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Managing Fear The Politics of

Homeland Security

BENJAMIN H FRIEDMAN

Americans want more homeland security than they need That is thepolitics of homeland security in a nutshell It results from two things First cogni-tive biases cause people to worry more about terrorists than they should andto demand more protection from them than costndashbenefit analysis recommendsSecond US citizensʼ information about terrorism comes largely from politiciansand government organizations with an interest in reinforcing excessive fears

These tendencies create political demand for ill-conceived counterterrorismpolicies Few policymakers will buck that demand and fight overreaction toterrorism But for those willing to look the history of health and safety regu-lation and defense policy reveals strategies to limit overreaction Policymakerscan improve communication strategies by promoting a stiff-upper-lip attitudetoward terrorism that emphasizes strength not vulnerability They can usecostndashbenefit analysis to justify decisions that limit the provision of defensesThey can design resource-allocating institutions to compare different kindsof risks and remedies against themmdashmaking the cost of homeland securitymeasures more transparent A more cynical approach is to embrace securitytheater answering demands for counterterrorism with policies that serve otherpurposes while holding down spending All these strategies are used today butnot enough

This essay explains why Americans demand too much homeland securityand offers ways to manage the problem That focus requires limiting discussionof the idea that terrorism is less of a threat than one generally hears1 Still the

BENJAMIN H FRIEDMAN is a doctoral candidate in political science at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology and a Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at theCato Institute

1 John Mueller ldquoA False Sense of Insecurityrdquo Regulation 27 (Fall 2004) 42ndash46 John MuellerOverblown How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and WhyWe Believe Them (New York Free Press 2006) Ian S Lustick Trapped in the War on Terror

Political Science Quarterly Volume 126 Number 1 2011 77

reader should take away the point that fear of terrorism is a bigger problemthan terrorism Terrorism after all takes its name not from violence but fromthe emotion it provokes But homeland security policy considers mostly theformer That is a shame especially because the defenses we mount againstterrorists often heighten our fears of them

Here the term ldquooverreactionrdquo refers to policies that fail costndashbenefit analysisand thus do more harm than good or to advocacy of those policies This is not tosay that all goods and harms easily reduce to economic value But when we con-sider the wisdom of policies including their contribution to values like our senseof right we have a kind of costndashbenefit ledger in our minds We are prepared tocall some actions excessive to their purpose and therefore overreactions

Homeland security means domestic efforts to stop terrorism or mitigate itsconsequences In that sense the name of the Department of Homeland Secu-rity (DHS) misleads Much of what DHS does is not homeland security andmuch of its budget does not count as homeland security spending accordingto the Office of Management of Budget (OMB)2 I use the phrase ldquohomelandsecurityrdquo with regret only because it is so common Only a nation that definesits security excessively needs to modify the word ldquosecurityrdquo to describe defenseof its territory In most nations ldquosecurityrdquo or ldquodefenserdquo would suffice

VULNERABILITY RISK AND FEAR

Vulnerability to terrorism is inevitable We can focus our defenses on high-value targets like crowded football stadiums jumbo jets nuclear power plantsthe White House and the Capitol but there remain countless malls festivalsand trains to bomb We can make it harder for malfeasants to enter the UnitedStates costing ourselves via lost travel immigration and business But bordercontrol can only be an aspiration in a country that has 12883 miles of coastlegally admits 177 million foreigners each year and shares 5500 miles ofborder with its top trading partner3 If invulnerability is the goal there is nolimit on homeland security spending

(Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 2006) Benjamin H Friedman ldquoLeap Before YouLook The Failure of Homeland Securityrdquo Breakthroughs 13 (Spring 2004) 29ndash40 Benjamin HFriedman ldquoThink Again Homeland Securityrdquo Foreign Policy (JulyndashAugust 2005) 22ndash28

2 On what counts as homeland security spending see the section on ldquoHomeland Security MissionFunding by Agency and Budget Accountrdquo in the Crosscutting Programs of the Analytical Perspectivesvolume of the ldquoBudget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2010rdquo accessed at httpwwwwhitehousegovombbudgetfy2010assetshomelandpdf 6 July 2010

3 The length of the border comes from the International Boundary Commissionʼs website ac-cessed at httpwwwinternationalboundarycommissionorgboundaryhtml 7 July 2010 The numberof foreign visitors comes from the US Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of ImmigrationStatistics 2008 (Washington DC Office of Immigration Statistics US Department of HomelandSecurity 2009) 65 accessed at httpwwwdhsgovxlibraryassetsstatisticsyearbook2008ois_yb_2008pdf 24 July 2010

