THE HART-RUDMAN COMMISSION

AND THE HOMELAND DEFENSE

Ian Roxborough

September 2001
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ISBN 1-58487-065-6

ii
FOREWORD

The American public and its leaders are paying

increasing attention to the issue of homeland defense. With

the exception of attacks by ballistic missiles, the continental

United States was long held to be virtually immune from

attack. For Americans, wars were something that took

place in other countries. In the future, that may not hold.

But while strategic thinkers agree that homeland

defense needs greater attention, there is less consensus on

the precise nature of the threat. In this monograph, Dr. Ian

Roxborough takes issue with the commonly held

assumption that the main threat to the American homeland

will come from terrorism inspired by U.S. leadership of

globalization. Roxborough contends that the architects of

the American strategy for homeland defense need a broader

perspective that includes a wide range of existing or

potential threats.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish this

monograph as a contribution to the ongoing evolution of

American thinking about homeland defense.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute

iii
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

IAN ROXBOROUGH is currently Professor of History and

Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony

Brook. He was previously employed at the London School of

Economics and the University of Glasgow. During 1997-98

he was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for National

Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Dr.

Roxborough has published several books and numerous

articles on Latin America. His current research is a study of

the post-Cold War debates about U.S. military strategy and

doctrine. Dr. Roxborough has a B.A. from the University of

York, England, and a Ph.D. from the University of

Wisconsin-Madison.

iv
SUMMARY

The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st

Century, popularly known as the Hart-Rudman

Commission after its chairs, has recently produced a series

of reports. The commission believes that recent changes in

the security environment mean the rise of new threats, in

particular the likelihood of an attack on American soil

resulting in thousands of casualties. As a consequence, the

commission calls for major changes in the organization of

national security institutions in order to respond

adequately to these new challenges.

This monograph discusses the assumptions underlying

the diagnosis and threat assessment made by the

commission. It argues that several assumptions made by

the commission are of debatable merit and rest on a very

selective reading of social science. The commission relies

heavily on the notion that globalization has both integrative

and disintegrative tendencies. While for much of the world

globalization increases integration, there will be an intense

rejection of western culture and a backlash to globalization

in parts of the Third World. The key assumptions

underlying this picture are that people in traditional

societies are disoriented by rapid social change and seek to

turn the clock back.

In fact, this notion that globalization is likely to produce

a backlash from Third World, and particularly Islamic

societies, has very little to support it. The monograph

argues that the work of the commission is based on poor

social science and that there is the risk that this has

produced an inaccurate diagnosis of the causes of conflict in

the 21st century. The commission believes that

fundamentally we are moving into an era of global cultural

conflict. This is speculative, and there is little in the way of

hard evidence to support such an assertion. We might

equally be moving into a historical period in which global

v
resource conflicts and changing regional power balances

will lead aspiring regional hegemons to embark on policies

that lead to war.

The monograph discusses four assumptions underlying

the work of the commission. They are: (1) globalization will

be a mixed blessing, producing both more integration and

also strident rejection; (2) social change is disruptive and

produces conflict because people lose their moral bearings

(what some authors call “anomie”); (3) what underlies

conflict is ultimately a clash of fundamental values; and (4)

the world is entering a radically new age. Each of these

assumptions is, in the view of the author of this monograph,

wrong.

The commission’s focus on a threat of mass casualty

attack on the American homeland perpetrated by Third

World states runs the risk of an unbalanced threat

assessment. The threat of mass casualty by foreign states

cannot be discounted, but it is not clear how the commission

arrives at the conclusion that this is likely to be America’s

biggest security challenge in the coming decades. This

monograph argues, first, that there is also a substantial risk

of mass casualty attack perpetrated by U.S. citizens.

Focusing on primarily on a threat from foreign states may

lead to defensive measures which may do little to reduce the

domestic threat. Second, the focus on dealing with the

threat of mass casualty attack on the United States needs to

be balanced with a range of other security concerns,

including the possible rise of would-be regional hegemons.

The monograph also discusses the analysis made by the

Hart-Rudman Commission concerning likely future trends

in American society and the implications these will have for

American military power. The commission argues that

globalization and declining social cohesion in American

society will together lead to an erosion of the ties between

citizens and the state. The commission believes that this

will result in a rather brittle public support for American

military operations. The monograph argues that this

vi
analysis of social trends in American society is one-sided.

While there are many matters that should concern us about

likely future trends in American society, the redefinition of

social ties should not be one. America is experiencing rapid

change in patterns of family, work and leisure, and these

will not uniformly result in less social integration. At any

event, it is unclear that changing conceptions of citizenship

will impinge on America’s ability to conduct military

operations in the ways which the commission thinks are

likely.

For these reasons, while many of the policy

recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission are

eminently sound, there is some risk they will not provide a

balanced and adequate strategic response to the changed

security environment.

The monograph then discusses the implications for the

Army and for the Department of Defense of the threat of a

mass casualty attack on the American homeland. It argues

that the Army should be cautious in the manner in which it

accepts the homeland defense mission. First, with the

addition of a new mission, there is likely to be a

strategy-resources mismatch unless considerable

additional resources are forthcoming (which is unlikely.)

Second, the monograph argues that it is by no means clear

that Army resources (and in particular, the National

Guard) are the most cost-effective way to deal with the

consequences of a mass casualty attack on the American

homeland. While there is a great deal that the Army can and

should do, the brunt of consequence management is likely to

be borne by civilian emergency response agencies. While

these agencies have the potential to deal effectively with the

consequences of such an attack, they are at present

seriously unprepared for the consequence management

task, and should receive additional resources as a high

priority.

The major recommendations of the commission concern

reorganization of the institutions of national security. While

vii
many of these recommendations, such as the call for a

National Homeland Security Agency, should be adopted,

the commission is prone to rely heavily on moral

exhortation rather than, for example, economic incentives,

as a way of changing what it sees as inefficiencies and

defects in American government. This monograph argues

that moral exhortation is unlikely to be effective except as

part of a large package of policies.

The Hart-Rudman Commission calls for the United

States to develop a “culture of coordinated strategic

planning.” This is an important recommendation which

plays to one of the Army’s strengths. It is in the Army’s

interest to do what it can to encourage the development of

strategic culture, and in particular of a balanced set of

capabilities to deal with a wide range of diverse threats.

viii
THE HART-RUDMAN COMMISSION

AND HOMELAND DEFENSE

Introduction.

