Editorial

America the undefended

James Carafano Director, Heritage Foundation's Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies
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America isn’t as well defended as it should be. To understand why, you have to go back a little over a decade.

In September 1999, the Hart-Rudman Commission declared, “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” The report was not taken very seriously — until two years later.

The Pentagon’s wake-up call occurred when part of the building collapsed in burning wreckage. Then things started to happen.

First, the Defense Department stood up U.S. Northern Command to oversee homeland defense, as well as missions where the military provided support to civil authorities (such as when 20,000 active-duty forces were sent to help out after Hurricane Katrina).

Then the Pentagon started building up the kind of specially trained and equipped ready-response forces that would be needed if there were a catastrophic disaster or attack on the homeland, such as a string of dirty bomb attacks or a plague outbreak.

Finally, the Defense Department started cheerleading for coordinated government planning on how to deal with the “unthinkable” scenarios where tens of thousands or millions of lives and hundreds of billions in property might be at risk. The 2005 strategy captured the Pentagon’s born-again attitude toward its homeland responsibility.

But protecting American citizens in their own homes became the first casualty of the budget wars.

Right off the top, the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review cuts thousands from the number of special troops prepared to respond to chemical, biological or nuclear incidents. As a result, the U.S. today has scant more capability than it did on 9/11 and much less than what it needs to respond to a catastrophic disaster.

Next, catastrophic-disaster planning was thrown under the bus. An effective Defense Department initiative to help states plan for such disasters was kicked over to Homeland Security, where it has pretty much died. The White House stopped comprehensive planning for two years to rewrite the presidential directive on the matter, which pretty much took planning back to square one.

A congressional commission concluded last year that “there is currently no comprehensive national integrated planning system to respond to either natural or man-made disasters.” As a result, “when the next big catastrophe happens, America probably won’t be any better prepared to deal with the death and destruction than it was after 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina.”

Finally, Northern Command is atrophying from benign neglect. It has almost no forces assigned to it. It has done nothing to really fulfill its mandate to address maritime security. As one former senior defense official told me, NORTHCOM has become a “hollow force.” Odds are, the Pentagon will likely try to get rid of the command altogether by merging it with Southern Command in the name of efficiency.

With hundreds of billions of defense cuts already on the table, is there any credible hope that the administration’s indifference to protecting the homeland is likely to change?

Abandoning the defense of American soil has been the first casualty of the lemming-like cuts to the military budgets. The really scary thing is that it just may be a precursor of things to come. What Americans used to take for granted — freedom of the seas, the sovereignty of American soil, the ability to have air supremacy in any conflict — all these could be memories once the race to gut the defense budget is completed.

James Jay Carafano is director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.