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Statement of
Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, National Security Studies
Council
on Foreign Relations
Before the
Committee on Governmental Affairs
United States Senate
October
12, 2001
I am Stephen Flynn, a Senior Fellow with the National Security
Studies Program at the Council on Foreign Relations where I have
been directing a project on “Protecting the Homeland:
Rethinking the Role of Border Controls.”
I am also a career U.S. Coast Guard officer and a member
of the Permanent Commissioned Teaching Staff of the U.S. Coast
Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut of which I am a proud
graduate. I am
speaking to you today in my capacity at a scholar who has been
thinking and writing these past five years about the issue of
asymmetric warfare and the vulnerability of the U.S. homeland to
a catastrophic terrorist attack.
I am honored to be afforded this opportunity to testify
on the how government should organize itself to meet the
imperatives of Homeland Security.
I was in New York City on that tragic Tuesday and like so
many who work and live there, I lost someone I knew—Mr. Fred
Morrone, Director
of Public Safety and Superintendent of Police for the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Fred was as decent and committed a public servant as you
would hope to find in this great nation.
His tragic loss along with the thousands of others who
now lie beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center towers has
transformed what had been, prior to September 11, an academic
issue for me. Now
it is a deeply personal one.
On the Monday following the attack, I stood at ground
zero and saw a sight I hope never to bear witness to again.
I commend this committee, and your leadership, Mr.
Chairman, in holding this hearing today.
There is no more vital issue before this country then
getting Homeland Security right.
I have read the President’s Executive Order Establishing the
Office of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Council.
I have examined S. 1449 and the bill to establish the
National Office for Combating Terrorism, and HR. 1158, the bill
to establish the National Homeland Security Agency.
I am familiar with the work of the Gilmore Commission
having been afforded the opportunity to brief that commission on
my research findings last April.
I have also been honored to work in support of the Hart-Rudman
Commission for which I served as a consultant on the Homeland
Security issue.
I am pleased that the President has taken the important step of
appointing Governor Tom Ridge to spearhead an effort to develop
and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national
strategy to secure the U.S. homeland from all forms of
terrorism. Such a
strategy is long overdue. I
am also gratified that the legislative branch is weighing in on
homeland security. As
the President has said, the war on terrorism will be a long
struggle. In light
of that fact, it is vitally important we vigorously examine and
debate where we should be heading and how we can best organize
ourselves to get there. In
the spirit of informing that enterprise, I offer the following.
As
this nation struggles to come to grip with our new sense of
insecurity and vulnerability, it needs to accept three things as
givens. First, no
matter how successful our current military efforts in
Afghanistan, for the foreseeable future, there will continue to
be anti-American terrorists with global reach.
Second, these terrorists will have access to the
means—including chemical and biological weapons—to carry out
lethal and catastrophic attacks on U.S. soil.
Last, the economic and societal disruption created by the
September 11 attacks has opened Pandora’s box.
Future terrorists bent on challenging U.S. power will
draw inspiration from the seeming ease at which America could be
attacked and they will be encouraged by the mounting costs to
the U.S. economy and the public psyche associated with the
ad-hoc efforts to restore security following that attack.
These realities highlight a central fact that strikes at the
very core of how this nation has organized itself to deal with
national security for the five decades following World War II.
Quite simply, we have built our defense and intelligence
communities to fight an away game.
But on
September 11, America’s new adversaries have sent an
unequivocal message: they intend to wage their war on our home front.
They also have indicated that they prefer to fight us
asymmetrically by attacking the American people, our landmarks,
and critical infrastructure.
In so doing, they have redefined who will be the
nation’s new foot soldiers in the battle to protect this
country from catastrophic terrorism. Those new foot soldiers are the front-line inspectors and
agents working for the Customs Service, INS, Border Patrol,
USDA, FAA, Coast Guard, and state and local law enforcement
officers and first responders.
Equally important are the private sector owners and
operators of the nation’s physical
plant, telecommunications, power, water supply, and
transportation sectors upon which our way of life and quality of
life depends. They must all make security a fundamental
priority.