The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st

Century, frequently known as the Hart-Rudman

Commission after its chairmen, issued its third and final

report in January 2001. The bottom-line conclusion is that

the primary national security challenge that the United

States will face in the next 20 or 30 years will be an attack by

an adversary on the American homeland which could

produce thousands of casualties. To deal with this threat,

the commission calls for a major reorganization of the U.S.

national security apparatus. The changed security

environment and the changed threat to American society

suggest a fundamental rethinking of the organizations

designed to achieve national security: there is no reason to

assume that an organizational structure established in the

early days of the Cold War and designed to counter the

Soviet threat will prove adequate to deal with the new

threat that the commission forecasts.

The basic proposition of the commission is that the forces

of globalization and the internet will have mixed results.

They will produce greater global integration in some areas,

and a rejection of modernity in others. As a result, the

commission concludes that “like it or not, we are entering an

era of global culture conflict.”

1

 The commission believes, in a

formulation that is clearly indebted to the work of Alvin and

Heidi Toffler, that “[w]e are witnessing a transformation of

human society on the magnitude of that between the

agricultural and industrial epochs—and in a far more

compressed period of time.”

2

This analysis of the sources of conflict in the 21st century

is certainly open to debate. In my view it is wrong. If so, the

1
policy implications suggested by the commission need to be

considered carefully before being implemented.

I argue that the underlying assumptions of the

commission led it to a mistaken analysis of trends, both

globally and in the United States. This, in turn, produces a

threat assessment which is heavily skewed to one particular

kind of threat, and which does not properly balance a range

of threats. Further, as a result of the underlying

assumptions about the nature of trends in the United

States, while the commission identifies some important

areas for policy change, it misdiagnoses other issues.

Central Arguments and Underlying Assumptions.

The argument that the United States now faces a

radically new security environment in which the threat of

mass casualty attack on the American homeland is a serious

possibility is not entirely original. In recent years several

official panels and commissions, and many independent

commentators, have turned their attention to the prospects

of mass casualty attacks within the United States and

appropriate responses. What distinguishes the work of the

Hart-Rudman Commission is the intellectual effort

invested in a careful analysis of the future security

environment, embedded in a serious effort at analyzing

future trends more generally. Together with three reports,

the commission produced a 150-page supporting document,

New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century,

which contains a detailed and careful analysis of global

dynamics, regional trends, trends in technology, and trends

in American society and culture. A large study group and

support staff facilitated the work of the commissioners. As

such, the work of the commission merits extended comment.

It is the only official report to provide a sustained analysis of

likely future trends, both in the United States and globally,

which may bear on an assessment of the probability of a

mass casualty attack on the U.S. homeland. The intellectual

2
courage of the authors of this valuable report is to be

applauded.

An assessment of New World Coming is by no means a

simple task. The report surveys a very wide range of

scenarios and is reluctant to discount all but a few of them.

As must necessarily be the case in any exercise in

futurology, there is a certain quality of “maybe this, maybe

that” about the report. The future, as the report suggests, is

likely to be a mosaic of quite varied outcomes. It would

therefore be easy to unintentionally emphasize some parts

of the report and neglect other, qualifying statements.

Nevertheless, basic themes in the report can be highlighted.

The commission subscribes to four underlying

assumptions: (1) globalization will be a mixed blessing,

producing both more integration and also strident rejection;

(2) social change is disruptive and produces conflict because

people lose their moral bearings (what some authors call

“anomie”); (3) what underlies conflict is ultimately a clash of

fundamental values; and (4) the world is entering a

radically new age. These assumptions have become common

currency among social commentators in recent years. Since

they underpin much of the commission’s analysis, they

should not pass unacknowledged. Each of these

assumptions is, in my view, wrong.

The proposition that globalization will produce a

backlash that will be the fundamental security challenge to

the United States has little empirical evidence to support it.

Although popular writers like Robert Kaplan and Benjamin

Barber have argued that globalization will generate a

rejectionist backlash, the most authoritative recent social

science texts

3

 give little weight to this, emphasizing instead

the gradual development of global norms of appropriate

conduct and the increasing extent to which politics is

defined by notions of human rights, common humanity, and

concern for the environment. Certainly there are people

who oppose globalization; but it is by no means clear that

3
these people will pose the biggest security challenge to the

United States in the coming decades. Certainly there will be

conflicts; but many, and perhaps most of them, will be a

response to factors other than globalization. There is a real

danger of making globalization into a sort of bogeyman that

is held accountable for all the troubles of the world. It is a

diagnosis which is far too sweeping to usefully inform

strategic choice.

An underlying argument of the commission is that social

change produces dislocation and tumult.

4

 It produces a turn

to pre-modern forms of social and political action. This is,

according to the commission, already noticeable in the

Muslim world. Like several other commentators,

5

 the

Hart-Rudman Commission believes that the real threat to

the United States comes from a rejectionist backlash to

globalization which will take the form of Jihad.

Pressures towards secularization inherent in the Western

technology that will flood much of the world over the next 25

years will not necessarily overcome traditional ways, but might

instead reinvigorate them. . . Geopolitics could become, in

essence, a form of culture politics.

6

In this way, the authors of New World Coming manage to

integrate a globalization backlash theory with a theory of

cultural clash, not dissimilar to that suggested by Samuel

Huntington.

7

This puts the United States in the position of a status

quo power. As the Hart-Rudman Commission suggests, the

notion of the simultaneously integrative and disruptive

forces of globalization implies that

the essence of American strategy must compose a balance

between two key aims. The first is to reap the benefits of a more

integrated world in order to expand freedom, security, and

prosperity for Americans and others. But, second, American

strategy must also strive to dampen the forces of global

instability so that those benefits can endure.

8

4
Of course, identifying which global changes are likely to

promote freedom, security and prosperity, and which do not

is no easy task. There exists the danger that all change will

be seen as “instability,” leading U.S. policymakers into an

unthinking conservatism that is both unsustainable and

counterproductive. The achievement of more freedom,

security, and prosperity will almost certainly produce

greater global instability in at least some important spheres

of economic, political, or social life. One can therefore

reasonably ask of the Hart-Rudman Commission how

policymakers are to distinguish change—which is

necessary and inevitable—from instability. There is a real

danger that the United States will make “instability” into a

threat instead of developing a strategy that will enable it to

adapt to the forces of global change over which it cannot

expect to have total control.

Returning to the commission’s main theme of increasing

risk of attack from foreign actors, it must be said that the

empirical and logical basis for globalization backlash and

culture clash theories is by no means self-evident or

convincing, despite the popularity of these theories within

Washington policy circles. Brookings analyst Yahya

Sadowski argues that there is little or no empirical evidence

to support theories which postulate a anti-modernist

reaction to Westernization and globalization. He says:

The great majority of the conflicts in the world today are not

“clashes of civilizations” but fratricides that pit old neighbors,

often from similar or identical cultures, against each other . . .

