Defense, National

views updated Jun 11 2018

Defense, National

National security would seem to be a simple concept to define. Joseph Nye Jr., who served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (1994-1995) during President Bill Clinton’s first term, observed that security is like oxygen—it is essential to all other governmental activity. Without it, a government is likely to become paralyzed and incapable of action, and may ultimately risk collapse. Not surprisingly, states generally regard national security as their primary responsibility. In common American parlance, the term national security has almost become a cliché and refers to the government’s efforts to defend the state from threats, mainly military threats but perhaps internal subversion as well. In other words, “security” seemingly equates to “defense.” However, while defense is an integral aspect of security, military defense does not exhaust the range of functions that governments must perform to ensure security, nor does it reflect the institutional affiliations of the people who work to provide security.

The term national defense evokes an era when the nation and the state, especially in northwest Europe and the United States, were thought to be one and the same— hence the term nation-state. Defense of the state meant defense of the nation, and security was largely defined in ways that reinforced this equation. In fact, virtually every modern state is multinational or multiethnic, even multi-confessional. Frequently, this diversity of religion directly relates to diversity of nationalities in the state, and many states are driven by conflicts among these diverse religions and nationalities. Therefore, a state, to be secure, must act in ways that forestall the emergence of crippling interethnic or interreligious confrontations. Such internal divisions frequently invite foreign intervention. In these contexts, security extends beyond defense against external invaders to include the prevention of civil war. Such a situation developed, for example, in Iraq, where contending Islamic groups became divided on the basis of religion and ethnicity (Shia and Sunni) and nationality (Sunni, Shia, and Kurd), and where foreigners intervened on every side.

Such internal divisions also developed in conflicts in Africa and the former Yugoslavia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many such conflicts, particularly in the third world, exemplify the fact that security pertains as much to the assurance of continuing internal order as it does to defense of the realm. Many third world countries simultaneously face the exigencies of state-building—that is, assuring internal security and defense against external threats—without sufficient time or resources to compete successfully with other more established states. Not surprisingly, the primary concern of the government becomes internal security and its continuation in power, leading to a proliferation of military, intelligence, and police forces. Indeed, for these states, and arguably even for transitional states like Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s, internal police forces are granted greater state resources than regular armies, this being a key indicator of the primacy of internal security as part of national security. Nevertheless, if states cannot defend themselves militarily against threats that have arisen due to a previous failure to provide security, the states themselves may fail.

Because of the breadth of domestic or foreign threats to the security of a society or a state in the modern world, national security can no longer be limited to defense against military attacks or internal unrest. Governments in the twenty-first century must defend against a multitude of threats to the health, viability, and integrity of society. Such threats extend beyond the canonical threat of war with another state or domestic unrest that culminates in revolution or civil war. The potential threats to state security include terrorism, large-scale criminality, narcotics trafficking, uncontrolled immigration, natural disasters, epidemics, and chemical and biological warfare. The threats facing states may also include major international economic crises, such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to 1998. These threats also tend increasingly to spill over national borders, often uniting the transnational purveyors of the threat (e.g., terrorist movements, crime syndicates). The range of potential threats blurs the distinction between military and police missions. Often, both institutions act together to promote security, as exemplified by the participation of the U.S. military in antidrug activities, homeland security, and the response to natural disasters. Thus, in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, calls multiplied in the United States for revising legal codes to permit greater scope for domestic military action during natural disasters.

Homeland security was proclaimed as the U.S. military’s main mission after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, leading to a dramatic expansion of its domestic role. This change has reopened the debate over the legitimate role of the armed forces in domestic security, and has stimulated the Department of Defense, the armed services, and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA to advocate substantial enhancement of their domestic powers. Thus the erosion of distinctions between security and defense, or between power projection abroad and homeland defense, creates difficult and persisting issues of possible encroachments on the domestic civil rights of Americans. These matters ultimately must be decided by the courts and legislatures. But their reemergence indicates that a fundamental component of national security remains the internal balance of power between civilian and democratic authorities and the armed forces that are supposed to be subordinate to them. These issues also raise the equally perennial question of the legal limits of state power in wartime, when it becomes too easy to argue that defense of the state overrides previously granted rights that are enjoyed without question (or seemingly so) in peacetime.

