What Is "Defense"?
November 6, 2001

by Joe Sobran

     For the first time in living memory, Americans have 
to think about defense. Most of us (I include myself, 
until fairly recently) have assumed that our government 
was defending us. We equated military spending in 
staggering sums -- sustaining heavily armed soldiers, 
sailors, and pilots around the world -- with defense. And 
we thought that meant safety.

     It didn't. Now we know better. All that military 
spending was making us enemies all over the earth. As a 
result, we have to worry about people who were no threat 
to us a few years ago -- cruel, cunning men who have 
found methods of by-passing traditional military forces.

     After World War II the Department of War was renamed 
the Department of Defense to soften its image. "Defense" 
sounded nicer than "war." Yet the United States military 
has been less and less oriented to what the Constitution 
calls "the common defense of the United States." Its 
offensive power has become stupendous, and globally 
ubiquitous, but its actual defensive power turns out to 
have been seriously flawed. It was designed to deter 
attacks by rival states, but other kinds of attacks were 
hardly imagined. An enemy state can be destroyed with 
overwhelming force; a loose affiliation of guerrillas, 
saboteurs, or terrorists is another matter.

     Nuclear weapons, which a few of our more hairy-
chested pundits are recommending now, are useless when 
you have to defend -- really defend -- every post office, 
airport, and shopping mall. You can't nuke anthrax.

     The nuclear option is being urged out of sheer 
frustration at a shadowy, dispersed, elusive enemy. Some 
people feel that our ultimate weapons must prevail, if 
only we use enough of them. But in this case, "enough" 
would mean genocide. Virtually the entire populations of 
several countries would have to be annihilated in order 
to kill a few scattered terrorists. And that's assuming 
that the terrorists would be close enough to the nuclear 
targets, rather than hiding in remote areas.

     Speaking of targets, I've read several newspaper 
columns urging nuking, but none of them have specified a 
target. They can't. The whole idea of nuclear weapons is 
strategic: to destroy major targets, especially big 
cities. But nobody knows where the relevant targets are, 
or why nuclear weapons would be any more effective than 
conventional explosives. In essence we are being told: 
"Don't just stand there -- nuke something!"

     The old model of a centralized enemy state doesn't 
apply here. The would-be nukers seem to forget that all 
the atrocities the enemy has committed so far have been 
the work of men who were and are already within U.S. 
borders. If Osama bin Laden, sitting in an Afghan cave, 
had a change of heart tomorrow, he might be unable to 
call off further strikes.

     The notion that bin Laden exercises close central 
control of the terrorist forces may be an optimistic 
assumption. It allows our government to feel it can win 
by targeting him -- or can at least justify its efforts 
to us. The politicians only have to make us feel they're 
achieving something with their "defense" forces, even if 
they aren't really getting an inch closer to victory or 
are actually doing more harm than good.

     This can be seen as a war between the public and 
private sectors. As usual, the public sector -- the U.S. 
Government, in this case -- is outspending the private 
sector -- the terrorists -- by a huge margin. And as 
usual, the massively organized and centralized public 
sector is wasting a colossal amount of wealth, while the 
decentralized private sector is getting far more bang for 
its buck.

     Conservatives and libertarians have long argued that 
the private sector is far more efficient than the public 
sector, but this isn't exactly the kind of demonstration 
we had hoped for. We'd rather Bill Gates made the point 
than Osama bin Laden. Not that it will sink in with our 
government either way. The lesson will be lost on 
believers in the megastate, as the calls for nuking the 
terror network illustrate.

     Talk about defense spending. This time it's not just 
our government that's paying; all of us are bearing the 
enormous cost of anticipating attacks on every 
conceivable target. And apart from the expense, there is 
the awful anxiety and fatigue. Welcome to the real world 
of defense.

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