78 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Vulnerability is not risk however Vulnerability considers the possibility ofharm risk its probability The United States has two attributes that reduce therisk of terrorism at home First mature liberal institutions undermine moti-vation for US residents to embrace political violence including terrorismOppressive societies have no monopoly on terrorist creation but they producemore than their share4 Because terrorism tends to be local this is good newsfor Americans5 Long before anyone used the phrase ldquohomegrown terrorismrdquothe United States had an effective policy to prevent it which is to remain acohesive liberal society Along with immigration patterns that helps explainwhy there is little terrorism and scant evidence of terrorist cells within theUnited States6 Despite extensive hunting just a handful of true terroristshave been arrested here in recent years7

Second our economy and governmental capacity limit the consequences ofterrorist attacks Homeland security experts often claim that American societyis brittle that even a cyberattack could cripple the economy8 They say weneed to transform ourselves into a resilient society that can withstand attacksand disasters This view overlooks our existing resilience Health care facilitiesemergency response organizations and capital to rebuild limit terrorismʼspotential damage here Poor misgoverned societies are the brittle ones Inthe United States most storms and attacks are nuisances that do little lastingharm Even catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina or the September 11attacks barely affect the national economy (the reaction to September 11 isanother matter)9

4 On the correlation between a lack of civil liberties and terroristsʼ country of origin see AlanKrueger What Makes a Terrorist Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton NJ PrincetonUniversity Press 2007) 77ndash79 On the relationship between liberal institutions and political violencesee Edward D Mansfield and Jack Snyder Electing to Fight Why Emerging Democracies Go to War(Cambridge MA MIT Press 2005)

5 Eighty-eight percent of terrorism occurs in the attackersʼ country of origin according to KruegerWhat Makes a Terrorist 71

6 Brian Ross ldquoSecret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilitiesrdquo 9 March 2005 accessed athttpabcnewsgocomWNTInvestigationstoryid5566425amppage51 7 July 2010

7 On the limited number of terror prosecutions in the United States see ldquoTerrorist Trial ReportCard September 11 2008rdquo Center for Law and Security New York University accessed at httpwwwlawandsecurityorgpublicationsSept08TTRCFinal1pdf 7 July 2010 Eric Schmitt ldquoFBIAgentsʼ Role Is Transformed by Terror Fightrdquo The New York Times 18 August 2009 Dan Eggenand Julie Tate ldquoUS Campaign Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Chargesrdquo The WashingtonPost 12 June 2005 David Cole ldquoAre We Saferrdquo New York Review of Books 9 March 2006 15ndash18

8 See for example Stephen Flynn The Edge of Disaster Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (New YorkRandom House 2007)

9 Gail Makinen ldquoThe Economic Effects of September 11 A Retrospective Assessmentrdquo Congres-sional Research Service 27 September 2002 accessed at httpwwwfasorgirpcrsRL31617pdf7 July 2010 BrianW Cashell and Marc Labonte ldquoTheMacroeconomic Effects of Hurricane KatrinardquoCongressional Research Service 13 September 2005 accessed at httpassetsopencrscomrptsRS22260_20050913pdf 7 July 2010

THE HOMELAND SECURITY | 79

The argument that we are brittle is similar to strategic airpower theorywhich claims that the destruction of critical economic nodes can halt a nationʼsindustrial output and force its surrender History shows that the theory severelyunderestimates the amount of violence needed to cripple most states Modernsocieties have repeatedly maintained economic output and their will to fightunder attacks far more destructive than what todayʼs terrorists can muster10

Economic trends heighten our safety The transition to a more service-based economy means relying less on physical infrastructure and more oninformation which is hard to destroy as it exists in dispersed networks andbrains Lowered communication and transportation costs leave us less depen-dent on any particular supplier or region making recovery from supply disrup-tions easier Think of it this way the closure of a supermarket in a town withonly one is more disruptive than the closure of one in a city with many

These US attributes limit the risk that terrorism poses here The nature ofour enemy limits it further Many analysts depict the September 11 attacks asevidence that we are in a new era of megaterrorism perpetrated by highly pro-fessional organizations employing unconventional weapons11 Conventionalwisdom says that two trends made history useless in studying modern terrorismFirst the spread of jihadist ideology replaced the more limited aims and vio-lence of past terrorism with apocalyptic goals and unlimited bloodlust12 Sec-ond the proliferation of destructive technology democratized killing power

