U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D‑Massachusetts) believes that cutting the military means rethinking the purpose of our military. He argues that the far-flung adventures that have killed thousands of American soldiers and consumed trillions of dollars simply haven’t been justified by U.S. defense needs. He also takes issue with President Obama exempting military spending from his so-called “spending freeze” proposed earlier this year. He spoke at the Cato Institute November 19, 2010.
Cato at Liberty
Cato at Liberty
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Defense and Foreign Policy
Strip-Search Machines as the Downfall of the ‘War on Terror’
Here’s Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot on NBC’s Meet the Press:
I think the danger here is that the public begins to revolt against these kinds of security procedures. And then you risk losing public support, not just for airport screenings, but for the whole war on terror and the whole national security regime post‑9/11.
Exactly.
The “danger” Gigot is talking about is that the government might lose control of counterterrorism policy, ceding that control back to a frustrated and increasingly restless American populace. The “War on Terror” theme supports a host of policies—most acutely, these airport searches—that are at best unexplained by the goverrnment and likely not merited by actual security conditions. As I noted in an earlier post, in seven billion domestic passenger trips over the last decade, there have been zero bombings. Yet we are to be searched like prison inmates at the whim of the TSA. That simply doesn’t comport with common sense.
(Top government officials and people I know and respect sometimes say things like, “If you knew what I’d learned in secret briefings .…” I don’t accept these assertions. Just like in a courtroom, facts not put into evidence are not facts in the public debate either. “War on Terror” secrecy policies are a failing pillar of post‑9/11 security policy.)
There is not real danger in shifting from today’s overreactive, fear-based security regime to one that exploits terrorism’s many weaknesses to secure the country cost-effectively, confidently, and consistently with Americans’ liberty and prosperity. The Cato book, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It, contains the thinking that undergirds a new, better approach.
Related Tags
The Ghailani Verdict
You’ve probably heard that a jury found Al Qaeda bomber Ahmed Ghailani guilty on only one out of 286 charges associated with the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
A predictable debate followed. Glenn Greenwald cited the outcome as proof that the system works, while Liz Cheney, Debra Burlingame and Bill Kristol described the trial as a reckless experiment. Thomas Joscelyn called the trial a miscarriage of justice.
The most insightful commentary I’ve seen is over at Lawfare. Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney summed things up pretty well: “Trial in federal court didn’t work out the way the Obama administration wanted, but it wasn’t a disaster–and we can’t honestly say it worked out worse than the military commission alternative would likely have done.”
I’ve disagreed with Wittes on lawfare issues before, but he and Chesney are right on this case: (1) the defendant will serve a minimum of twenty years in jail, possibly life; (2) it’s not certain that the military commissions would have allowed evidence obtained by coercion (Charlie Savage also made this point in his article for the New York Times), (3) the conspiracy conviction in civilian court is solid on appeal, but not necessarily so in a military commission (conspiracy is not a traditional law of war violation, and three sitting Supreme Court justices have questioned its application in that forum); (4) the forum of conviction is less ripe for attack in courts of law and public opinion.
That’s a good outcome.
NATO Countries Meet in Lisbon
The inherent vulnerabilities and shortcomings of an alliance created in 1949 to defeat an adversary that ceased to exist in 1989 will be on display for all to see tomorrow when President Obama and leaders of NATO meet in Lisbon. I predict that President Obama will try to put the best possible gloss on the alliance’s inability to resolve its internal differences over Afghanistan, and the leaders of the other NATO countries will surely do the same. But they can not obscure the fact that an alliance that was expanded on the premise that it was uniquely suited to deal with problems far outside of Europe has revealed itself to be all but irrelevant.
Much of the media coverage has focused on the NATO mission in Afghanistan, especially the new, new target date for the handover of security responsibilities to the Afghan government some time in 2014, ignoring the fact that a number of the NATO countries that contributed troops to the mission will have already headed for the exits by then. A story in today’s Washington Post notes that Canada expects to pull out its 3,000 troops next year, and Germany will begin withdrawing in 2012.
Beyond the Afghan mission, it is to be expected that President Obama and the other heads of state will reaffirm the supposed central importance of NATO to transatlantic and, indeed, global security through a new “strategic concept.”