For the past two years I have made field visits at crossings
along the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders, to many of this
nation’s seaports and airports, as well as overseas in
mega-ports such as Rotterdam and Hong Kong.
My research question has been this: given the cascading
tide of peoples and goods moving across international borders,
can we intercept that which is illegal and dangerous, while
facilitating that which is legitimate and benign?
The answer I have arrived at has sobering implications
for our post-World Trade Center world.
Stated succinctly, this nation has no credible means to
filter the bad from the good within the transportation networks
that link the U.S. economy with the world.
This has three very serious implications relevant to the
national emergency we find now ourselves facing.
First, if the President and his national security team believe
the odds are low for detecting and intercepting a catastrophic
terrorist attack on U.S. soil, they will inevitably feel all the
more pressure to quickly track down, arrest, or eliminate the
perpetrators. Since
an overseas manhunt requires some form of an international
posse, the pressure to act with dispatch may lead to the cutting
of deals with friends and foes alike that may carry a very
costly price-tag over the long run. Combating terrorism will be a prolonged struggle.
Therefore, policy makers need all the breathing room they
can get in building a diplomatic, military, and economic
strategy. Key to
achieving this will be restoring a sense that terrorist threats
on the United States can be managed.
Second, a sense of defeatism that once in transit, terrorists or
the means of terrorism cannot be stopped, places a heavy burden
on domestic policing and civil defense that may ultimately
endanger fundamental liberties.
If the assumption is that terrorists will always be able
to slip through and set up shop on American soil, then the
argument for allowing law enforcement more intrusive
surveillance technologies becomes a compelling one.
The case for reducing the barriers for the intelligence
community to engage in domestic collection efforts also gathers
more force. In
addition to the loss of privacy protections, domestic
counter-terrorist efforts can be used as a basis for justifying
more restrictions on freedom of movement, and imposing a larger
“security tax” on virtually all aspects of modern life.
Third, the absence of a credible capacity to filter illicit from
licit cross-border activity places U.S. commerce at frequent
risk of disruption. This
stems not so much from acts of terror as it does from the U.S.
response to it. In
the hours following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the combined
result of grounding the commercial aviation fleet, stopping all
inbound ships arriving in the nation’s major seaports, and
moving from Alert Condition 4 to Alert Condition 1 at the land
border was to place a tourniquet around the transportation
arteries that feed the national economy.
This blunt response was prudent given the initial
uncertainty surrounding the attacks.
Any plane, train, ship or truck could have been a bomb.
But, there is some risk that taking such drastic measures may
now become standard procedure not just in the wake of a future
attack, but whenever the government is presented credible
intelligence about a threat of catastrophic terrorism.
For example, imagine that a covert human intelligence operation
has successfully penetrated a terrorist cell and discovered that
a container has been loaded with a chemical weapon and destined
for an importer in the United States.
At present, the U.S. government has virtually no means to
identify the location of a container until it reaches its final
destination port. Once
it has left an Asian port it could be placed on a coastal
freighter and then mixed among the more than million containers
handled each month by Hong Kong or Singapore.
There it could be loaded aboard a container ship destined
for Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long
Beach, or even the Panama Canal where it could enter the United
States through any of the seaports on the Gulf or Atlantic
coasts. Given this
situation, the President would face the unhappy choice of
effectively creating maritime transportation gridlock so as to
allow each container to be examined when it arrives, or praying
that the container does not get diverted or the weapon is not
activated before it can be detained at its final destination.
In the post-World Trade Center world, two things can be accepted
as certainties. First,
there exists a heightened risk of another attack either by
adversaries or terrorists who are inspired by the example of
September 11 or in retaliation to the U.S. response.
Second, stepped-up counter terrorist intelligence work
will inevitably produce more warnings of possible attacks; i.e.,
the more the intelligence community looks, the more they are
likely to find threats that should be taken seriously.
In both instances, we face the likely prospect routinely
imposing an embargo on our own economy as a preventative measure
to protecting the homeland.
Over time, this has the potential to advance the primary
aim of the terrorist: to
weaken the United States by creating profound economic and
societal disruption.
What does all this mean for the way we organize ourselves for
homeland security?