Eight years later and counting with plenty of conventional terrorismabroad and almost none in the United States evidence is mounting that thesetrends are overstated or wrongmdashthat September 11 was more an aberrationthan a harbinger of an age of deadlier terrorism13 Terrorism using biologicalor nuclear weapons should still worry us but the common claim that thesesorts of attacks are virtually inevitable is an overstatement

Al Qaeda was never a global conspiratorial organization strategicallydispatching well-trained operatives Even in its late 1990s heyday al Qaedawas instead a small vicious group based in Afghanistan vying for controlof a larger and far-flung collection of jihadist groups and cliques of varying

10 On this point see Robert A Pape Bombing to Win Airpower and Coercion in War (Ithaca NYCornell University Press 1996) A comparison between strategic airpower theory and the claim thatthe United States faces grave risk from cyberattack is made in James A Lewis ldquoAssessing the Risksof Cyber Terrorism Cyber War and Other Cyber Threatsrdquo December 2002 accessed at httpcsisorgfilesmediacsispubs021101_risks_of_cyberterrorpdf July 7 2010

11 See for example Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon The Age of Sacred Terror (New YorkRandom House 2002)

12 On jihadist ideology see Mary Habeck Knowing the Enemy Jihadist Ideology and the War onTerror (New Haven CT Yale University Press 2006) 28ndash29 105ndash22

13 On September 11 as an aberration see John Mueller ldquoHarbinger or Aberrationrdquo NationalInterest 69 (Fall 2002) 45ndash50 Contrary to many claims terrorism has been declining in frequencyin recent years See Andrew Mack ed Human Security Brief 2007 (Vancouver Simon Fraser Uni-versity 2008) 8ndash20


competence and aims (jihadists themselves are a tiny minority of the Islamistmovement)14 The US invasion of Afghanistan degraded al Qaedaʼs alreadylimited cohesion and its managerial ability Today al Qaeda consists of bunchesof guys as Marc Sageman puts it united by ideology not organization15 Evenal Qaedaʼs ldquocorerdquo group in Pakistan no longer looks like a coherent organization

The claim that jihadism is spreading appears to be wrong probably back-ward the outgrowth of looking only at recent history Today jihadismʼs popu-larity seems to be waning16 This is not surprising given that the ideologyconsiders the vast majority of people including most Muslims enemiesdeserving murder If this decline is real it comes in spite of the US decisionto declare a global war on terrorism and fight indefinitely in two Muslim coun-tries steps that strengthened the jidahist claim that the West is attackingIslam Whatʼs more most jihadists do not attack the United States Even inthe 1990s few of these groups embraced al Qaedaʼs goal of attacking theUnited States and now that fraction seems to be shrinking17

The democratization of killing power has more validity Weapons tech-nology has certainly improved with time and it does proliferate Yet the pro-liferation has not occurred as fast or as thoroughly as feared Predictions thatnuclear weapons technology would quickly spread to dozens of statesmdashmaderegularly since the dawn of the nuclear agemdashhave proved false18 The numberof states maintaining or developing biological weapons has declined in recentyears contrary to many predictions19 The failure of these forecasts probablystems from technological determinismmdasha focus on technical feasibility ratherthan the political ends that arms serve

The same error confounds predictions about the proliferation of uncon-ventional weapons to terroristsMost groups are uninterested probably becauseconventional attacks reliably produce the results they seek and because theyremain rooted in local political struggles This parochialism makes them more

14 Jason Burke Al Qaeda Casting a Shadow of Terror (New York Palgrave Macmillan 2003)145ndash160 The 911 Commission Report Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacksupon the United States (New York W W Norton 2004) 59ndash60 67

15 Marc Sageman Leaderless Jihad Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (PhiladelphiaUniversity of Pennsylvania Press 2008) 69

16 MackHuman Security Brief 2007 15ndash20 Audrey Kurth Cronin ldquoHow al-Qaida Ends TheDecline andDemise of Terrorist Groupsrdquo International Security 31 (Summer 2006) 7ndash48 Gilles KepelJihad The Trail of Political Islam trans Anthony F Roberts (Cambridge MA Belknap Press 2002)361ndash378 Scott Shane ldquoRethinking Our Terrorist Fearsrdquo The New York Times 26 September 2009

17 Fawaz Gerges The Far Enemy Why Jihad Went Global 2d ed (New York Cambridge Univer-sity Press 2009) 165ndash185 228ndash250

18 John Mueller Atomic Obsession Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New YorkCambridge University Press 2009) 89ndash102