Societies in the throes of globalization are not any more likely

to suffer anomic social violence, culture clashes, or ethnic

conflict than countries that are not.

9

Not only are theories of globalization based on notions of

anomic backlash fundamentally flawed, similar theories

have been shown in instance after instance to be an

inaccurate and misleading explanation of popular political

radicalism. From early militancy by workers during the

industrial revolution, to Third World urban protest, to the

5
rise of extremist movements like Naziism, anomie-based

explanations have been consistently falsified by empirical

research.

10

 And although U.S. policymakers may find

anomie-based theories emotionally and cognitively

comfortable, they are in fact a poor guide for the

understanding of social dynamics, and a dangerous basis for

policymaking. They lead both to overgeneralization and

misidentification of the sources of conflict in the modern

world.

With regard to the third underlying assumption of the

commission, there is no consensus among social scientists

that conflict in the 21st century will be based on a clash of

essentially different values and cultures. Although Samuel

Huntington has made a strong case for a clash of cultures as

the fundamental driving force behind conflict in the 21st

century, his proposition has been subjected to sustained

criticism by other social scientists.

11

 The notion that the

important fault-lines in the world lie between civilizations,

and that therefore future conflicts will be about

fundamental values ignores a mass of research on the role of

strategic, organizational, political, and economic factors in

war causation.

12

 It is a one-sided focus on a single factor

which creates a gripping story, but is likely to be misleading

as a guide to policy.

It should be noted that there are other ways to view the

world of the early 21st century than the globalization theory

espoused by the commission. The commission does not

subscribe, for instance, to a realist view of international

relations in which the most serious threats to U.S. national

security would come from expanding regional hegemons.

The commissioners note that these threats exist, but argue

that the United States is unlikely to be challenged by a peer

competitor and that threats from would-be regional

hegemons, while they should be guarded against, do not

constitute the most serious threat to the security of the

United States.

13

 It is not unreasonable to disagree with the

commission’s assessment here.

6
Finally, the broad conceptual scheme of a transition

from agricultural to industrial to information-based society

(the Toffler view) is but one among many diagnoses of our

times. Certainly a lot of change is going on: whether this

amounts to an epochal shift, and whether the Tofflers have

correctly identified the nature of that shift, remain open

questions. The periodization proposed by the Tofflers is too

sweeping to provide a useful guide to predicting the

future.

14

 The notion that we are entering a new age tends to

downplay the continuing importance of economic and

geopolitical factors in producing conflict, and also to

downplay the relevance of realist theories of international

relations. True, we live in a time of rapid change: this does

not mean that everything will change. There will remain a

great deal of continuity in the global system, and threats

from would-be regional hegemons ought not be discounted.

In summary, the underlying assumptions of the

commission’s diagnosis of the current threat environment

are based on a highly selective reading of social science. I

believe it is bad social science. This matters. As Bernard

Brodie once said, “. . . good strategy presumes good

anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military

blunders of all time have resulted from juvenile evaluations

in this department.”

15

Threat Assessment.

The commission’s choice of underlying assumptions has

produced a threat analysis that is clearly skewed in a

particular direction: the United States will probably face a

threat of a mass casualty attack on the American homeland

instigated by an adversary state. I will argue below that

there is no reason to believe that this will be America’s

major security challenge. Mass casualty attacks may be

perpetrated by individuals and autonomous groups, and

these people are as likely to be American citizens as

foreigners. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the main

7
security challenge will come from this direction, rather than

from instability caused by emerging regional hegemons.

Although the Hart-Rudman Commission believes that

the principal threat will come from terrorists, they believe

that these will not be acting on their own but will be

sponsored by adversary states. They say,

Terrorism will appeal to many weak states as an attractive

asymmetric option to blunt the influence of major powers.

Hence, state-sponsored terrorists are at least as likely, if not

more so, than attacks by independent, unaffiliated terrorist

groups.

16

These states are likely to be Islamic, and they will avoid

challenging the United States on its own terms. Instead,

they will threaten the United States with long-range

missiles or with attacks carried out by groups and

individuals who have entered the United States. They do

note that “there will be a greater incidence of ad hoc cells

and individuals, often moved by religious zeal, seemingly

irrational cultish beliefs, or seething resentment.”

17

Nevertheless, the principal threat will be from states rather

than individuals and autonomous groups.

There are two surprising things about this contention.

First, while it is possible that the challenges to the United

States will come mainly from adversary states, it is also

possible that the challenge will come primarily from

autonomous individuals and groups. The word “hence” in

the sentence “Hence, state-sponsored terrorists are at least

as likely . . .” does not convey a reasoned argument. The fact

that some states are likely to look for asymmetric responses

to the United States does not imply that state-sponsored

threats of mass casualty attack are more likely than threats

from individuals and groups. It is a simple logical

nonsequitur to argue that because terrorism will be

attractive to weak states, these states will be the principal

instigators of mass casualty attacks.

8
Second, to the extent that there is a threat of mass

casualty attack on the United States, there are reasons to

argue that the perpetrators are likely to be U.S. citizens

committed to extreme right-wing world views. It is striking

that New World Coming has little to say on this issue,

particularly since the biggest mass casualty attack on the

U.S. homeland in recent years was the Oklahoma City

bombing. Despite initial assumptions that the attack must

have been the work of Islamic fundamentalists, it turned

out that the perpetrators were U.S. citizens. The

commission’s argument that the threat of mass casualty

attack arises from growing resentment against Western

culture leads to the conclusion that the perpetrators of mass

casualty attacks are likely to be non-Westerners. It is here

that their underlying assumptions lead them astray. There

are other possible sources of rage against the U.S.

Government, and many of these are contained within

American society and culture. Those Americans who believe

that the U.S. Government has been taken over by a Zionist

conspiracy, that black helicopters from the United Nations

are threatening American liberties, or that the supremacy

of white Christians is under threat from “mud people,” are

as much a part of “Western culture” as the rest of us.

Specialists in terrorism note that in recent years right

wing extremism has replaced leftist terrorism as the chief

concern. They also note that, for a variety of reasons, right

wing attacks are likely to produce more casualties than was

the case with the left wing terrorists of the 1960s and

1970s.

18

 Defense analysts have only recently appreciated

this threat.

19 New World Coming ignores it almost entirely.

It does so at our peril.

It may be that the commissioners’ focus on underlying

values as the cause of conflict leads them to conceptualize

the issues concerning American society more in terms of

social cohesion than in terms of a threat from the extreme

right.