First, it means that we need to fix some very broken front line
agencies. The
Customs Service, INS, Border Patrol, USDA, and Coast Guard
simply lack the manpower, data management tools, communications
equipment, and collaborative mechanisms to protect our borders.
A few facts make the case:
-- Despite the fact that Canadian Security and Intelligence
Service (CSIS) believes that there may be as many as 50
terrorist groups with a foothold in Canada, as of August 2001,
the U.S. Border Patrol had just 330 agents supported by a single
analyst. Their
monumental task is to detect and intercept illegal border
crossings along the vast open spaces of the 4000-mile land and
water border with Canada.
-- U.S. trade with Canada climbed from $116.3 billion in 1985 to
$409.8 billion in 2000, but U.S. Customs has only 700 inspectors
assigned to the northern border—200 less then it had twenty
years ago. On the
border crossings in the State of Washington, Montana, North
Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Vermont and Maine,
routinely half of the existing primary inspection booths remain
closed solely because of the understaffing of U.S. Customs and
INS inspectors.
-- After a decade of budgetary neglect, the U.S. Coast Guard
which is tasked to maintain port security and patrol 95,000
miles of shoreline, has had to reduce its ranks to the lowest
level since 1964 and to routinely cannibalize its decades-old
cutters and aircraft for spare parts to keep them operational.
In the 1990s, the Coast Guard did assemble six specially
trained “Port
Security Units.” But
these units are manned by reservists and funded by the
Department of Defense to serve overseas so as to protect
military forces operating in foreign ports.
--
These frontline agencies cannot effectively talk with each
other. For example,
imagine there is a ship with a shadowy record of serving in the
darker corners of the maritime trade.
Its shipping agent sends notice that it will be importing
a type of cargo that does not square with its homeport or its
recent ports of call. It
is manned by crew members some of which are on an intelligence
watch list because they are suspected of having links with
radical Islamic fundamentalist organizations. This ship is
scheduled to arrive on the same day that a tanker carrying
highly volatile fuel is also arriving in port.
It would be reasonable for the American public to expect
that a ship with a shady past, carrying suspect cargo, and
manned by a questionable crew would be identified, stopped and
examined before it could enter U.S. waters with potentially
tragic consequences. However,
under the current border management architecture, odds are this
would not happen because none of these red flags would be viewed
simultaneously. The
Coast Guard is likely to know something about the ship and will
know also about the scheduled arrival of a tanker carrying
hazardous cargo. Customs
will receive some advance cargo manifest information.
INS may or may not know that much about the
crew—depending on the kind of visas the sailors are holding
and the timeliness with which the shipping agent faxes the crew
list. In addition, none of the frontline inspectors in these
agencies are likely to have access to national security
intelligence from the FBI or the CIA.
And all of these agencies will have more people, cargo,
and ships that spark their interest and concern than they have
the manpower to intercept and inspect.
We
need to ask how these front-line agencies could be so broken? The answer lies in no small part because their parent
departments, congressional appropriators, and OMB reviewers have
failed to appreciate the vital security role these agencies
play.
Finally, we need to ask how can we fix this—and soon. “Better coordination” alone will not answer the mail.
Coordinating broken entities that have not been well
served by their parent departments will not provide the nation
with the kind of robust border management capability the country
requires to prevent terrorists attacks on U.S. soil.
These agencies will need a serious long-term infusion of
resources to man, equip, and train them to operate in the more
complex security environment within which they must perform.
They will require a powerful advocate in the executive
branch, and strong allies on Capitol Hill.
The best way to achieve that is to assign these agencies
to a new home in the U.S. government under one roof.
September 11 was a watershed event.
Many of the people I rode in with early that morning on
the commuter train to New York never made the return trip home
to their husbands, wives, children, and parents.
There is much more we could have done prior to September
11 to prevent terrorist and the means of terrorism from being
able to target this nation.
There is much we can do and now must do to reduce the
risk of another catastrophic event on U.S. soil.
When it comes to rethinking how to organize the U.S.
government to meet the vital homeland security imperative,
everything should be placed on the table.
Thank you for this
opportunity to present my thoughts before you. I welcome your
comments and questions.
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