19 Milton Leitenberg ldquoAssessing the Threat of Bioterrorismrdquo in Benjamin H Friedman JimHarper and Christopher A Preble eds Terrorizing Ourselves Why Counterterrorism Policy is Failingand How to Fix It (Washington DC Cato Institute 2010) 162ndash163


like past terrorists who sought few dead and many watching than the apoca-lyptic warriors we are told to expect That generalization includes jihadistgroups which generally have not attempted to develop these weapons what-ever their rhetoric

Of course alQaedadid attempt to develop biological weapons inAfghanistanbefore the US invasion and there are credible stories that it considereddeveloping nuclear weapons and even sought fissile materials20 But theseattempts failed That failure demonstrates why al Qaeda is unlikely tosucceed in mass destruction

Mass violence has historically been the product of bureaucratic hierar-chical organizations that belong to states or insurgencies that approximatethem Bureaucratic organizations reliably store and dispense knowledge Theydivide labor to allow efficiency and coordinated activity States provide themwith plentiful capital manpower and technical expertise Historically onlyarmies had the manpower to carry out mass violence with small arms More-advanced weapons that allow a few people to kill many such as artillery strikeaircraft and especially nuclear weapons required industrial capability thatstates controlled

Because they are generally clandestine terrorist groups usually lack theseattributes Policing or military attacks prevent clandestine networks fromgathering That makes it difficult to gain and transfer deadly knowledgeamass wealth and build the physical plants needed to make sophisticatedweapons Failure characterizes the short history of non-state organizationsbuilding unconventional weapons for mass-casualty attacks21

The claim that the Internet can replace training camps is at best partiallytrue22 Social factorsmdashprobably the volume and speed of interactions that hap-pen in personmdashmake on-site trainingmore effective than the remote kindMostorganizations that effectively coordinate activity whether it is the MarinesCorps or the New England Patriots still avoid virtual training

Terrorist groups that are most like states and relatively unmolested likeHezbollah are more capable of producing sophisticated weapons But becausethey are like states attached to territory and local political ends they are sub-ject to deterrence They are therefore less likely to want or use such weaponsIn any case no such group now targets the United States

The near future of terrorism in the United States should then resemble therecent past There will be a few conventional attacks mostly abroad that will

20 The 911 Commission Report 60 15121 For an overview of terrorist attempts to use chemical and biological weapons see Jonathan

Tucker ed Toxic Terror Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (CambridgeMA MIT Press 2000)

22 An example of this claim is Gabriel Weimann Terror on the Internet The New Arena the NewChallenges (Washington DC US Institute for Peace Press 2006) 127


kill a handful of Americans in an average year Mohammed Atta has no betterclaim to the future of terrorism than Ayman Farris who hoped to down theBrooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch or various other terrorist incompetentsarrested in the United States in recent years23 In its ability to do harm al Qaedais more like the anarchist movement in its heyday transnational troublemakersthan the Nazis In most of the United States the danger of terrorism is statisti-cally nonexistent or near it The right amount of homeland security spending inthose areas is none

The American public does not share this view A July 2007 Gallup pollfound that 47 percent were very or somewhat worried that they or someonein their family would become a physical victim of terrorism24 Although lowerthan the almost 60 percent of Americans who felt this way in late 2001 thetotal was similar to the numbers in 2002 and the average finding since Thatpoll also found that 47 percent of Americans thought a terrorist attack wasvery or somewhat likely in the United States in the next several weeks25 Thenumber of Americans answering this way had declined significantly sincelate 2001 when almost three-fourths of those polled felt this way but hadheld roughly steady since 2002

These polls suggest three things First Americans are overly afraid ofterrorists Even in 2000 when 24 percent were very or somewhat worried thatterrorism would harm them or their family Americans overestimated the lowprobability of harm Second September 11 seems to have caused a spike infear that eased after a few months but stayed higher than reality meritedThird most Americans do not use the evidence of terrorist weakness the yearswithout serious attack to update their beliefs

Inflated fear creates a permissive environment for overreaction to terrorismSecurity politics becomes a sellerʼs market where the public will overpay forcounterterrorism policies The most important effect of this fear has been height-ened US militarism the indefinite extension of the war in Afghanistan thewar in Iraq and a defense spending boom

More relevant here is the countryʼs mounting homeland security billWhile it remains tiny compared to defense spendingmdashroughly one-tenthmdashgovernment-wide homeland security spending has grown fast from about

23 For a sampling see Bruce Schneier ldquoPortrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiotrdquo Wired14 June 2008 accessed at httpwwwwiredcompoliticssecuritycommentarysecuritymatters200706securitymatters_0614 7 July 2010