9
Globalization, Social Cohesion and Moral Values in

America.

Although the principal threat to the U.S. homeland is

seen by the Hart-Rudman Commission as largely external,

this does not mean that the authors of the report are

sanguine about developments within the United States.

Quite the contrary, the authors of New World Coming

devote a long and carefully researched section of the report

to a prognostication about likely future trends in American

society and culture. They worry that a number of trends will

lead to reduced social cohesion in American society.

Reduced social cohesion matters because it can lead to a

weakening of links between the individual citizen and the

state. In turn, this might mean a rather brittle public

support for U.S. military operations. The implications for

the Army are potentially profound. In the first place, the

weakening of emotional ties to the state will make

recruiting increasingly more difficult. Second, public

support for U.S. military operations will not rest on the

broad patriotic consensus that characterized much of the

postwar period. America’s ability to project military power

might be eroded from within.

The authors believe that globalization will mean that

people’s 

sense of emotional attachment to the state will wane. . . The

implication for civil-military relations, broadly construed, can

hardly be overstated: unless they feel themselves directly at

risk, citizens will not endanger their lives for a state with which

they feel little or no emotional bond.

20

The ties that bind individual or group loyalty to a state can

change and even unravel, and the next 25 years portend a good

deal of unraveling.

21

New World Coming is correct in noting that there has

been a trend since the mid-1970s towards a decline in

several measures of civic engagement, voter turnout being

not the least of these. The authors of the report argue that

10
this is part of a much larger process of social change in

America. Increasing income inequality, the growth of

single-parent families, and increasingly bitter “culture

wars” are also important trends. They worry about the state

of race and ethnic relations in contemporary America.

These trends, if they continue, may well result in a situation

which, in the commission’s view, might lead to increasing

social polarization and a loss of social cohesion.

The report addresses the issue of ethnic and religious

diversity. The commissioners say,

some observers are quite worried, based on the view that

American society has become dangerously fragmented, along

ethnic, racial, and sectarian lines . . . the unrestrained

assertion of differences could push a benign impulse toward

pluralism into fragmentation, undermining the sense of a

shared national purpose.

22

There may well be trends towards greater social

fragmentation in contemporary American society, but

possibly not for the reasons suggested by this report. The

commission is right to be concerned about the coherence of

American society, but not only for the reason of support for

government policy. Although the commission does not focus

on this, the increasing alienation of a significant section of

American society from their government creates a mass

social base from which future perpetrators of mass casualty

attacks may emerge. Nor is the commission’s diagnosis of

the causes of social malaise to be taken as the last word in

social scientific diagnosis: while there are many features of

American society to worry about, it is far from clear that the

trends towards greater pluralism in race and ethnic

relations and the changes in the nature of families are what

we should be concerned about.

To take one example, they note that children from

single-parent households do less well than children from

traditional families.

23

 They go on to conclude that “the sharp

spike in the numbers of single-parented children over the

past 30 years suggests that as these children become adults

11
between now and 2025, the level of social dysfunction may

rise proportionately.”

24

 This may happen. On the other

hand, as family structure changes, the link between single

parenting and bad outcomes for children is likely to be

attenuated. There is little discussion in New World Coming

of the benefits of new forms of family life, nor is there much

recognition that this is probably a trend which is unlikely to

be reversed in the near future. Moreover, there are so many

factors which produce decline in the forms of civic

participation which are of concern to the commission that it

is probably unreasonable to attribute too much causal

weight to the increase in single-parent families.

25

Another example is the report’s concern that “we may be

headed for a considerably more stressful cognitive

environment,”

26

 which will make it harder for individuals

and families to cope with modern life. Following Thomas

Friedman, the authors suggest that the most important

thing for parents will not be a need to get up to speed on

high-tech skills but rather to follow “old fashioned

fundamentals such as good parenting, a functional family

life, and high quality basic education.”

27

In raising these qualifications about the conclusions of

New World Coming, I do not mean to suggest that there will

not be increases in crime, mental illness, and violence, and

decreases in the amount and quality of sociability.

Sometimes bad outcomes happen. There is no reason to

assume that things will always improve. However,

prognostications in this area are notoriously difficult. The

world is a complicated place, and simple explanations are

not always the best explanations. The Hart-Rudman

Commission has had the intellectual courage to venture its

assessment, but readers of the report need to bear in mind

that both the reasoning and the empirical basis for the

commission’s conclusions are open to serious challenge.

Finally, the connections between social and cultural

change in America and citizen support for U.S. military

operations is by no means as direct as the report suggests.

12
Indeed, the whole argument rests on so many uncertain

assumptions and imputed causal connections that it is

probably unrealistic to make serious predictions in this

area.

The authors are probably correct that there will be major

shifts in the nature of the relationship between citizen and

state.

28

 But it is unclear how this will impact military

operations. In what future scenario will large numbers of

citizens be asked to “endanger their lives” for the state?

Surely we do not anticipate fighting the kind of mass

mobilization war that characterized much of the 20th

century. If the commissioners are right that the

fundamental security challenge of the 21st century will be

responding to rejectionist attacks on the American

homeland, these will not be countered by drafting large

numbers of young men into the armed services. And in any

case, if there is a real threat of mass casualty attack on the

American homeland, surely many citizens will, indeed, “feel

themselves directly at risk” and will support what they see

as appropriate U.S. countermeasures. It is hard not to

believe that the authors of New World Coming have not

lapsed into nostalgia for the “good war” and the

citizen-soldiers of the 20th century.

The argument put forward by the authors of New World

Coming that the ties that bind citizens to the national state

will weaken is probably true. Globalization is indeed likely

to produce a redefinition of citizenship. People are

increasingly likely to see themselves as participants in a

global society, and this will undoubtedly mean a

redefinition of their attitude to the national state. But

rather than see this simply as a matter of concern, as a

diminution of the state’s ability to assume unquestioning

compliance on the part of its citizens, it would be more

realistic to attempt to discern the ways in which

redefinitions of citizenship might transform the nature of

social cohesion.

13
For centuries conservatives have lamented the

supposedly deleterious effects of social change on social

cohesion and moral values. Liberals have optimistically

maintained that progress is occurring (or would occur if the

only the right policies were adopted), and that changes in

morals produce greater individual freedom. The truth must

embrace elements of both positions. Change is inevitable;

some of it has good outcomes, some of it has bad outcomes.

