Defense, National

views updated

Defense, National

National security would seem to be a simple concept to define. Joseph Nye Jr., who served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (1994-1995) during President Bill Clinton’s first term, observed that security is like oxygen—it is essential to all other governmental activity. Without it, a government is likely to become paralyzed and incapable of action, and may ultimately risk collapse. Not surprisingly, states generally regard national security as their primary responsibility. In common American parlance, the term national security has almost become a cliché and refers to the government’s efforts to defend the state from threats, mainly military threats but perhaps internal subversion as well. In other words, “security” seemingly equates to “defense.” However, while defense is an integral aspect of security, military defense does not exhaust the range of functions that governments must perform to ensure security, nor does it reflect the institutional affiliations of the people who work to provide security.

The term national defense evokes an era when the nation and the state, especially in northwest Europe and the United States, were thought to be one and the same— hence the term nation-state. Defense of the state meant defense of the nation, and security was largely defined in ways that reinforced this equation. In fact, virtually every modern state is multinational or multiethnic, even multi-confessional. Frequently, this diversity of religion directly relates to diversity of nationalities in the state, and many states are driven by conflicts among these diverse religions and nationalities. Therefore, a state, to be secure, must act in ways that forestall the emergence of crippling interethnic or interreligious confrontations. Such internal divisions frequently invite foreign intervention. In these contexts, security extends beyond defense against external invaders to include the prevention of civil war. Such a situation developed, for example, in Iraq, where contending Islamic groups became divided on the basis of religion and ethnicity (Shia and Sunni) and nationality (Sunni, Shia, and Kurd), and where foreigners intervened on every side.

Such internal divisions also developed in conflicts in Africa and the former Yugoslavia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many such conflicts, particularly in the third world, exemplify the fact that security pertains as much to the assurance of continuing internal order as it does to defense of the realm. Many third world countries simultaneously face the exigencies of state-building—that is, assuring internal security and defense against external threats—without sufficient time or resources to compete successfully with other more established states. Not surprisingly, the primary concern of the government becomes internal security and its continuation in power, leading to a proliferation of military, intelligence, and police forces. Indeed, for these states, and arguably even for transitional states like Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s, internal police forces are granted greater state resources than regular armies, this being a key indicator of the primacy of internal security as part of national security. Nevertheless, if states cannot defend themselves militarily against threats that have arisen due to a previous failure to provide security, the states themselves may fail.

Because of the breadth of domestic or foreign threats to the security of a society or a state in the modern world, national security can no longer be limited to defense against military attacks or internal unrest. Governments in the twenty-first century must defend against a multitude of threats to the health, viability, and integrity of society. Such threats extend beyond the canonical threat of war with another state or domestic unrest that culminates in revolution or civil war. The potential threats to state security include terrorism, large-scale criminality, narcotics trafficking, uncontrolled immigration, natural disasters, epidemics, and chemical and biological warfare. The threats facing states may also include major international economic crises, such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to 1998. These threats also tend increasingly to spill over national borders, often uniting the transnational purveyors of the threat (e.g., terrorist movements, crime syndicates). The range of potential threats blurs the distinction between military and police missions. Often, both institutions act together to promote security, as exemplified by the participation of the U.S. military in antidrug activities, homeland security, and the response to natural disasters. Thus, in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, calls multiplied in the United States for revising legal codes to permit greater scope for domestic military action during natural disasters.

Homeland security was proclaimed as the U.S. military’s main mission after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, leading to a dramatic expansion of its domestic role. This change has reopened the debate over the legitimate role of the armed forces in domestic security, and has stimulated the Department of Defense, the armed services, and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA to advocate substantial enhancement of their domestic powers. Thus the erosion of distinctions between security and defense, or between power projection abroad and homeland defense, creates difficult and persisting issues of possible encroachments on the domestic civil rights of Americans. These matters ultimately must be decided by the courts and legislatures. But their reemergence indicates that a fundamental component of national security remains the internal balance of power between civilian and democratic authorities and the armed forces that are supposed to be subordinate to them. These issues also raise the equally perennial question of the legal limits of state power in wartime, when it becomes too easy to argue that defense of the state overrides previously granted rights that are enjoyed without question (or seemingly so) in peacetime.

The same issues have arisen in other countries. The war that began in 1991 in the republic of Chechnya in southeastern Russia served as the primary justification for the curtailment of Russian federalism and of innumerable civil rights for the population and the media. In Great Britain, the government’s reaction to the terrorist bombings in July 2005 occasioned a lively debate over the civil rights of Muslim immigrants to Great Britain and of British citizens in general. Thus the contemporary threat environment, punctuated by the global fear of and war against terrorism, is a manifestation of global trends and issues. This overall similarity of trends and agendas relates in important ways to the universal and transnational nature of twenty-first-century threats. And because contemporary threats to security are transnational, they must often be dealt with in international forums or through multilateral cooperation. The erosion of distinctions between security and defense, along with the globalization of threats, has generated global counterresponses.

Nonetheless, if states cannot defend against any or some combination, let alone all, of these threats, their security immediately becomes at risk as societal cohesion comes under threat. Indonesia’s regime collapsed in 1998 for failing to cope with the Asian financial crisis. The governments of China, Russia, and the countries of Central Asia also believe that their internal cohesion and thus security are under threat from the ideologies of democracy, allegedly supported by foreign nongovernmental organizations and by states who use these organizations, as well as the tools of the media and information technology, to undermine their regimes. These regimes’ leaders frequently charge that the United States is orchestrating a campaign to promote democracy, and even that democracy threatens their security and sovereignty.