24 Gallup Inc ldquoTerrorism in the United Statesrdquo 6ndash8 July 2007 accessed at httpwwwgallupcompoll4909terrorism-UnitedStatesaspx1 7 July 2010 Question ldquoHow worried are you that you orsomeone in your family will become a victim of terrorismmdashvery worried somewhat worried nottoo worried or not worried at allrdquo

25 Gallup Inc ldquoTerrorism in the United Statesrdquo Question ldquoHow likely is it that there will befurther acts of terrorism in the United States over the next several weeksmdashvery likely somewhatlikely not too likely or not at all likelyrdquo


$12 billion in fiscal year 2000 to around $66 billion for FY0926 The DHSbudget grew from $31 billion in FY03 to $55 billion in FY10 Adjustingfor inflation that is over 45 percent growth27 Most of the spending goes tothe operational cost of its agenciesmdashthe biggest are Borders and Customsthe Coast Guard the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) theSecret Service the Transportation Security Administration and Immigrationand Customs Enforcement These agencies hurriedly pulled together intoDHS in 2002 are not primarily concerned with counterterrorism28 The BorderPatrol prevents illegal immigration the Secret Service guards the presidentthe Coast Guard rescues ships FEMA cleans up after storms and so on Theircontribution to counterterrorism is secondary Still they have all won massivefunding boosts since September 11 The agency that probably contributesmost to domestic security is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inthe Department of Justice

In addition homeland security regulations hinder commerce One OMBestimate says that major (meaning more than $100 million in annual cost)homeland security regulations cost the US economy $34 billion to $69 billionevery year29 Additional homeland security costs are state and local securityspending and some private security purchases

Are these costs worth it The uncertainty of the benefit provided by home-land security policies makes it hard to say Attacks are so rare and affected byso many factors that it is impossible to determine what lives particular securityefforts save Still historical fatality statistics give rough estimates

The average number of Americans killed annually by terrorists between1971 and 2001 was 104 The total would be far lower just a handful if

26 The figure for 2000 is from Veronique de Rugy ldquoWhat Does Homeland Security Spending Buyrdquo(AEI working paper no 107 American Enterprise Institute 29 October 2004) Later figures are fromSteven M Kosiak ldquoOverview of the Administrationʼs FY 2009 Request for Homeland SecurityrdquoCenter for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 27 March 2008

27 Calculated from annual DHS ldquoBudget-in-Briefrdquo documents accessed at httpwwwdhsgovxaboutbudget 26 July 2010 and ldquoFederal Funding for Homeland Security An Updaterdquo Congres-sional Budget Office July 20 2005 accessed at httpwwwcbogovftpdocs65xxdoc65667-20-HomelandSecuritypdf 7 July 2010

28 On the formation of the department see Susan B Glasser and Michael Grunwald ldquoDepart-mentʼs Mission Was Undermined from Startrdquo The Washington Post 22 December 2005 Dara KayCohen Mariano-Florentino Cueacutellar and Barry R Weingast ldquoCrisis Bureaucracy Homeland Securityand the Political Design of Legal Mandatesrdquo Stanford Law Review 59 (December 2006) 684ndash700

29 Office of Management and Budget ldquo2008 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs ofFederal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State Local and Tribal Entitiesrdquo January 200912 accessed at httpwwwwhitehousegovombassetsinformation_and_regulatory_affairs2008_cb_finalpdf 7 July 2010 This range is probably substantially lower than the total cost of homeland secu-rity regulations because it does not consider non-major regulations and some indirect costs ScottFarrow and Stuart Shapiro ldquoThe BenefitndashCost Analysis of Security Focused Regulationsrdquo Journalof Homeland Security and Emergency Management 6 (January 2009) 1ndash20 accessed at httpwwwbepresscomjhsemvol6iss125


September 11 were not included Using this figure and several other scenariosthat estimate possible lives saved by homeland security spending Mark Stewartand John Mueller analyze the cost-effectiveness of the post-September 11 in-crease in homeland security spending (what is spent annually above what wasbeing spent annually before the attacks plus inflation) They find that with theadded spending the United States spends between $63 million and $630 millionper life saved30 That is exponentially more than what experts consider to becost-effective using market measures of the value of a statistical life31 Mosthealth and safety regulations cost far less per life saved usually a few million32

It seems that overall homeland security spending is not worthwhile althoughparticular programs might be The point here however is not to engage inextended costndashbenefit analysis of homeland security spending but to suggest thathomeland security policymakers should To date little of this analysis occursin government as discussed below