Things are, of course, complicated. New World Coming

takes a generally conservative view of change, regarding it

primarily as a source of conflict and of moral decay, rather

than seeing it as having potential for increased individual

autonomy and freedom. It is, as the commission suggests,

likely that citizens will no longer routinely support their

government. It is not obvious, as the commission implies,

that this is necessarily a bad thing. A weakening of the

nexus between citizen and state will require all sorts of

changes in the ways in which politics is conducted. Rather

than seek to turn back the clock, the commissioners would

have done better to explore some of the ways in which

America’s military organizations can adapt to and benefit

from these changes.

Whatever regrets for a past way of life the authors of

New World Coming might have, this intellectual stance is

unhelpful in providing an insight into the future. To take a

pertinent example, most social scientists who have thought

about the implications of the changing nature of citizenship

argue that globalization will produce not just an increasing

identification as part of a common global humanity, but also

increased identification as participants in a particular

locality. It is by no means clear quite what this will mean,

but surely it would be worthwhile to devote some thought to

exploring how this might be used to increase the national

security of the United States. Is it not conceivable that

localist identities might be harnessed to increase citizen

participation in domestic preparedness, for example?

14
The Organizational Response.

Assuming that the threat of mass casualty attack on the

U.S. homeland is a non-negligible possibility, what steps

should be taken? There are many issues here, from the

training of first responders to the organizational design of

the national security apparatus. The Hart-Rudman

Commission, as indicated in its charter, focuses on

questions of organizational design at the broadest level.

The authors of New World Coming make an analogy

with the early years of the Cold War. At that time America

faced an entirely new strategic threat. As a result, new

strategies (containment and nuclear deterrence) were

forthcoming, and an entirely new organizational

complex—the Department of Defense (DoD), the Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Council

(NSC), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—was created.

This had its counterpart internationally in NATO and, on a

grand strategic level, in the United Nations, the World

Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Quite

reasonably, the commissioners call for a total reassessment

of America’s national security institutions to deal with the

new threat of mass casualty attack on the American

homeland. The Phase III Report, released in January 2001,

asserts that the commission “believes that the security of

the American homeland from the threats of the new century

should be the primary national security mission of the U.S.

Government.”

29

 (emphasis in original.) The focus of the

third report is, therefore, on the organizational changes

necessary to respond to the new threat. The commission

takes an appropriately broad approach to the topic.

The Phase III Report of the commission, has four key

themes. The first is the need, emphasized by many other

commentators as well, for a national strategy to preserve

American leadership into the 21st century. In the foreword

to the Report, Gary Hart and Warren Rudman state that

15
the key to our vision is the need for a culture of coordinated

strategic planning to permeate all U.S. national security

institutions. Our challenges are no longer defined for us by a

single prominent threat. Without creative strategic planning in

this new environment, we will default in time of crisis to a

reactive posture. Such a posture is inadequate to the challenges

and opportunities before us.

30

The final report repeatedly stresses that no one is in overall

charge of national security strategy.

31

 The report asserts

that “strategic planning is largely absent within the U.S.

government.”

32

 The commission suggests that there be a

national budget for national security so that decisions about

priorities can be made in a more rational manner.

There seems to be considerable public support for

measures to protect the United States against mass

casualty attacks. The idea of national missile defense is

clearly popular, and there seems to be a constituency

available for mobilization around measures aimed at

domestic preparedness and consequence management in

the event of a successful mass casualty attack on the U.S.

homeland. At the same time, while there seems to be a

constituency that can be engaged in domestic preparedness,

there is still considerable discussion about exactly what

form domestic preparedness and consequence management

should take. It seems clear that, despite impressive efforts

on the part of the government, current capabilities are still

probably far from adequate.

33

 Here is an opportunity to

elicit popular support for measures to improve

preparedness.

Not surprisingly, the second major theme in the report is

the need for reorganization of American governmental

institutions. In addition to now-common suggestions for

reform of the State and Defense Departments and the

intelligence community, the commission suggests that the

NSC staff has acquired more power and responsibility than

is desirable, and argues that the National Security Advisor

and NSC staff “return to their traditional role of

16
coordinating national security activities and resist the

temptation to become policymakers or operators.”

34

With regard to the national security mission which the

commission regards as central, its key proposal is that a

National Homeland Security Agency (NHSA) be

established “to consolidate and refine the missions of the

nearly two dozen disparate departments and agencies that

have a role in U.S. homeland security today.”

35

 The new

NHSA would be built upon the Federal Emergency

Management Agency (FEMA). The Coast Guard, the

Customs Service, and the Border Patrol would be

transferred to it. The NHSA director would have Cabinet

status and would be a statutory advisor to the NSC. One

argument for the NHSA is that the “current distinction

between crisis management and consequence management

is neither sustainable nor wise. The duplicative command

arrangements that have been fostered by this division are

prone to confusion and delay.”

36

 The commission also

suggests that a new office of Assistant Secretary for

Homeland Security be created within DoD. The commission

further argues that the National Guard should be “given

homeland security as a primary mission, as the U.S.

Constitution itself ordains.”

37

The creation of a NHSA could have considerable

implications for the Army. Depending on how this Agency

was structured, the Army could have a greater or lesser role

in homeland defense. The devil, of course, is in the details.

As proposed by the commission, the active component of the

Army would probably have a secondary role. The National

Guard and other Reserve forces, however, might well play

major roles in the new Agency.

The proposal to establish a NHSA is a sound one, as is

the notion of building it around FEMA. Some of the other

more detailed suggestions, such as giving the National

Guard homeland security as a primary mission, almost

certainly require greater consideration and should not be

adopted without careful analysis.

17
One difficulty with the organizational reforms suggested

by the commission is that their focus is largely on top-level

organizational changes. These are necessary, but major

efforts need to be made at the local levels, particularly in

terms of sustainability. As Amy Richardson and

Leslie-Anne Levy have argued, much more attention needs

to be devoted to creating an effective system of domestic

preparedness based on local civilian organizations.

38

 The

commission addresses some of these issues, particularly the

need to provide better medical facilities, but the real

emphasis of the commission’s thinking is elsewhere.

The third theme of the report is the need for massive

investment in education and in basic science. Without this

investment, the commission argues, the United States will

rapidly fall behind in basic science, with potentially

disastrous consequences not only for economic growth and

well-being but also for national security. The commission

argues that

the inadequacies of our systems of research and education pose

a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter

century than any potential conventional war that we might

imagine. . . If we do not invest heavily and wisely in rebuilding

these two core strengths, America will be incapable of

maintaining its global position long into the 21st century.