The same issues have arisen in other countries. The war that began in 1991 in the republic of Chechnya in southeastern Russia served as the primary justification for the curtailment of Russian federalism and of innumerable civil rights for the population and the media. In Great Britain, the government’s reaction to the terrorist bombings in July 2005 occasioned a lively debate over the civil rights of Muslim immigrants to Great Britain and of British citizens in general. Thus the contemporary threat environment, punctuated by the global fear of and war against terrorism, is a manifestation of global trends and issues. This overall similarity of trends and agendas relates in important ways to the universal and transnational nature of twenty-first-century threats. And because contemporary threats to security are transnational, they must often be dealt with in international forums or through multilateral cooperation. The erosion of distinctions between security and defense, along with the globalization of threats, has generated global counterresponses.

Nonetheless, if states cannot defend against any or some combination, let alone all, of these threats, their security immediately becomes at risk as societal cohesion comes under threat. Indonesia’s regime collapsed in 1998 for failing to cope with the Asian financial crisis. The governments of China, Russia, and the countries of Central Asia also believe that their internal cohesion and thus security are under threat from the ideologies of democracy, allegedly supported by foreign nongovernmental organizations and by states who use these organizations, as well as the tools of the media and information technology, to undermine their regimes. These regimes’ leaders frequently charge that the United States is orchestrating a campaign to promote democracy, and even that democracy threatens their security and sovereignty.

Thus the term national security must encompass societal or state security against the entire range of threats described above, including traditional war, insurgency, and revolution. National security reaches beyond the defense of the state to encompass the goal of achieving and sustaining a broader societal cohesion, resilience, and integrity that can withstand numerous shocks or threats. Since the contemporary environment makes ensuring state security in this broad sense government’s most fundamental responsibility, with defense being the main component of the provision of security, the burden of state spending on security and defense is huge. Similarly, many state organizations beyond defense ministries are involved in providing security, and their missions are steadily expanding.

Strategic threats to a society or state, threats that can overwhelm a state’s ability to overcome or even effectively respond to them, have become multidimensional, and may originate from and be targeted at the land, the seas and other bodies of water, the air, space, and the ether (cyberspace). Consequently, threats, as well as the response to them, are no longer exclusively determined by geography. Any actor anywhere in the world, be it an individual or an institution, with the means to carry out an attack, can target anyone or any object in any of these dimensions. Moreover, the originator of these threats need not launch an attack from his or her point of origin. All an enemy need do is set an attack in motion, as the Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden did in 2001 when he initiated attacks on New York City and the Washington, D.C., area from Afghanistan. Those actually carrying out the mission can identify the appropriate medium and locales wherein they can launch an attack. This backdrop also greatly multiplies the possibilities for shadowy relationships between sponsoring states and transnational terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. In America’s “war on terror,” for example, the enemy has no geographical center.

As a result, the number of possible strategic targets is greatly expanded. Any place on earth can become a target or a launching site for major attacks. Since no state can preplan sufficiently to ensure global and multidimensional readiness, governments everywhere face so variegated a repertoire of threats that they must devise new methods of responding or they must greatly transform existing institutions to meet the variety of threats. Many more issues than before now come under the rubric of national security, as do many more state organs and policies. Since providing for security has become even more of a challenge to a state’s capability and resources, often stretching the state beyond the breaking point, expanded multilateral forms of security cooperation among states have developed. This cooperation may involve agencies responsible for the military, police, intelligence, public health, the treasury, immigration, and so on. This expanded burden upon states adds substantially to the pressures upon states who face major challenges of state building (e.g., Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and helps explain why so many regimes are on the verge of failure.

