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The defense of the American homeland has always been the core mission of the U.S. military, but the meaning of that responsibility is undergoing a transformation and demands careful rethinking. Specifically, the September 11 attacks and the global war on terror are forcing American strategists to reevaluate conventional assumptions about how missile defense and neighboring nations fit into U.S. national security.

 

Defense of the homeland has always been the prime directive for American strategists, even before the formal creation of the United States. Yet more than three years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a useful contemporary meaning for this term is still proving elusive to U.S. policymakers. Buckets of money have been thrown at the problem, legislation has been passed, and the disparate bureaucratic pieces that the Department of Homeland Security comprises have been rearranged--yet it is far from clear that any useful strategy has emerged from the process.

 

Despite a visceral new understanding of our vulnerability after the September 11 attacks, some basic questions remain unanswered. Where, exactly, are the boundaries of the American "homeland"? Are they coterminous with the political borders of the United States, or do they extend outward into outer space and cyberspace? To what extent and in what ways does the defending the "homeland" entail active involvement in the Caribbean and Latin America? And, central to the purpose of this essay, what is the U.S. military role in defending the homeland?

A related problem with homeland defense strategy is that there has been insufficient discussion about the relative merits of active versus passive means of defense. While the Bush administration has pursued a forward defense in the sense of taking the fight against terrorists to their sanctuaries in the greater Middle East, the strategic importance of Central America and northern South America is not yet fully appreciated. Likewise, after struggling to put missile defense programs and research back on track after eight years of neglect under the Clinton administration, the Pentagon has done almost nothing to recast its efforts in a post-9/11 strategic framework.

Even though many of these questions must be decided at a higher level of government, the Department of Defense must achieve some measure of clarity on these matters if the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review is to be successful. To date, far too much of the homeland defense debate has dwelled on the need to react rapidly to future strikes in the United States. Most recently, the report of the 9/11 Commission, so commendable in so many ways, has directed attention at the multiple mishaps that occurred that day.
 
Many have seen in the state missions of the National Guard--and in the hundreds of thousands of Army Guardsmen--a tempting instrument for "consequence management" in preparation for future catastrophic terrorist attacks. And indeed, emergency response is a traditional and valuable mission for the Guard. But it is likewise vital that the Pentagon balance, and indeed favor, active defenses.
 
As John Lewis Gaddis argues in Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, "For the United States, safety comes from enlarging, rather than from contracting, its sphere of responsibility. Americans . . . have generally responded to threats-and particularly surprise attacks-by taking the offensive, by becoming more conspicuous, by confronting, neutralizing, and if possible overwhelming the sources of danger rather than fleeing from them. Expansion, we have assumed, is the path to security."[1]

This is most true when it comes to the role of the military. This is not to disparage purely defensive measures. But it is important to recognize that static defenses have consistently failed in the face of an adaptive and resourceful enemy. The United States confronts such an enemy in radical Islam and thus must be careful not to bog down too much military power in defending the home front.
 
Indeed, there is an important distinction to be made between the broader mission of homeland defense, which encompasses the military, and missions of homeland security, which are inherently more specific and often inappropriate for the application of military force. In particular, proposals to reconfigure the Army National Guard--already torn between its state and federal roles--from a force capable of emergency response in a time of national catastrophe into a big-war, strategic reserve are unwise.

America's "Third Border"

Even if the military role in direct homeland defense should be a narrow one, the traditional understanding of the priority of the Western Hemisphere to U.S. security needs to be recovered by the Pentagon. The reaction to the 9/11 attacks has had the paradoxical effect of diverting attention from America's neighbors in Latin America, particularly from the Caribbean basin and northern South America. These territories have long been regarded, most notably in the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, as crucial to providing strategic depth to the defense of the continental United States. Taken collectively, the region represents America's "third border."

Indeed, the great strategists of the nineteenth century recognized that American hegemony in the hemisphere was crucial to U.S. national security. Then, the foremost concern of strategists like John Quincy Adams was to prevent another great power from taking advantage of the political and military vacuum elsewhere on the continent to establish a foothold within striking distance of the American homeland. With the exception of Mexico's brief tenure under Maximilian in the 1860s and Cuba during the Cold War, Washington has arguably succeeded in this goal.

Today, too, the United States is threatened by the weakness and instability of the political actors along its southern rim, a situation that presents an opening for strategic competitors. In the context of the global war on terror, there is a longstanding concern that lawless regions of Latin America such as Isla de Margarita in Venezuela and the Triple Frontier, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil come together, are being used by Middle Eastern radicals to find safe haven and raise money. Economic forces have also created a huge market across Latin America and the Caribbean for fake passports, visas, and other identity papers--a vulnerability that terrorists could exploit to enter the United States.

In the longer term, some strategists are also concerned about increased engagement by the People's Republic of China in Latin America and the Caribbean. Beijing is interested in Latin American energy resources--in particular, oil contracts in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador--using "yuan diplomacy" and low visibility military-to-military relations to market itself as an attractive political and economic alternative to the United States. Although still less a priority than its investments in Africa, China's recent decision to send troops to Haiti represents another signpost in a deepening Sino-Latin relationship in America's backyard.

