problems that could affect their way of life, position in the world, and very survival. Instead they behaved as if gulled into a belief that the key security problems of the post-Cold War era were ethnic and other internal conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, East Timor, and Kosovo. Peacekeeping and peacemaking in these places, although engaging important humanitarian concerns, never addressed the vital security interests of the United States, and none of these conflicts could begin to threaten its survival. As if to confirm this point, the official military strategy of the United States during the last decade centered not on peacekeeping but on the challenge of fighting two Desert Storm reruns, one in Korea and one in the Persian Gulf, at the same time. The two-major-theater-war doctrine at least had the virtue of addressing threats to vital U.S. allies and interests. But as the decade wore on, it was increasingly apparent that although important interests were at stake in both major theaters, in neither was U.S. survival in question. The A-list seemed empty, so policy and strategy focused on B- and C-level problems instead. ¹

A-list threats, such as the threat posed by the Soviet Union for the preceding half-century--were indeed absent, but only if threat is understood as the imminent possibility of attack defined in traditional military terms. If taken instead to denote looming problems that could develop into Cold War-scale dangers, the A-list contained at least four major underattended items in the 1990s: (1) the collapse of Moscow's power, (2) the growth of Beijing's military and economic might, (3) proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and (4) the prospect of catastrophic terrorism. Upon taking office, George W. Bush and his administration claimed to be formulating their strategy around the first two of these items, in a self-proclaimed return to big power realism. But in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 11, the Bush administration is instead finding its agenda dominated by catastrophic terrorism, for which it appears no more or less prepared than its predecessor Bush, Sr., and Clinton administrations.

The challenge of catastrophic terrorism is destined to be a centerpiece of the field of international security studies, and thus of the readers and writers of the pages of this journal, for the foreseeable future. Today the focus is a particular nest of Islamic extremists operating freely from the lawless failed state of Afghanistan. But the last time that a building in the United States was destroyed in a terrorist attack, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, the perpetrator was homegrown, an embittered American nihilist operating in the vast anonymity of modern society. One month earlier, an obscure cult in Japan put sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway and attempted an airborne anthrax release. Indeed the varieties of extremism that can spawn catastrophic terrorism seem limitless, and they have not been studied as thoroughly by social scientists as have the dynamics of great power rivalry. What is clear is that war-scale destructive power is becoming increasingly available as technology advances. The same advances heighten the complexity and interconnectedness of civilization, making society more vulnerable at the same time it delivers to small groups destructive powers that were formerly the monopoly of states. Thus if security is understood to be the avoidance and control of mass threat, catastrophic terrorism must occupy a central place in security studies, a status that "ordinary" non-mass terrorism never achieved.²

The resulting agenda of analysis and policy development is wide. First, the motivations and root causes of catastrophic...