The centrality of security as the state’s preeminent responsibility emerges clearly from comparisons of different states’ approaches to the task of providing security. This is not just because of the priority accorded in the United States to homeland defense since 2001. In the war on terrorism, security is no longer the sole province of the regular armed forces, whereas in the United States as well as in other nations, defense remains very much a military prerogative. Security, on the other hand, can be provided by the police forces, intelligence agencies, bank inspectors, public health services, and airport security personnel. Indeed, it is universally agreed that all providers of security, wherever they may function, ideally should be coordinated so that efforts and information flow freely between different agencies, and that effective responses to threats may be coordinated either among the various components of national bureaucracies or among transnational institutions.

In Afghanistan since 2001, for example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provides defense in support of the U.S. military mission there. In fact, both NATO and the U.S. armed forces became engaged in the overall reconstruction of the state after the deposing of the Taliban government in late 2001. The situation was similar in Iraq after U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. Such international cooperation is necessary, given the nature of the contemporary threat environment and the rise of what scholars discern as new paradigms of war. In one new paradigm, warfare takes place among the people and entails more than just providing defense. In such a war, it becomes necessary to provide security and to enable the revival of a functioning state.

This is by no means an exclusively American view. French defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie wrote that “to respond to such testing situations, solutions must be developed which if not purely military, must be military above all” (2005, p. 15). In other words, the expanded threat environment of the twenty-first century imposes security and defense missions on the armed forces that extend far beyond previous concepts of security and defense, or the simple notion of operational victory over opposing armed forces. This environment necessarily brings into the picture both greater transnational threats and greater cooperation against them, as well as expanded roles in the provision of security for a much broader range of state agencies.

At the same time, it is not the case that all states view the expanded range of threats in the same light. Whereas the U.S. government sees terrorism primarily in terms of a military threat, Germany (at least under the administration [1998-2005] of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder) sees terrorism mainly as a criminal phenomenon that must be confronted by police and nonmilitary measures. Italy, on the other hand, provides for a much greater range of military involvement under the rubric of national and civil defense. However, many states and analysts of international security affairs warn that despite the enlistment of the armed forces in antiterrorist operations, antiterrorism must not supplant the traditional defense missions of the regular armed forces.

Security, therefore, is broader than defense and encompasses efforts to maintain the well-being and integrity of society as a whole. Defense, in contrast, relates to ensuring that the state itself and its citizens, armed forces, and vital interests are not attacked, or if they are attacked, that the attacker is defeated. Undoubtedly, security encompasses defense, but not vice versa. Moreover, there is no universal agreement on the nature of the threat posed by terrorists, as the German example illustrates. Neither is it possible to assume that the provision of security in this broad comprehensive sense will eclipse the need for armies to defend against major attacks on a state’s vital interests and resources, human or material. The September 11, 2001, attacks were an act of war carried out against the United States on a global scale and should be seen as such, even if the entire range of instruments of power available to the U.S. government must be brought into play across a broad agenda that encompasses such realms as financial monitoring, antiproliferation, public health, and emergency management.

National security does not refer merely to national defense, as it did during the cold war. But, at the same time, it cannot mean less than national defense. War remains the ultimate argument of states, and defense, even more than security in the broad sense, remains their primary responsibility. While it is true that failure to provide adequate security, in the comprehensive definition of the term given here, places a state’s future at risk, failure to defend the state against violent threats transforms that risk into the certainty of defeat. While security encompasses defense, defense is the most critical aspect of security and is likely to remain so.

SEE ALSO Arms Control and Arms Race; Arms Race; Deterrence; Military

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alliot-Marie, Michèle. 2005. Security Could Be Europe’s Great Rallying Point. Financial Times December 5: 15.

Cabigiosu, Carlo. 2005. The Role of Italy’s Military in Supporting the Civil Authorities. Connections: The Quarterly Journal 4 (3): 59–70.

Klose, Gerhard J. 2005. The Weight of History: Germany’s Military and Domestic Security. Connections: The Quarterly Journal 4 (3): 53–55.

Smith, Rupert. 2005. The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. London: Allen Lane.