There is not room here to respond to the many objections to this approachto homeland security and to the broader idea that we are overreacting to ter-rorism I respond only to the two objections that have the most merit Oneclaim is that government should spend heavily to avoid the small risk of ter-rorism because our inevitable overreaction to the attacks we would otherwisefail to prevent will cost far more33 In other words if an expensive overreactionis bound to occur it is a cost of terrorism which might justify the seemingly

30 Mark G Stewart and John Mueller ldquoCostndashBenefit Assessment of United States HomelandSecurity Spendingrdquo (research report no 273012009 Centre for Infrastructure Performance andReliability University of Newcastle Australia January 2009) accessed at httpogmanewcastleeduau8080vitalaccessservicesDownloaduon3126SOURCE1view5true 7 July 2010 As Stewart andMueller acknowledge they leave out the reasonable guess that the expected annual mortality fromterrorism could be zero or only a handful meaning the cost per life saved could be far higher Theyalso do not account for the fact that a variety of other government activities have counterterrorismvalue That means homeland security spending can be credited with only a fraction of the lives savedannually from terrorism and that the cost-per-life-saved estimates ought to be multiplied

31 If a policy costs more per life saved than the value of a statistical life the government is valuinglife more highly than people do in their behavior and could probably produce more health by regu-lating in other ways Stewart and Mueller use $75 million per life saved the middle of a range ofestimates from $4 million to $11 million That is an adjustment from a range of $3ndash$9 million in a 2000article W Kip Viscusi ldquoThe Value of Life in Legal Contexts Survey and Critiquerdquo American Law andEconomic Review 2 (Spring 2000) 195ndash210 at 205 A related concept is riskndashrisk or healthndashhealthanalysis which says that at some cost a regulation will cost more lives than it saves by destroyingwealth used for health care and other welfare-enhancing activities One calculation of that cost from2000 is $15 million Robert Hahn Randall Lutter and W Kip Viscusi Do Federal Regulations ReduceMortality (Washington DC AEIndashBrookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies 2000) accessed athttpaei-brookingsorgadminauthorpdfsredirect-safelyphpfname5pdffileshlvpdf 7 July 2010

32 There are many exceptions that cost far more Cass Sunstein Risk and Reason Safety Law andthe Environment (New York Cambridge University Press 2002) 29ndash33

33 Daniel Byman ldquoA Corrective That Goes Too Farrdquo Terrorism and Political Violence 17 (SpringSummer 2005) 511ndash516 at 512


excessive up-front cost of defense A problem with this argument is thatoverreaction might happen only following rare shocking occasions like Sep-tember 11 Future attacks might be accepted without strong demand formore-expensive defenses Another problem is that the defenses might not sig-nificantly contribute to preventing attacks and overreaction The argumentʼsmain flaw is its assumption that all overreaction is alike Not all countriesreact to terrorism the same way Overreaction can be better or worse

A more interesting claim is that the utilitarian premises of costndashbenefitanalysis are inappropriate because terrorism is not just a source of mortalityor economic harm like carcinogens or storms but political coercion thatoffends our values Defenses against human political dangers provide deter-rence and a sense of good Those benefits may be impossible to quantify34

Another way to put it is that both terrorism and counterterrorism are con-cerned with something more than safety They deal with fear and the politicaleffects of attacks What seems excessive from a costndashbenefit standpoint isappropriate given these considerations

This argument is right except for the last sentence That is as a justifica-tion for our counterterrorism policies this argument proves too much Its logicserves any policy said to combat terrorism no matter how expansive and mis-guided Costndashbenefit analysis is just one tool for considering a policyʼs worthbut it is a necessary one Because resources are always constrained we alwaysneed to assess how useful policies are in producing safety Homeland securitypolicies appear to be inefficient in that sense Were it the case that these poli-cies greatly reduced public fear and blunted terroristsʼ political strategy theywould nonetheless be worthwhile But something closer to the opposite ap-pears to be true Al Qaeda wants overreactionmdashOsama bin Laden brags ofbankrupting the United Statesmdashand the policies seem as likely to cause alarmas to prevent it35

THE ORIGINS OF OVERREACTION

This section offers two kinds of explanations for exaggerated fear The firstconcerns psychological biases that cause people to overestimate terrorismʼsdanger36 The second explanation is the biased information that Americans

34 I have not seen this view clearly articulated in print but have heard it in person from JeremyShapiro formerly of the Brookings Institution It is touched on in Jessica Stern ldquoDreaded Risksand the Control of Biological Weaponsrdquo International Security 27 (Winter 2002ndash2003) 89ndash123 at 99