Despite the demands of the wars in the greater Middle East, the Bush administration has succeeded in some respects in crafting a sensible defense policy toward Latin America. In the past four years, there have been more, much-needed joint exercises with Latin American forces, while the cap on the number of U.S. personnel to help the Colombian government in its war against narco-guerrillas has been doubled. Soldiers from El Salvador and Nicaragua have served in Iraq, and in November Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is traveling to Latin America for ten days to speak at the Defense Ministerial of the Americas in Quito, Ecuador, stopping along the way for talks in a half-dozen countries.
 
More substantively, the United States, Chile, and Panama are working together in a multinational coalition to protect the Panama Canal--arguably, the most crucial piece of infrastructure for the free flow of commerce in the Western hemisphere--from terrorist threats, while an even larger joint, multinational force has been assembled to patrol America's "third border" in the Caribbean basin.
 
Still, these disparate pieces do not together make a strategy, and there is still much work to be done. In particular, next year's Quadrennial Defense Review should recognize the vital importance of deepening American hegemony in the hemisphere by improving bilateral and multilateral relations--in particular, security and economic relations--with the countries of the region. For instance, U.S. military planners and the Department of Homeland Security need to improve the traditionally frosty security relationship with Mexico--which, unlike the rest of Latin America, falls under the area of responsibility of Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

Missile Defenses

There is another critical but seldom-discussed homeland defense issue that the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review must address: the rationale for U.S. missile defense programs. For too long, missile defenses have been treated as an end in themselves. The Clinton administration, animated by an outdated "arms control" mentality inherited from the waning days of the Cold War, completely undid the rather limited but sensible set of programs it inherited from the first Bush administration; rather than run the risk of simply terminating programs, they sought simply to tie missile defense efforts in knots while reducing funding. The current Bush administration, by contrast, has had an equally single-minded approach: undo the damage and root programs so deeply that killing them would be impractical. It too had a leftover Cold War agenda: withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and deploying a national missile defense system.
 
But treating missile defenses as the last battle of the Reagan years has left a whole host of programs with very uncertain strategic purpose in the post-9/11 environment. In a time of terrorism, the threat of ballistic missiles seems less pressing. The arsenals of rogue regimes--North Korea and the emerging Iranian capability--are most clearly intended as a deterrent, and mostly an indirect deterrent, to U.S. attack. Yet unlike Iraq, neither of the remaining "axis of evil" states looks to be a likely target of an American invasion. Thus, while sea-based and theater missile defenses remain an important priority, the argument for national missile defenses would seem to have little immediate application to such antagonistic but essentially weak adversaries. From an American perspective, the strategic value of national missile defenses in these cases does not seem worth the cost. Similarly, the remote chance of an unauthorized or accidental Russian launch is better handled not by building a wall around America, but by leaning forward, working with Moscow to slash its nuclear arsenal and improve security around its nuclear sites. Such an approach also has the simultaneous benefit of addressing the more realistic threat posed by the Russian arsenal: the possibility of the theft by terrorists of weapons or materials that could be deployed in an unconventional attack on the U.S. homeland.

The real value of national missile defenses lies in the long-term strategic competition with China. The PRC's nuclear arsenal is barely larger than that of North Korea, but the geopolitical consequences of a "deterred United States" that result from the possession of a minimal nuclear capability are exponentially greater. North Korea, evil and dangerous as it is, cannot be construed as a great power challenger to the United States and the global, liberal international order. The People's Republic of China, on the other hand, may be exactly that, not only across the Taiwan Strait, but elsewhere in East Asia and indeed the world. Thus the real mission for U.S. missile defenses is to eliminate the deterrent value of China's miniscule long-range ballistic missiles.

This mission that "dare not speak its name" may well be doomed to ultimate failure--China certainly commands the engineering talent and the wealth necessary to build an arsenal sufficient to offset the U.S. investment in defenses--but simply raising the cost of an assured deterrent for Beijing would add a crucial element to the larger strategic competition. First, the defensive nature of such systems is hardly provocative; China could not credibly claim that U.S. missile defenses were "targeted at them," even though Beijing will certainly raise a diplomatic storm in order to preserve its cheap deterrent. Second, China would have to respond by investing in its offensive capabilities, creating significant opportunity costs for its program to develop conventional power-projection capabilities. Missile defense optimized to deal with a Chinese threat is a perfect example of an asymmetric approach to a very severe strategic challenge.
 
The Bush administration's "layered" approach to missile defense--which incorporates a range of components--still makes sense. But the continuing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the "long, hard slog" of the global war on terror ahead of us, place a burden on the next Quadrennial Defense Review. Most importantly, it must assess how the Pentagon's missile defense programs fit within the new, post-9/11 strategic framework--and the budgetary constraints that may entail.

An Enlarged Understanding

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, President Bush constructed a national security policy that--consistent with America's past strategic culture--accepted the necessity of preemption, hegemony, and unilateralism in the global war on terror. These concepts, too, apply in the formulation of a homeland defense doctrine. By continuing to take an enlarged understanding of the boundaries of the American homeland, the Pentagon's next Quadrennial Defense Review can thus confer clarity on a concept that lies at the heart of the U.S. military's mission.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI.

Note

1. John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 13.