Stephen Blank

The views expressed here do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

Defense, National

views updated May 09 2018

DEFENSE, NATIONAL

DEFENSE, NATIONAL. As in most countries, in the United States "national defense" is usually officially construed as the pursuit of all national interests by military means. Because of its location between two oceans, the weakness of its immediate neighbors, and the fortuitous presence of the Royal Navy during the nineteenth century, the United States seldom had to "defend" itself in any literal sense. Not until the advent of long-range nuclear weapons in the mid-twentieth century did the United States face a serious threat to its survival. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in September 2001 introduced a new challenge to American "national defense," one without precedent in the nation's history.

In 1789 the new U.S. Constitution gave the federal government powers to provide for the common defense, balanced by state control of the militia and the right of the citizenry to bear arms. The Congress was empowered to levy taxes, declare war, raise armies, and provide for a navy. The president was named commander in chief of the army and navy and in 1795 received authority to call out the militia to execute the laws, suppress insurrection, and repel invasion. The Militia Act of 1792 established the principle of universal obligation to military service for all free white male citizens between the ages of 18 and 45.

From a strength of 750 men at the time of George Washington's inauguration, the regular army (established in 1775) grew to about 9,000 on the eve of the War of 1812. The Marine Corps was also founded in 1775. The navy, reestablished formally in 1798, gained valuable experience in the undeclared Quasi-War with France (1798–1800) over neutral maritime rights and in later operations against Tripolitan corsairs. President Thomas Jefferson (1801–1808) cut back both the army and the navy, relying for defense mainly on the militia and harbor fortifications supplemented by gunboats. His administration did see the founding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1802) and the acquisition of the vast Louisiana Territory (1803).

The War of 1812, fought with Great Britain over the issue of neutral maritime rights, demonstrated the inadequacy of a national defense based on militia and maritime commerce raiding. The British, although absorbed in the struggle with Napoleon until 1814, were able to defend Canada successfully, sweep the tiny American navy from the seas, and penetrate the Atlantic and Gulf coast defenses at several points.

During the century after 1815 the United States poured its energies into economic growth, territorial expansion, and domestic politics. Thanks mainly to British concurrence and sea power, the hemispheric hegemony rashly proclaimed by the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 met no serious challenge. Up to the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) the army's normal strength hovered around 6,000, mostly scattered along the advancing frontier and engaged in sporadic clashes with the Indians. The navy's few frigates and sloops watched for slave traders and showed the flag. Still committed to the militia tradition, Congress in 1821 rejected Secretary of War John C. Calhoun's plan for a professional peacetime army that could be expanded rapidly in an emergency.

In both regular services, meanwhile, a new professionalism was emerging, nurtured both at West Point and at the Naval Academy, established at Annapolis in 1845. The war with Mexico growing out of the annexation of Texas was fought largely with the regulars and volunteer forces raised by the states. Victory brought annexation of most of the remaining areas west of the Mississippi.

The Civil War (1861–1865) remains the costliest war, in relative human and material terms, in American history. Its demands far exceeded the meager capabilities of the existing military system. Only a handful of regular officers proved equal to the test of higher command, and the tiny regular army remained mostly on the western frontier. Both sides resorted to conscription, mainly as a spur to volunteering. Militia, as such, served only as state local defense forces. By the end of the war, the Confederate government was attempting to control or operate such essential activities as munitions production and blockade-running, anticipating the rigors of twentieth-century "total" war.

After 1865 the army went back to protecting the frontier against Indian raids, and the navy returned to patrolling distant stations. Until the 1890s the army's strength remained in the neighborhood of 25,000, with a strong cavalry component to combat the Plains Indians. In the 1880s the seacoast fortifications were modernized, and the navy began belatedly to replace its wooden sailing ships and smooth-bore guns with modern vessels and armament. By 1898 it had a powerful fleet built around five battleships.

The war with Spain (1898–1899) was a response to U.S. expansionist pressures. Victory, won with relative ease, gave the United States possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, including the Philippines, which reacted with an armed revolt against the United States that took several years to suppress.