35 On al Qaedaʼs stated desire for overreaction see for example John Mintz ldquoBin Laden LaudsCosts of War to USrdquo The Washington Post 2 November 2004

36 For other treatments of some of these dynamics see Cass Sunstein ldquoTerrorism and ProbabilityNeglectrdquo Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26 (MarchndashMay 2003) 121ndash136 Sunstein Risk and Reason51ndash52


get about terrorismmdasha result of the incentives that pressure those who providethis information and its socialization37

Cognitive Errors

In economic terms the public lacks incentive to acquire accurate risk infor-mation38 The world is complex Time is short No one can be an expert ineverything So people make risk assessments via heuristics mental shortcutsbased on impressions and received wisdom

These heuristics reliably cause errors in assessing danger For example wetend to ignore the high probability of small gains or losses and focus on bigpayoffs or disaster despite their remote odds39 In other words people rarelythink in terms of expected utility which is why lotteries thrive People alsogenerally value losses more than equal gains40 This effect loss aversioncreates status quo bias a tendency to protect what we have rather than seekwhat we can gain A related idea is that people value the elimination of a riskmore than its reduction by an equal amount41 Thus people will pay more toreduce a risk from 10 percent likelihood to zero likelihood than from 20 per-cent to 10 percent even though they get the same increment of safety

These tendencies help explain why both leaders and the public investheavily against disasters like terrorist attacks even where their likelihood isremote Hoping to eliminate an already small risk they pay opportunity costs

37 For the argument that elite discourse guides public opinion see John Zaller The Nature andOrigins of Mass Opinion (New York Cambridge University Press 1992) For a discussion of whythe imbalance in elite opinion leads Americans to overrate national security dangers in generalsee Benjamin H Friedman ldquoThe Terrible lsquoIfsrsquordquo Regulation 30 (Winter 2007ndash2008) 32ndash44

38 This is an extension of the argument that voters do not have incentive to learn their true inter-ests Anthony Downs An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York Harper amp Row 1957)

39 The exploration of heuristics as an explanation for decision making under uncertainty stemsfrom prospect theory a set of ideas from cognitive psychology influential in economics Prospecttheory tells us that peopleʼs decisions about risk depend on the context the frame in which theydecide The frame depends on how the risks are presented prior assessments of the risk and itscharacteristics as opposed to its magnitude Prospect theory says that people are more sensitive togains and losses than absolute welfare On prospect theory see Daniel Kahneman and Amos TverskyldquoProspect Theory An Analysis of Decision under Riskrdquo Econometrica 47 (March 1979) 263ndash291Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky ldquoVariants of Uncertaintyrdquo Cognition 11 (March 1982) 143ndash157Amos Tversky Paul Slovic and Daniel Kahneman eds Judgment under Uncertainty Heuristics andBiases (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1992) For a discussion of how this research relatesto political science see Jack S Levy ldquoAn Introduction to Prospect Theoryrdquo Political Psychology13 (June 1992) 171ndash186

40 Cass Sunstein Laws of Fear Beyond the Precautionary Principle (New York Cambridge Uni-versity Press 2005) 41ndash42

41 Rose McDermott Risk-Taking in International Politics Prospect Theory in American ForeignPolicy (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 1998) 29ndash31


far bigger than the added increment of safety merits In that sense the votingpublic cannot get enough of a good thing

Cognitive psychology tells us that people rely too heavily on initial impres-sions of risk and discount later information an effect called anchoring42 Stick-ing to initial assessments allows us to avoid the mental effort of recalculationWe prematurely assume that a few pieces of data represent a trend and avoidreevaluating fitting new data to a theory rather than vice versa43

The assessment of terrorism after an event like September 11 powerfulenough to sweep away previously anchored ideas about the threat may causeus to exclude subsequent evidence of terrorist weakness People fail to recon-sider their view that September 11 demonstrated the arrival of a new era ofcatastrophic terrorism even as evidence against the proposition mounts

Another heuristic is representativeness people use previously understoodevents to estimate the probability of a new one rather than considering itspast frequency44 Representativeness causes the conjunction fallacy wherepeople fail to realize that an outcome that requires several conditions to holdhas a lower probability than each condition45 The conjunction fallacy mayexplain why people overestimate the odds of unconventional weapons attacksand other complex terrorist plots Such attacks require success in a series oftasks Failure at one can prevent success46 People are likely to fail to considereach hurdleʼs detrimental effect on the odds of success They use some priorevent to estimate the probability of the new one