39

The decline has already begun. As the report argues, the

causes of American slippage in science and education are

deeply-rooted and difficult to eradicate. The commission is

surely right in its emphasis on science and education, and

right again in its conclusion that the root causes must be

tackled. It is worth emphasizing how important it is that a

commission charged to investigate national security should

conclude that massive investment in basic science and in

education ought to be a top priority. Although the report

does not stress it, investment in education may well have a

further useful impact: increased education may possibly

reduce both the sense of alienation and the propensity to

18
adopt paranoid apocalyptic theories on the part of

distressingly large sections of the American public.

Finally, consonant with their earlier diagnosis of the ills

of American society, the commission argues that something

must be done to improve the quality and commitment of

people working for the government, both as a whole and in

the military. The commission believes the United States is

“on the brink of an unprecedented crisis of competence in

government.”

40

 The commission is undoubtedly right in its

diagnosis of a serious problem here.

That said, it is therefore a little disheartening that the

report seems to rely heavily on the ability of the president to

exhort his fellow citizens to embark on a crusade to alter

this state of affairs. The commissioners call for a “national

campaign to reinvigorate and enhance the prestige of

service to the nation.”

41

 They cite the example of “the clarion

call of President John F. Kennedy . . . and remember how

President Ronald Reagan reinvigorated the spirit of the

U.S. military . . .”

42

 Moral exhortation is surely necessary;

but it is also likely to be insufficient.

The reliance on moral exhortation to solve a deep-seated

problem might appear to be at variance with the

commission’s own diagnosis of the increasing malaise of

American society, and their diagnosis of an increasing

decline in citizenship and national commitment. The stress

on moral exhortation is, however, part of a larger theme

underlying the analysis offered by the Hart-Rudman

Commission. At the deepest level, the commissioners seem

to believe that the conflicts of the 21st century will arise

from deep clashes of culture. The process of globalization

will intensify contacts between societies and will stimulate

a rejectionist backlash, which will add fuel to the fires of

cultural conflict. The response by the United States involves

not simply an organizational shake-up and measures of

domestic preparedness; it requires efforts to reconstitute a

nation of committed citizens. American culture must be

saved from moral decay brought on by the social

19
fragmentation produced by rapid social change.

Old-fashioned values should be reasserted. The bond

between citizens and the national state should be

reinvigorated. These diagnoses are problematic, and the

prescriptions for governmental action that flow from them

are likely to have minimal impact.

This search for national cohesion and national values

underlies much of New World Coming’s analysis of trends in

American society. Given the stress on values, it is hardly

surprising that the commission turns to moral exhortation

as a solution. If, however, one takes seriously the

globalization argument propounded by the commission to

the effect that there will be a loosening and redefinition of

the bonds between citizens and their state, then one must

ask whether moral exhortation is likely to be very effective.

The commission has, it seems, contradicted its own

intellectual analysis.

Implications for the Army: A Balanced Strategy.

The Hart-Rudman Commission calls for a “culture of

coordinated strategic planning,” and notes that America’s

“challenges are no longer defined for us by a single

prominent threat.”

43

 The commission argues that

the United States needs five kinds of military capabilities:

nuclear capabilities to deter and protect the United States and

its allies from attack; homeland security capabilities;

conventional capabilities necessary to win major wars; rapidly

employable expeditionary capabilities; and humanitarian relief

and constabulary capabilities.

44

These conclusions are sound: a balanced set of

capabilities to deal with a range of diverse threats is,

indeed, what is required. The difficulty comes in weighing

and prioritizing these threats and capabilities. Here the

underlying assumptions of the commission come into play.

The three reports of the commission all place the

question of homeland defense as a, perhaps the, key priority.

20
Among the 14 key points made in the first report, the need

for homeland defense is placed first. In the

recommendations for institutional reform in the final

report, the most notable is the suggestion to create a NHSA.

Despite disclaimers about the need for a balanced defense

against a variety of threats, the commission has, indeed, a

very clear message: the urgent concern of the United States

in the security arena must be to protect the homeland

against a mass casualty attack by an adversary state. This

conclusion follows directly from the underlying

assumptions of the commission.

New World Coming builds on underlying assumptions

about the importance of values in conflict, about the

importance of moral cohesion in modern society, and about

the disruptive impact of social change to argue that the

forces of globalization will produce a backlash, and that, as a

result, America will be faced with a major threat from

certain Third World nations.

I have argued that the commission’s underlying

assumptions about the causes of disorder in the 21st

century lead to a one-sided and overly general threat

assessment. The commission is right to note that there is a

new threat from disgruntled Third World states that could

result in a mass casualty attack on the American homeland.

It errs in arguing that this will be the principal threat that

America will face in the coming decades. There is nothing in

the analysis of the commission that justifies this conclusion.

It is likely that the United States will face a number of

diverse threats in the 21st century, and it must prepare to

meet all of them.

The need to deal with a diverse collection of threats will

make it extremely difficult to articulate a grand strategy

which will capture the popular imagination. What we are

likely to see is a jockeying for prominence between

proponents of various strategic threats, with governmental

attention to particular strategic issues rising and falling in

response both to events in global politics and the working

21
out of a complex set of bureaucratic and political struggles.

What is required of America in the early 21st century is a

complex strategy designed to meet, and more importantly,

prevent from emerging, a multitude of diverse threats.

Developing and articulating such a grand strategy will be

extremely difficult, and possibly beyond the capacity of the

political system to achieve. This will make force planning

difficult at best, and at times the process is likely to become

divorced from strategic objectives. One lesson that the Army

might draw from this is the need to consistently emphasize

the importance of coherent strategic planning and the need

to maintain versatile forces capable of responding to a wide

range of situations.

Because it is impossible to accurately estimate at this

point how these potential threats will evolve relative to one

another, a prudent national security strategy will seek

balanced capabilities to deal with all these potential

threats. As the international security environment changes

and as some threats become more salient, resources can be

shifted from one threat area to another. By focusing largely

on the threat of mass casualty attack on the American

homeland, the globalization perspective of New World

Coming downplays the potential challenges from other

states that seek to challenge American hegemony. And by

focusing largely on foreign states as the origin of this threat,

the commission understates the danger from its own

disgruntled citizens. An adequate strategic posture must

prepare the United States to mitigate, and respond to, each

of these possible threats.

These underlying assumptions lead to a threat

assessment which may well be inaccurate and to policy

recommendations that may not be effective. In terms of

threat assessment, the commission probably overstates the

threat from foreign states that are likely to employ mass

casualty attacks on the American homeland, understates

the threat from alienated American citizens, and may

perhaps not give due weight to realist causes of interstate

conflict. 

