Philip Bobbitt of the The University of Texas at Austin School of Law will deliver the November Bradley Lecture.

Thus far, our biggest deficit in waging the War on Terror has been a lack of ideas—the kind of reshaping ideas that Viner, Brodie, Schelling, and others developed to cope with the emergence of the nuclear threat during the Cold War. We must reconceptualize terrorism, warfare, and the aim of the war that we seek in victory before the notion of "winning a war against terror” can make any sense. We must understand that the struggle against terror is really three wars: there is the war against twenty-first-century terrorism—global, networked, outsourcing of operations—there is the effort to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of compelling rather than deterring, and finally there is the struggle to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing. These separate wars exist in relation to one another in a very complex way. Progress in one dimension tends to exacerbate the difficulties in other dimensions. This imposes on the United States a kind of triage of terror: we must address the most acute problems first, knowing that doing so will make other problems worse off, and we must have the flexibility to attack those other problems when they themselves become acute, with the sure knowledge that doing so will make the initial problem addressed worse also.

Philip C. Bobbitt is the A. W. Walker Centennial Chair at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. One of the nation’s leading constitutional theorists, Professor Bobbitt’s interests include not only constitutional law, but also international security and the history of strategy. He has authored or coauthored six books: Constitutional Interpretation (1991), Democracy and Deterrence (1987), U.S. Nuclear Strategy (1989), Constitutional Fate (1982), Tragic Choices (1978), and most recently The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (2002). Professor Bobbitt is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Club of Madrid. He has been elected a member of the American Law Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. He is also a member of the Commission on the Continuity of Government. He has served as associate counsel to the President, the counselor on international law at the State Department, and legal counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra Committee. At the National Security Council, he was director for intelligence, senior director for critical infrastructure, and senior director for strategic planning.