The reality is very different. The U.S. government chose to retain NATO after the end of the Cold War, in part to discourage the creation of an independent European military capability. The net effect of this short-sighted decision is clear: European military capabilities have atrophied, European military spending has stagnated or declined, and U.S. military personnel, and U.S. taxpayers, have been forced to bear a larger and larger share of the burdens of defending a continent eminently capable of defending itself.
It could be argued that the Europeans wouldn’t have much need for more military spending in the first place, even if Americans renounced the security guarantee under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. After all, who are they going to fight? The persistent conflicts that defined Europe for centuries have been replaced by economic interdependence and growing political integration. The notion of France going to war with Germany is about as absurd as Kentucky going to war with Tennessee.
Regardless, Washington should not be let off the hook for its past failures to encourage European countries to do more for their own defense. Lacking such capabilities, a number of NATO countries have made a show of supporting U.S. policies, most notably in Afghanistan. But public support for such missions is weak, and elected leaders of democratic countries risk a return to private life if they consistently buck the wishes of their constituents.
NATO has become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end — security — that could command support on both sides of the Atlantic, and unpopular one, at that. Germans aren’t willing to die in Afghanistan to prove that NATO is still relevant. Though the concept has fallen into disfavor thanks to the Bush administration’s shenanigans in the run-up to the war in Iraq, a “coalition of the willing” is a lot more useful than a “coalition of the reticent and feckless.”
Related Tags
Does Risk Management Counsel in Favor of a Biometric Traveler Identity System?
Writing on Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Robert Poole argues that the Transportation Security Administration should use a risk-based approach to security. As I noted in my recent “ ‘Strip-or-Grope’ vs. Risk Management” post, the Department of Homeland Security often talks about risk but fails to actually do risk management. Poole and I agree—everyone agrees—that DHS should use risk management. They just don’t.
With the pleasure of remembering our excellent 2005 Reason debate, “Transportation Security Aggravation,” I must again differ with Poole’s prescription, however.
Poole says TSA should separate travelers into three basic groups (quoting at length):
- Trusted Travelers, who have passed a background check and are issued a biometric ID card that proves (when they arrive at the security checkpoint) that they are the person who was cleared. This group would include cockpit crews, anyone holding a government security clearance, anyone already a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Global Entry, Sentri, and Nexus, and anyone who applied and was accepted into a new Trusted Traveler program. These people would get to bypass regular security lanes upon having their biometric card checked at the airport, subject only to random screening of a small fraction.
- High-risk travelers, either those about whom no information is known or who are flagged by the various Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence lists as warranting “Selectee” status. They would be the only ones facing body-scanners or pat-downs as mandatory, routine screening.
- Ordinary travelers—basically everyone else, who would go through metal detector and put carry-ons through 2‑D X‑ray machines. They would not have to remove shoes or jackets, and could travel with liquids. A small fraction of this group would be subject to random “Selectee”-type screening.
He believes, and has argued for years, that dividing “good guys” from “bad guys” will effectively secure. It’s certainly intuitive. Poole’s a good guy. I’m a good guy. You’re a good guy (in a non-gender-specific sense).
Knowing who people are works for us in every day life: Because we can find people who borrow our stuff, for example—and because we know that we can be found—we husband our behavior and generally don’t steal things from each other, we, the decent people with a stake in society.
Poole’s thinking takes our common experience and scales it up to a national program. Capture people’s identities, link enough biography to those identities, and—voila!—we know who the good guys are and who are the (potential) bad.
But precisely what biographical information assures that a person is “good”? (The proposal is for government action: it would be a violation of due process to keep the criteria secret and an equal protection violation to unfairly divide good and bad.) How do we know a person hasn’t gone bad from the time that their goodness was established?
The attacker we face with air security measures is not among the decent cohort whose behavior is channeled by identification. That attacker’s path to mischief is nicely mapped out by Poole’s proposal: Get into the Trusted Traveler group, or find someone who can get in it. (It’s easy to know if you’re a part of it. They give you a card! You can also test the system to see if you’ve been designated “high-risk” or “ordinary.”)
With a Trusted Traveler positioned to do wrong, chances are good that he or she won’t be subjected to screening and can carry whatever dangerous articles onto a plane. The end result? Predictable gnashing of teeth and wailing about a “failure to connect the dots.”
