The Law: Homeland Security: The Concept and the Presidential Coordination Office–First Assessment

The September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted the introduction of a new concept and a new presidential coordination office. Homeland security may be a substitute for the cold war-weary national security concept, devoid of the latter's intellectual development, but prone to the same use as a justification for the exercise of prerogative power in ways harmful to constitutional arrangements of government and guaranteed citizen rights. The presidential coordination office, mandated by a presidential order and directed by a White House assistant to the president, is seemingly beyond congressional accountability, including efforts to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. This is a first assessment. Considering the Concept Policy concepts, as many students of the so-called policy sciences well know, are often artistic phrases of momentary fashion, appearing briefly in popular parlance and then disappearing, perhaps overtaken by other concepts, developments, or events. Homeland security may prove to be one of these short-lived terms. Some regard it as being unpleasantly reminiscent of past, highly nationalistic invocations of the "fatherland" or the "motherland" by nations pursuing cultural or racial purity or seeking to expand their borders or political influence--as Hitler did in Austria with the Anschluss of 1938--to embrace their nationals in neighboring lands. Others may find it attractive as a new term to address an old concern, maintaining the security of the country, without resorting to the national security concept of the cold war era (see Relyea 1994, 41-61). The concept of homeland security appears to be rooted in past efforts at civil defense. President George W. Bush acknowledged this relationship in his November 8, 2001, address on homeland security, saying that as part of the new concept, "We will ask state and local officials to create a new modern civil defense service, similar to local volunteer fire departments, to respond to local emergencies when the manpower of governments is stretched thin." (1) Acknowledged to be "as old as history," civil defense took shape as a programmatic concept in the aftermath of World War II, when "steady growth in the destructiveness of weapons, improvements in the means of their delivery, and the aggressive actions of a well-armed and hostile Communist bloc ... forced a re-evaluation of the security position of the United States" (Yoshpe 1981, 1). Civil defense had its origins in World War I, when warring nations had developed the capability of using aircraft for direct attacks on targets behind the forces in the field. Non-combatant civilians manning the industries that supported mass armies came to be viewed as the "home front," and therefore a proper target for enemy attack ... For the U.S., World War I posed no real threat of air attack; and civil defense could hardly be said to have existed during that war. (Ibid., 56-57) By the time war commenced again in Europe in September 1939, aircraft and aerial bombs had undergone significant development, and the idea of using such weapons to attack populations and production centers in the prosecution of war had received elaboration and notoriety at the hands of the Italian theorist, Guilio Douhet ([1921] 1943). However, at the time of America's entry into world war in 1941, little civil defense preparation had occurred: "no significant research had been done on sheltering, warning devices, blackout and camouflage, control centers, and other tactics in defense against enemy weapons" (Yoshpe 1981, 59). An Office of Civilian Defense had been created in May 1941, but it was in almost continuous administrative disarray and was dismantled before the close of the war, making it evident that "the Administration did not then consider civil defense as part of the permanent national security structure" (Ibid. …