Thus the term national security must encompass societal or state security against the entire range of threats described above, including traditional war, insurgency, and revolution. National security reaches beyond the defense of the state to encompass the goal of achieving and sustaining a broader societal cohesion, resilience, and integrity that can withstand numerous shocks or threats. Since the contemporary environment makes ensuring state security in this broad sense government’s most fundamental responsibility, with defense being the main component of the provision of security, the burden of state spending on security and defense is huge. Similarly, many state organizations beyond defense ministries are involved in providing security, and their missions are steadily expanding.

Strategic threats to a society or state, threats that can overwhelm a state’s ability to overcome or even effectively respond to them, have become multidimensional, and may originate from and be targeted at the land, the seas and other bodies of water, the air, space, and the ether (cyberspace). Consequently, threats, as well as the response to them, are no longer exclusively determined by geography. Any actor anywhere in the world, be it an individual or an institution, with the means to carry out an attack, can target anyone or any object in any of these dimensions. Moreover, the originator of these threats need not launch an attack from his or her point of origin. All an enemy need do is set an attack in motion, as the Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden did in 2001 when he initiated attacks on New York City and the Washington, D.C., area from Afghanistan. Those actually carrying out the mission can identify the appropriate medium and locales wherein they can launch an attack. This backdrop also greatly multiplies the possibilities for shadowy relationships between sponsoring states and transnational terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. In America’s “war on terror,” for example, the enemy has no geographical center.

As a result, the number of possible strategic targets is greatly expanded. Any place on earth can become a target or a launching site for major attacks. Since no state can preplan sufficiently to ensure global and multidimensional readiness, governments everywhere face so variegated a repertoire of threats that they must devise new methods of responding or they must greatly transform existing institutions to meet the variety of threats. Many more issues than before now come under the rubric of national security, as do many more state organs and policies. Since providing for security has become even more of a challenge to a state’s capability and resources, often stretching the state beyond the breaking point, expanded multilateral forms of security cooperation among states have developed. This cooperation may involve agencies responsible for the military, police, intelligence, public health, the treasury, immigration, and so on. This expanded burden upon states adds substantially to the pressures upon states who face major challenges of state building (e.g., Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and helps explain why so many regimes are on the verge of failure.

The centrality of security as the state’s preeminent responsibility emerges clearly from comparisons of different states’ approaches to the task of providing security. This is not just because of the priority accorded in the United States to homeland defense since 2001. In the war on terrorism, security is no longer the sole province of the regular armed forces, whereas in the United States as well as in other nations, defense remains very much a military prerogative. Security, on the other hand, can be provided by the police forces, intelligence agencies, bank inspectors, public health services, and airport security personnel. Indeed, it is universally agreed that all providers of security, wherever they may function, ideally should be coordinated so that efforts and information flow freely between different agencies, and that effective responses to threats may be coordinated either among the various components of national bureaucracies or among transnational institutions.

In Afghanistan since 2001, for example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provides defense in support of the U.S. military mission there. In fact, both NATO and the U.S. armed forces became engaged in the overall reconstruction of the state after the deposing of the Taliban government in late 2001. The situation was similar in Iraq after U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. Such international cooperation is necessary, given the nature of the contemporary threat environment and the rise of what scholars discern as new paradigms of war. In one new paradigm, warfare takes place among the people and entails more than just providing defense. In such a war, it becomes necessary to provide security and to enable the revival of a functioning state.

This is by no means an exclusively American view. French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie wrote that “to respond to such testing situations, solutions must be developed which if not purely military, must be military above all” (2005, p. 15). In other words, the expanded threat environment of the twenty-first century imposes security and defense missions on the armed forces that extend far beyond previous concepts of security and defense, or the simple notion of operational victory over opposing armed forces. This environment necessarily brings into the picture both greater transnational threats and greater cooperation against them, as well as expanded roles in the provision of security for a much broader range of state agencies.

At the same time, it is not the case that all states view the expanded range of threats in the same light. Whereas the U.S. government sees terrorism primarily in terms of a military threat, Germany (at least under the administration [1998-2005] of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder) sees terrorism mainly as a criminal phenomenon that must be confronted by police and nonmilitary measures. Italy, on the other hand, provides for a much greater range of military involvement under the rubric of national and civil defense. However, many states and analysts of international security affairs warn that despite the enlistment of the armed forces in antiterrorist operations, antiterrorism must not supplant the traditional defense missions of the regular armed forces.

Security, therefore, is broader than defense and encompasses efforts to maintain the well-being and integrity of society as a whole. Defense, in contrast, relates to ensuring that the state itself and its citizens, armed forces, and vital interests are not attacked, or if they are attacked, that the attacker is defeated. Undoubtedly, security encompasses defense, but not vice versa. Moreover, there is no universal agreement on the nature of the threat posed by terrorists, as the German example illustrates. Neither is it possible to assume that the provision of security in this broad comprehensive sense will eclipse the need for armies to defend against major attacks on a state’s vital interests and resources, human or material. The September 11, 2001, attacks were an act of war carried out against the United States on a global scale and should be seen as such, even if the entire range of instruments of power available to the U.S. government must be brought into play across a broad agenda that encompasses such realms as financial monitoring, antiproliferation, public health, and emergency management.

National security does not refer merely to national defense, as it did during the cold war. But, at the same time, it cannot mean less than national defense. War remains the ultimate argument of states, and defense, even more than security in the broad sense, remains their primary responsibility. While it is true that failure to provide adequate security, in the comprehensive definition of the term given here, places a state’s future at risk, failure to defend the state against violent threats transforms that risk into the certainty of defeat. While security encompasses defense, defense is the most critical aspect of security and is likely to remain so.

SEE ALSO Arms Control and Arms Race; Arms Race; Deterrence; Military