22
The underlying assumptions of the commission lead not

only to an overemphasis on one particular threat, they also

lead to a poor characterization of that threat. The threat

assessment that stems from the work of the commission is

both too sweeping and too monothematic. Instead of talking

in general terms about globalization and backlash, the

commission might have done better to examine the specific

situations likely to foster extremist opposition to the U.S.

Government. It is unhelpful to diagnose a general threat

from Islamic nations supposedly threatened by

globalization. It would be more helpful for threat analysts to

examine the specific kinds of situations likely to produce

anti-American activities.

For example, rather than an “ideological” or “religious”

reaction to globalization, or a deep clash of cultures, what

we may be witnessing is a nationalist response to American

assertiveness in the world. It is tempting to believe that,

because the language used by the perpetrators is frequently

(though by no means always) religious or religiouslyinformed, the explanation of such behavior is to be sought in

the body of religious beliefs. This may be too much of an

intellectual shortcut. Religious vocabulary may shape what

is at root a nationalist response. And these nationalist rages

are likely to be responses to quite specific actions on the part

of the United States. For example, the massive presence of

U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia as a result of the

Gulf War has produced—encapsulated in the person of

Osama bin Laden—a strident nationalist rejection of

America. The “backlash” may be less a primitivist rejection

of globalization than a response to American intervention

abroad.

Not only are the situations giving rise to anti-U.S.

feelings likely to be specific, but there are also likely to be

quite specific incubators that produce the militants who will

attempt to carry out mass casualty attacks. Harvard

professor Jessica Stern has pointed to the importance of

religious schools in the institutional network that sustains

and creates the social world where mass attacks are

23
thinkable and culturally approved. She has also noted that

such schools are most prevalent in those regions where

long-term guerrilla insurgency has transformed societies.

45

Rather than sweeping generalizations based on a simple

notion of globalization, we need much more careful and

detailed analysis of the specific circumstances which

facilitate the growth of extremist movements, both abroad

and at home.

The Army (and DoD in general) should continue to

devote resources to studying specific regions of the world,

and should be cautious about reliance on overarching

theories of globalization as an predictor of future conflicts.

There is no substitute for detailed local area knowledge. If

anything, the Army should consider increasing its

specialized foreign area expertise.

Implications for the Army: Domestic Preparedness.

Turning to the question of Army missions, the work of

the Hart-Rudman Commission has some obvious and

important implications for the Army. There is, indeed, a

threat of mass casualty attack on the American homeland.

(The commission is right to emphasize this; it is one-sided in

its evaluation of the likely source of this threat.) Policies are

currently being developed to improve the capability of the

government to respond to such a catastrophe, and the Army

should ensure that its voice is heard in these debates.

The Army should reexamine the role it might play in

homeland security. Many of the proposals of the commission

have merit and relevance, and should be the subject of

serious discussion. However, the Army should not allow

itself to be distracted by the homeland security mission to

the detriment of its other core missions. The Army should

prepare for consequence management and for continuity of

operations. However, the threat of a mass casualty attack

on the American homeland should not distract the Army

from preparing for other kinds of military operations,

whether these are power projection or peacekeeping.

24
Indeed, it would be a great risk if increased attention by the

Army to domestic preparedness came at the expense of its

ability to conduct either warfighting or military operations

other than war. Clearly there are important and

complicated resource issues involved, which are beyond the

scope of this monograph. A real danger is that the Army

might find itself stretched too thin if it does not secure the

extra resources necessary to adequately perform this

additional mission.

46

Further, since the threat of a mass casualty attack

perpetrated by American citizens cannot be discounted, the

Army needs to consider the implications that Army

involvement might have for civil-military relations. This is

a very complex and sensitive issue, and beyond the scope

this monograph. It is, however, a topic the implications of

which need to be explored in detail. Finally, the commission

is right about the need to reorganize the U.S. national

security apparatus to deal with the threat of mass casualty

attack. This will necessarily involve the Army in some way

or other. Exactly what form these new organizational

arrangements and what form Army involvement should

take should be a matter for open discussion at this point. It

is by no means clear that the top-down organizational

reforms suggested by the commission are the most

appropriate.

Implications for the Army: Citizens and Their

Army.

The assumptions upon which the commission builds its

recommendations rely heavily on the notion that the

process of globalization will weaken emotional ties between

citizens and their government. This is used to construct a

picture of loss of social cohesion in America and decreased

willingness of citizens to support the military either by

enlisting or by supporting military operations. If the

commission was right in its assessment, these would be

matters of serious concern both for the Army and for DoD

25
more generally. In fact, however, there is little reason to

suppose that support for U.S. foreign policy, including the

use of military force, among the population at large is likely

to show any significant downward trend, and certainly not

because of the kinds of globalizing trends highlighted by the

commission. It is possible that the armed forces will

experience increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining

officers and enlisted personnel, but the reasons for this may

have less to do with waning patriotic values and more to do

with trends in the economy.

The commission is probably right in its argument that

the coming decades will see changes in the relationship

between citizens and the state. Instead of wringing its

hands over the moral decay of the nation, the commission

would have spent its energies better if it had attempted to

determine how the changing relationship between citizen

and state might lead to new ways of organizing military

operations. The old model of the citizen-soldier is no longer

relevant. In any case, the notion of a huge army of

citizen-soldiers that characterized World War II seems

anachronistic. Some thought needs to be given to the

ramifications of this for the way in which the Army will be

organized in the future.

The Commission’s Policy Recommendations.

In terms of policy recommendations, the emphasis on

social cohesion leads the commission to seek a solution in

the wrong area to the changing relationship between

citizens and their government. There is too much hope

placed in the efficacy of a moral crusade led by the

government, and not enough attention paid to ways in

which changes at the local level might be utilized to improve

homeland security. This is manifest in the emphasis on

organizational solutions at the national level, and a

deemphasis on the need to build homeland defense

measures from the bottom-up by incorporating local and

regional civilian emergency responders as the core of the

26
homeland defense effort. One of the central issues in any

effective homeland defense will be ensuring that military

and civilian energies and capabilities are fused in a

synergistic manner.

The commission has produced a complex analysis with a

number of important policy recommendations. There is

much value in their work, including the insistence on

preparing for the possibility of mass casualty attack on the

American homeland. Unfortunately, many of the

assumptions underlying the commission’s analysis are, in

my view, deeply flawed. This means that the threat

assessment presented by the commission, and some of the

commission’s policy recommendations, are seriously

undermined and need to be treated with caution.

Conclusion.

The upshot is that the report that devotes the most

attention to a social scientific diagnosis of the threat of mass

casualty attack has a number of methodological

shortcomings which make its conclusions of dubious value.

It ignores almost entirely the threat from the domestic

extreme right, and its analysis of American domestic trends

is largely concerned with moral values and social cohesion.