To protect its new empire and play its new world-power role, the United States expanded and modernized its armed forces in the early twentieth century. The reforms of Elihu Root gave the army a modern general staff organization and a system of advanced professional education on the European model. Spurred by Alfred Thayer Mahan's doctrines of sea power and its new imperial responsibilities, the United States had become by 1914 the third strongest naval power.

The European war that erupted in 1914 impinged on American interests in many ways—through the strangling of trade with European neutrals and the Central Powers, through the growth of a munitions industry fattened by foreign arms contracts, and through loss of American lives and property on neutral merchantmen attacked by German submarines. Responding to a popular clamor for "preparedness," the Defense Act of 1916 expanded the regular army and the National Guard and removed restrictions on federalization and use of the guard in an emergency, although it rejected the army proposal for a big volunteer federal reserve. In August 1916 Congress also voted a huge naval building program.

Although both sides in World War I violated neutral maritime rights, the United States in April 1917 came in on the side of the Triple Entente. In the next nineteen months some 4 million men were mobilized, of whom about half were sent to France and played a part in the final battles of 1918. These forces were raised by a federally administered selective draft, which, as in the Civil War, served also to stimulate volunteering. Dependent on its allies for most of its armament, the United States supplied large quantities of small arms, ammunition, food, and raw materials to them and contributed substantially in warships and merchant shipping to the defeat of the German submarine.

In the succeeding two decades the development of the long-range bomber and naval aircraft carrier exposed the United States itself, for the first time since the disappearance of sailing navies, to the real possibility of attack from other continents. In the 1930s, moreover, the growth of Japanese power and ambitions threatened American interests in the Pacific and Far East, while the rise of Nazi Germany in alliance with Italy and Japan raised the specter of a hostile militarism wielding global power.

The navy was the nation's first line of defense during this period. But at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, the leading nations had agreed to limitations on naval strength and construction, which had the practical effect of giving Japan naval supremacy in the western Pacific. Meanwhile, in a climate of popular revulsion against war, meager appropriations and declining enlistments reduced the regular army, National Guard, and newly created Federal Organized Reserve far below authorized levels. The army's air forces embraced the new doctrine of strategic air power, and the ground forces and marines experimented with new techniques of mechanized and amphibious warfare. But on the eve of World War II, the army had only a handful of modern aircraft and tanks.

During the 1930s the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) tried to foster hemispheric solidarity against Axis propaganda and economic penetration, and in 1938 it broadened national defense commitments to embrace the hemisphere. But in 1940, with the German conquest of most of western Europe, the United States suddenly faced the threat of German-Italian naval supremacy in the Atlantic and air attacks on South America from West African bases, while its fleet was pinned down in the Pacific watching Japan. Reacting to this threat, the United States instituted selective service and launched a massive rearmament program that year while negotiating with other hemisphere nations and Great Britain for base rights and military collaboration.

Hemisphere defense was closely linked with material aid to Great Britain, the Soviet Union (after June 1941), and other nations opposing the Axis. Under the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, the United States eventually transferred to anti-Axis nations $50.2 billion in war matériel and services. During 1941, in collaboration with Britain, the United States occupied Iceland and other Atlantic bases, convoyed Allied shipping, exchanged shots with German submarines, ferried Britishtroops, and helped plan the eventual defeat of Germany. In 1941, with German armies bogged down in the Soviet Union and with Great Britain apparently safe from invasion, the pace of American rearmament was slowing. At this juncture Japan, after fruitless negotiations for U.S. recognition of its regional hegemony, struck without warning on 7 December at U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and in the Philippines, and simultaneously moved against British, French, and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States a few days later.

In World War II the United States mobilized forces of 15 million men and women, about one-quarter of the total anti-Axis coalition; mounted large-scale campaigns in the Mediterranean, Europe, the Pacific, and Burma; and provided the backbone of a crushing material superiority over the Axis powers.

