Homeland $ecurity
After 9/11, the Bush Administration started one of the largest government agencies ever and we are spending some $75 billion dollars a year on security. Is it worth it? A Ohio State University professor puts the terror business into a bit of perspective:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year. So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?”
Money spent on bombs and fake security does not show up on the government debt, so these items are basically free. Every dollar spent on NPR, however, is like a million knives stabbing Grover Norquist in the eye.
Well, I’ve never had a fire at my house, so did I waste money by buying smoke detectors?
Spending on security is something you’ll never be able to truly quantify; you can’t know what the cost of the attack prevented was, nor even how many attacks were discouraged or never occurred because the potential attackers couldn’t figure out a way they were certain enough would get around security.
If there is never another attack, it could easily be argued that we spent way too much money on security; if there is another attack, it will surely be argued that we didn’t spend enough.
DHS was a typical government reaction: more bureaucracy. I don’t like that we have it, but most of the functions seem necessary. I’d have been happier, though, if we’d made it part of the Department of the Interior, the way it is in most countries.
The Soviets had nuclear weapons with intercontinental ranges, weapons in sufficient quantity to obliterate this country. We spent billions on a deterrent nuclear force, in bombers, ICBMs and SSBNs. No Soviet attack was ever launched.
Now, did we spend more than was necessary to deter a Soviet nuclear attack? The answer is: we don’t know, and we really can’t know.
The Russians still have nuclear weapons with intercontinental ranges, and both of our countries have more than sufficient capacity to destroy *the entire world* many times over. At some point we went way past deterrent to shoveling money at the M&O companies building these weapons. In other words, for nuclear weapons, we went way past the business of security into sheer madness a long time ago. And we still pay silly amounts of money to maintain this level of destruction. Which — in spite of multiple treaties to reduce warheads — is still way more than anyone needs for so-called *deterrence*.
DHS itself, was not new government spending. We were already spending the money. We reorganized our government security functions under a single command. I guess effeciency and common sense is too blinding for you to accept.
I think that alot of the price of DHS and the post-terrorist mind set is in the fear-mongering business that we all too often indulge in. The TSA security theater is not security — it is meant to largely give the impression of security while spending alot of tax dollars for little result. More importantly, it codifies the idea that you are a terrorist until proven otherwise. Which is a pretty shitty way for your government to look at you.
DHS was new government spending, Delusional David — lots of the TSA structure as it exists today (as well as its requirements) did not exist before the DHS and the creation of the TSA.
And certainly no one would claim that the DHS is any more efficient than the previous structures, either.
“Spending on security is something you’ll never be able to truly quantify…”
I think we can all agree that if Bush had spent a bit more time and a little more brain power on security pre-9/11, we’d be living in a much different world right now.
Cassandra, there were serious debates during the 1970s and 1980s over “minimum deterrence,” basically a counter-city strategy in which it was the enemy’s cities which were targeted, “counterforce,” in which you were targeting the enemy’s striking forces, in an attempt to minimize damage to yourself by destroying his forces before they could be launched, and whether you had to deter what it was most probable he would do or the worst he could do. With failure to guess right meaning total destruction, any errors were made on the side of assuming the worst.
Which points out both the silliness of the escalation and its essential hubris. As if once the Soviets and the US started pushing buttons that there would be something *orderly* about the targeting, the launching, the destruction. So pretending that there was something rational about it, we spent a ton of money to ensure that we both had the ability to destroy the planet multiple times over. And when there are new treaties meant to pull back on some of that stupidity, you and yours run around with your hair on fire. Even though plenty of capacity of destroy the world remains.
Remember that DHS was thrust down the Bush Admnistration’s throat by Congress. I have little good to say about Bush and Bushies, but their initial opposition to DHS was one they got right.
http://rationalrevolution.net/war/homeland_security_act.htm
DHS has been a boondoggle rather than an effective agency since day one.
I worked in Alabama at the Center for Domestic Preparedness helping to train the first transferees from other agencies (DOJ, DoT, DoE, etc.). It was clear at the time, and later verified for me by several senior administrators, that these agencies used the opportunity to transfer out their hacks and troublemakers.
That’s one.
Two is that if you read the 9/11 commission report carefull and the myriad of reports turned out by thinktanks left and right, the “connect-the-dots” failure prior to 9/11 included a hefty dose of “top down” rather than “bottom up” management of operational and strategic intelligence. So what did the DHS structure do? Create an even more centralized cone of distribution for intelligence that is even less responsive to many specific types of intel that the one we originally had.
That’s two.
Third strike is that multiple programs individual agencies had proposed unsuccessfully over the years were suddenly converted into “security-related” programs because Congress for about five years gave DHS absolutely everything it asked for. So the budgets of the composing agencies jumped enormously, even though (using DOJ as an example) the programs were directed at speeders, drug users, and corporate embezzlers rather than crazed suicide bombers.
That’s strike three.
There is no effective argument that any serious study has ever produced to suggest that the creation of DHS has made us any safer.
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that it has caused multiple civil rights to evaporate.
so -lets cut Defense and DHS spending – instead of education and social programs
Anyone?? T-Party??
Steve,
Well said, especially with strike 3.