These are seen to matter because of the need for popular

support for a national security strategy. The commission’s

work relies heavily on the notion of a antimodern “backlash”

to the dislocations and strains of social change—an

approach that many professional social scientists no longer

find plausible. It is true that “culture matters.” This does

not mean that conflicts will be necessarily, or even likely,

about culture. And the commission provides no reason for

the assertion that foreign states present a greater threat of

mass casualty attack than either domestic or foreign

nonstate actors.

Despite its forward-looking speculations about the

future, the intellectual framework of the commission

remains caught up in the past. In its emphasis on a clash of

27
culture, on the deleterious impact of social change, on the

need for social cohesion and strong moral values, in its

suspicion of changing family forms, and in its call for moral

leadership as the central element in a solution to the

problems of government, the commission has provided a

conservative diagnosis of our times. The commission may be

right. We won’t know until the future is upon us. But the

underlying assumptions are so open to question that it

would be imprudent to base a major strategic reorientation

on the commission’s recommendations.

Instead of basing threat assessment on questionable

sociological theories and sweeping journalistic

generalizations, it would be more prudent for future threat

assessments to attempt to identify the concrete and specific

social circumstances that facilitate the rise of the mass

movements that provide the soil in which paranoid

fantasies flourish. Readers of the reports of the HartRudman Commission should not abdicate their critical

judgement in the face of what is, in many respects, the most

impressive effort at futurology published since the end of

the Cold War.

ENDNOTES

1. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century,

New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century, September

15, 1999, p. 26.

2. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century,

Seeking a National Strategy, April 15, 2000, p. 5.

3. David Held, et al., Global Transformations, Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1999, is probably the standard accepted text

in the field at the university level. It is accompanied by The Global

Transformations Reader, David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds.,

Malden MA: Polity Press, 2000. One other standard work is The

Globalization Reader, Frank Lechner and John Boli, eds., Malden, MA:

Blackwell, 2000.

4. New World Coming, p. 43.

28
5. See Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, New York: Random

House, 1995; Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth, New York: Random

House, 1996; Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, New York: Random

House, 2000.

6. New World Coming, p. 43.

7. Samuel Huntington,The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking

of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

8. Seeking a National Strategy, pp. 5-6.

9. Yahya Sadowski, The Myth of Global Chaos, Washington, DC:

Brookings Institution, 1998, p. 5.

10. For analyses that present an anomie/strain type of argument,

see Neil Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1959; W. Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass

Society, New York: Free Press, 1959. For critiques and alternatives, see

inter alia, Wayne Cornelius, “The Political Sociology of Cityward

Migration in Latin America,” in Latin American Urban Research, F.

Rabinovitz and F. Trueblood, eds., Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1971;

William Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, New York: Russell Sage

Foundation, 1965; Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge

Comparisons, New York: Academic Press, 1984.

11. See, for example, Fouad Ajami, “The Summoning”; Robert

Bartley, “The Case for Optimism”; Liu Binyan, “Civilization Crafting”;

and Jeanne Kilpatrick, “The Modernizing Imperative” all in Foreign

Affairs, Vol. 73, No., 4, September/October 1993.

12. Good summaries of social science thinking on war causation are

Handbook of War Studies II, Manus Midlarsky, ed., Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2000; and What do we Know about War?

John Vasquez, ed., Oxford, England: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.

13. Seeking a National Strategy, p. 7.

14. Dividing human history into agricultural, industrial, and

information (or global) ages leads to an emphasis on technology as the

key driver in history. It means that the period before industrialization

which we refer to as “the early modern period” or the “renaissance” and

“reformation” is seen as part of a relatively unchanging, “traditional”

agrarian age. In fact, at least from the 15th century (i.e., 350 years

before industrialization), Europe was experiencing massive social

changes. These included the expansion of markets, the origins of

capitalist enterprise, an emphasis on reason in the understanding of the

29
world (which was to lead to modern science), increasing rationalization

in many areas of social life, etc. In a similar way, the division between

the industrial age and the information (or global) age ignores the major

changes between early industrialization and its late 20th century

successors. The rise of the corporation, of mass democracy, and of rapid

growth in living standards all are social changes that post-date the

onset of industrialization by many years. The three-fold periodization of

history favored by the Tofflers (and hence by the commission) is not only

too sweeping; crucially, it misstates the causal dynamics involved in the

growth of modern society.

15. Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, New York: Macmillan, 1973,

p. 332.

16. New World Coming, p. 48.

17. Ibid.

18. Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism, New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999.

19. John Train, “Who Will Attack America?” Strategic Review, Vol.

XXVII, No. 4, Fall 2000.

20. New World Coming, p. 35.

21. Ibid., p. 38.

22. Ibid., pp. 124-125.

23. Ibid., p. 121.

24. Ibid.

25. Robert Putnam estimates, for example, that the amount of

decline in civic engagement that can be attributed to single-parent

families is “probably not much . . . [a]part from youth- and

church-related engagement, none of the major declines in social capital

and civic engagement that we need to explain can be accounted for by

the decline in the traditional family structure.” Robert Putnam,

Bowling Alone, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000, pp. 278-279.

26. New World Coming, p. 11.

27. Ibid., p. 12.

30
28. Though, in my view, they overestimate the instrumental bases

of citizenship loyalty to the state in the past, and therefore

underestimate the purely emotional elements in patriotism.

29. United States Commission on National Security/21st Century,

Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, January 31,

2001, p. 10.

30. Ibid., p. iv.

31. Ibid., p. 47.

32. Ibid., p. 48.

33. See, for example, Amy Richardson and Leslie-Anne Levy,

“Ataxia: the Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the U.S.

Response,” Henry Simpson Center, Report No. 35, October 2000; and

U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), “Combating Terrorism: Use

of National Guard Response Teams is Unclear,” GAO/NSIAD-99-110,

May 1999.

34. Road Map for National Security, p. xi.

35. Ibid., p. vi.

36. Ibid.. p. 20.

37. Ibid., p. ix.

38. Richardson and Levy.

39. Road Map for National Security. p. ix.

40. Ibid., p. 86.

4. Ibid., p. 88.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., p. iv.

44. Seeking a National Strategy, p. 14.

45. Jessica Stern, “Pakistan’s Jihad Culture,” Foreign Affairs,

November/December 2000.

31
46. Eric V. Larson and John Peters, Preparing the U.S. Army for

Homeland Security: Concepts, Issues, and Options, Santa Monica:

RAND, 2001.

32
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Robert R. Ivany

Commandant

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STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

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Mrs. Christine A. Williams