Every day in America, indeed around the globe, we collectively substantiate the thoughts of the great 19th-century Swiss military thinker Antoine-Henri Jomini.
Indeed, if he and Osama bin Laden and Muhammed Atta were somehow looking across the great divide to observe Minnesotans filing into a Gophers football game or waiting in security lines at MSP airport last Dec. 27, Jomini probably would nod approvingly while the two former terrorists high-fived. Their 9/11 attack was a textbook example of a military principle he championed, “economy of force.”
Every time a young couple with a baby has to distribute the contents of a diaper bag between their collective pockets to be allowed into a football game, a woman has to clutch her tampons in her hands to get through the same stadium entrance, or thousands of footsore travelers eye their watches as they shift fretfully from one foot to another, it becomes clear that the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were the greatest “economy of force” military operation in the history of humanity. Never before had such a statistically small expenditure of lives and money inflicted so much tangible and intangible harm on an enemy.
Having just observed the 15th anniversary of the attacks, it is only human to focus on the deaths that day. The current tabulation is about 3,000 on the day itself and nearly that many claims for subsequent deaths have been filed, primarily among public safety members who contracted fatal cancers or respiratory problems. There is no way to put a value on human life, though we do so implicitly in the decisions we make later.
In this case, it is rather our own efforts to restore our security after the attacks that have imposed high economic costs every day since. Of course, these decisions also are prompted by other incidents such as the shoe and underwear plane bombers, the San Bernardino shootings this year, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and so forth.
The extra security measures at airports imposed in reaction to 9/11 now affect about 900 million person-flights per year in the United States alone and many more in other countries. Estimating an hour extra for each in our country alone, that time lost annually by travelers roughly equals that of 450,000 people working full-time for a year. If we added that many people to the unemployed, the national rate in September would have been over 5.1 percent instead of 4.9 percent. And this is just for the extra time for travelers due to airport security. The hours of work by thousands of security personnel is extra.
There also are the security checks on entering all sorts of other facilities, including most major and some sports venues, concerts, theaters, shopping malls etc. There are all the people who work for private security services, all the additional metal detectors and scanners, the concrete barriers, the bomb-sniffing dogs that we have trained, and on and on. The economic costs we have chosen to impose on ourselves are enormous. And they outweigh the resources that went into the plane hijackings 15 years ago by a wider margin than in any other conceivable event in history. They impose an enormous value on each life lost on 9/11 and subsequent attacks we have deemed terrorism.
Jomini’s expositions of strategy were deeply familiar to Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, W.R. Sherman and many other Civil War officers because they were the only ones taught at West Point for decades. So the idea of “economy of force” was familiar to leaders on both sides and is one of the “principles of war” drummed into every young army officer for centuries.
It refers to finding opportunities where a relatively small use of available military forces cause disproportionate damage to one’s enemies’ capabilities. The strategic purpose is to free other resources for a main attack. That really wasn’t the case for the al-Qaida attacks or subsequent ones perpetrated by wannabes of other groups. The 18 original hijackers were just out to strike a blow, not facilitate a larger attack, although they did have delusions, common to analogous groups in previous eras, that their success would inspire countless multitudes to spontaneously rise up.
Counter to much electoral braggadocio, groups such as al-Qaida, ISIS and the like, do not pose an existential threat to the government or economy of our country or of any other friendly democracy. But, despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent, explicitly and implicitly, on security measures, it is still relatively easy for them to kill a few of us and thus frighten, anger and humiliate all of us.
So we surrender civil liberties to intelligence agencies and limit the size of purses women may carry into Gopher football games. Perhaps there is no alternative. We have not had any deaths in a terrorist incident in aviation since 9/11 itself. But that does not mean all the time and budget spent on airport security is unneeded. If we returned to the measures in place 20 years ago, we might well suffer successful attacks.
That is an unwelcome reality of the new millennium. Warfare has become asymmetric in ways that often favor small decentralized groups. Organizations like ISIS do not yet have the political infrastructure to take over countries and hold them, but their actions can force us to expend enormous resources on security. Candidates’ bombast about “carpet bombing,” “making sand glow in the dark” and “kill their families” aside, it is impossible to wipe these groups out. Their threat can be suppressed, but not eliminated.
Are we then condemned to large expenditures forever? Perhaps. But we can also be more overt in applying a rule of reason. Public officials need to be more willing to ask, “Is this metal detector really necessary?” In 2004, I chanced to drive by the little Army Reserve Center in Worthington, Minn., where I had served 25 years earlier. Nearly empty 28 days of the month, it was then surrounded by concrete barriers to keep vehicles distant from the building. Now, clearly, if a terrorist wanted to carry out an attack in that rural town, there are at least a dozen targets, including the Pizza Ranch and Walmart, that would be much more attractive. But someone in the Defense Department decided we needed barriers at every little military facility.
Private sector decision makers need to be more judicious, too. Do stringent limits on purse or diaper bag sizes really improve our security to a degree that outweighs the inconvenience imposed? Or are such measures just street theater, what soldiers call “eyewash,” meant for show rather than substance?
Ignore nonsense about “winning the war on terror.” There is no individual terrorist or organization that can or will surrender to us on the deck of the USS George Washington. We are going to be in this situation for a long time. We can try to be reasonable and prudent in choosing security measures or we can whip ourselves into frenzies. Which of these we choose will affect what resources will be left to meet the other needs of our societies.