All this is not to say that Poole’s plan should not be adopted. If he can convince an airline of its merits, and the airline can convince its shareholders, insurers, airports, and their customers, they should implement the program to their heart’s content. They should reap the economic gain, too, when they prove that they have found a way to better serve the public’s safety, convenience, privacy, and transportation needs.
It is the TSA that should not implement this program. Along with what are significant security defects, it is the creation of a program that the government might use to control access to other goods, services, and infrastructure throughout society. The TSA would migrate toward conditioning all travel on having a government-issued biometric identity card. Fundamentally, the government should not be making these decisions or operating airline security systems.
A very interesting paper surfaced by recent public attention to this issue predicts that annual highway deaths will increase (from an already significant number) by between 11 and 275 because of people’s avoidance of privacy-invasive airport procedures. But what caught my eye in it were the following numbers:
During the past decade, terrorist attacks, with respect to air travel in the United States, have occurred three times involving six aircraft. Four planes were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident occurred in December 2001, and, most recently, the Christmas Day underwear bomber attempted an attack in 2009. In that same span of time, over 99 million planes took off and landed within the United States, carrying over 7 billion passengers.
Especially because 9/11’s “commandeering” attack on air travel has been essentially foreclosed by hardened cockpit doors and passenger/crew awareness, these numbers suggest the smallness of the chance that somone can elude worldwide investigatory pressure, prepare an explosive and detonator that actually work, smuggle both through conventional security, and successfully use them to take down a plane. It hasn’t happened in nearly 100 million flights.
This is not an argument to “let up” on security or to stop searching for measures that will cost-effectively drive the chance of attacker success even closer to zero. But more thorough risk management analysis than mine or Bob Poole’s would probably show that accepting the above risk is preferable to either delaying and invading the bodily privacy of travelers or creating a biometric identity and background-check system.
Related Tags
Will the Deficit Compel Congress to Cut Military Spending?
Over at National Journal’s National Security Experts blog, Megan Scully notes the military spending cuts contained within a proposal by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of the president’s deficit reduction commission. Scully asks: “How feasible would it be for lawmakers to make these kinds of cuts to defense?…What kind of sway will fiscal hawks have in the next Congress — and will it be enough to push through sweeping defense cuts over the objections from pro-defense members of their party?”
Government spending across the board must be cut, I explain, beginning especially with entitlements. I continue:
Other spending must also be on the table, however, and that includes the roughly 23 percent of the federal budget that goes to the military. This often poses a particular challenge for Republicans given their traditional support for military spending and their professed commitment to fiscal discipline. But it need not be particularly difficult. If Republicans reaffirm that the core function of government, many would say one of the only core functions of government, is defense (strictly speaking), then the path to a politically sustainable and economically sound defense posture is clear: a military geared to defending the United States and its vital national interests, and not permanently deployed as the world’s policeman and armed social worker. Such a posture would allow for a smaller Army and Marine Corps as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are drawn to a close (as they should be), deep cuts in the Pentagon’s civilian work force, which has grown dramatically over the past 10 years, and sensible reductions in the nuclear arsenal. More modest cuts are warranted in intelligence and R&D. Finally, significant changes in a number of costly and unnecessary weapons and platforms, including terminating the V‑22 Osprey and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and greater scrutiny of the F‑35 program, for example, must also be in the mix.…
Serious cuts to military spending… must be part of a broader strategic reset that ends the free-riding of wealthy and stable allies around the world, and that takes a more balanced and objective view of our relative strategic advantages and our enviable security.
You can read the rest of my response here.
The Security Logic Clarifies the Question
A new post on the TSA blog gets the logic behind the strip/grope combination correct.
[I]f you’re selected for AIT and choose to opt-out, we still need to check you for non-metallic threats. That’s why a pat-down is required. If you refuse both, you can’t fly.
Any alternative allows someone concealing something to decline the strip-search machine, decline the intimate pat-down, and leave the airport, returning another day in hopes of not being selected for the strip-search machine. The TSA reserves the right to fine you $11,000 for declining these searches.
So the question is joined: Should the TSA be able to condition air travel on you permitting someone to look at or touch your genitals?
I’ve argued that the strip/grope is security excess not validated by risk management. It’s akin to a regulation that fails the “arbitrary and capricious” standard in adminstrative law. But the TSA is not so constrained.