For a quarter-century after World War II the United States was the most powerful nation on earth. Yet its leaders perceived a threat to its very survival from a hostile and expansionist world communism. American fear of communism dated back to the 1920s, but its immediate source was the split with Moscow over the postwar settlement in Eastern Europe and Germany. Suspicious of its former allies and concerned for its future security, the Soviet Union after 1944 rapidly occupied and communized Eastern Europe, rejected an American proposal for international control of atomic energy, and in 1949 developed its own atomic bomb.

In 1947 Congress placed the armed services (including a separate air force) with the joint chiefs of staff under a single secretary and Department of Defense. In 1949 the United States joined with Canada and ten (eventually thirteen) European nations in a mutual defense pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), bolstered by integrated forces organized under a single headquarters and an American supreme commander. NATO was the first in a global network of U.S.-sponsored regional mutual security pacts formed during the 1950s, embracing forty-two nations and supplemented by a vast system of military bases and communications and by permanent fleets in the Mediterranean and western Pacific.

In 1950 a Soviet-supported North Korean invasion of South Korea precipitated a major limited war (1950–1953) involving large-scale intervention by the Chinese Communists, who had been victorious in the Chinese civil war of 1947–1949, and deployment of U.S. forces to a peak strength of 350,000 in a combined UN force of 800,000.

During the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1960), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed a strategy of "massive retaliation" to deter open or covert Communist aggression. The new strategy ostensibly relied primarily on strategic air power and nuclear weapons, elements favored in post-Korea military force structures. It also involved American aid to anticommunist governments in Taiwan, Thailand, South Vietnam, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Greece, and Pakistan.

In 1957 the Soviets developed their first intercontinental ballistic missile, ending the virtual immunity of the U.S. homeland to nuclear attack and creating a "balance of terror" between the two superpowers. With the advent of nuclear-powered missile-launching submarines and "hardened" missile sites in the 1960s, each side gained an "assured destruction capability" against the other's cities. The fragility of this deterrent standoff was demonstrated to a frightened world in October 1962 when U.S. intelligence discovered that the Soviets were attempting to offset American superiority in long-range missiles by secretly shipping shorter-range missiles to Communistruled Cuba. After a short, but tense confrontation, Moscow backed down and withdrew the missiles.

By the end of the 1960s the Soviet Union had achieved virtual parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons and was expanding its naval power. To avert an apparently imminent Communist takeover in South Vietnam in 1965, the Johnson Administration initiated heavy bombing of North Vietnam and large-scale deployment of combat forces in the south. North Vietnamese forces, supplied by the Soviet Union and China, began to move into the south at about the same time. Four years later, the United States had more than 600,000 troops in Southeast Asia, most of them in South Vietnam.

The turning point came in 1968, when the Communist Tet offensive convinced U.S. leaders that the war could not be won at acceptable cost. President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace negotiations, and withdrew from the presidential election. After Richard Nixon's election to the presidency in 1968, he continued negotiations and gradually withdrew American forces from South Vietnam, while the Vietnamese were being trained and equipped to carry on alone. In 1973 the United States ceased military operations in Vietnam, and in 1975 Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. The war, the most unpopular in American history, cost 58,000 American lives, with annual expenditures that soared to $28.8 billion in 1969. American bombers dropped three times as much tonnage as in all of World War II. Use of the draft as the primary source of military manpower, reversing the Korean War policy of reliance on reserves, intensified popular antiwar feeling. In 1973 selective service was terminated, and the armed forces reverted to their traditional reliance on voluntary enlistments.

During the 1980s the Reagan Administration implemented the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. The end of the Cold War led many to question the need for such a large military and substantial defense cutbacks began. In 1991, however, the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf, and throughout the decade the use of American military force abroad increased, particularly in Somalia in 1992–1993 and the former Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States faced the most immediate threat to its national security since Pearl Harbor. The Bush Administration responded by attacking terrorist base camps in Afghanistan and commencing a massive defense buildup on par with the Reagan defense program of the 1980s. Most national security experts have concluded that terrorism poses a major threat to American security in the twenty-first century, and the military will increasingly be molded to respond effectively to that challenge.