A related misperception is the tendency to see intentionality centraliza-tion or agency where there is none We imagine patterns failing to appreciaterandomness47 This tendency and perhaps old representative ideas of howenemy organizations function can explain why Americans see al Qaeda as aworldwide conspiratorial organization with a strategy rather than a loosemovement with many strategies Unrelated attacks videos and travel seemcoordinated because we imagine a hierarchical organization much as Com-munism seemed monolithic

42 Ibid 6ndash743 Robert Jervis Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton NJ Princeton

University Press 1976) 187ndash18844 Tversky Slovic and Kahneman Judgment under Uncertainty 23ndash10045 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman ldquoExtensional versus Intuitive Reasoning The Conjunc-

tion Fallacy in Probability Judgmentrdquo Psychological Review 90 (October 1983) 293ndash315 NancyKanwisher ldquoCognitive Heuristics and American Security Policyrdquo Journal of Conflict Resolution33 (December 1989) 652ndash675 at 654ndash655

46 For an analysis of odds of nuclear terrorism based on this insight see Mueller Atomic Obses-sion note 18 181ndash198 For a similar-style analysis that reaches more-alarming conclusions seeMatthew Bunn ldquoA Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nuclear Terrorismrdquo Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science 607 (September 2006) 103ndash120

47 Paul Bloom and Csaba Veres ldquoThe Perceived Intentionality of Groupsrdquo Cognition 71 (May 1999)1ndash9 and Jervis Perception and Misperception 319ndash323


Also important in considering the perception of terrorism is the availabilityheuristic where people overestimate the odds of events or scenarios that theycan picture Events become cognitively available when they are recent whenthey create memorable images and when they receive great publicity48 Sharkattacks are an example Because terrorism creates strong images and attractsmedia attention it is a quintessentially available risk Images of the collapsingWorld Trade Center remain unforgettable for most Americans Politiciansʼand the mediaʼs tendency to talk about foreign attacks keeps the risk cogni-tively available for most Americans Therefore they see it as more likely thanprobability merits

People also tend to overestimate the danger of risks that provoke dreadwhich are those that are novel or perceived as involuntary49 Though ter-rorismʼs novelty may be fading for most Americans it is involuntary Victimsknowingly assume no risk

Because of how we are wired terrorism is almost a perfect storm for pro-voking fear and overreaction which is its point Cognition alone howevercannot explain public demand for protection from danger We also need tounderstand the incentives that motivate the experts that teach us aboutdanger50 In the national security realm that means the government whichdominates both the creation and interpretation of information about threats51

That information originates in intelligence collection and analysis congres-sional hearings government-funded studies and agency reports The loudestvoices in national security debates are executive branch officials candidatesfor office agency heads and nominally independent experts relying on gov-ernment information and beholden to political interests due to inclinationambition and funding

Political Motives

This section outlines elitesʼ political incentives to exaggerate terrorist capa-bility A caveat is needed first What follows is not an argument that peopleare simply products of their organizational or electoral interests Peoplethroughout the government often serve the national interest at the expenseof their own Their presence in the government can be an example The pointis that competing interests mask and damage the national interest The argu-ments below are not laws of politics but pressures that create a general ten-dency even though people often resist them

48 Tversky Slovic and Kahneman Judgment under Uncertainty 163ndash178 Sunstein Laws of Fear36ndash39 Sunstein ldquoTerrorism and Probability Neglectrdquo

49 Paul Slovic ldquoPerception of Riskrdquo Science 236 (April 1987) 280ndash28550 Harvey Sapolsky ldquoThe Politics of Riskrdquo Daedalus 119 (Fall 1990) 83ndash9651 Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro The Rational Public Fifty Years of Trends in Americansʼ

Policy Preferences (Chicago IL University of Chicago Press 1992) 367ndash369


One source of bias in the information Americans get about the terroristthreat is the need to justify American foreign policy commitments US foreignpolicy is largely unrestrained Wealth allows us to distribute troops andpromises hither and yon and liberal ideology encourages it We rarely needto worry that these actions will trigger a large war with a rival power unlikeduring the Cold War At home the cost of militarism is diffuse For citizens ofcontinental European powers in the early twentieth century or the Atheniansthat Thucydides chronicled war often meant participating in fighting andforeign policy failures brought disaster conquest plundered cities and thelike For most Americans the only clear and present danger from our defensepolicies is marginally higher taxes or economic harm from national debt Thedead are confined to the volunteer military

Still these policies and the military spending that supports them have tobe sold to voters particularly when the policies begin The justification neednot match the motivation Whether our policies aim to promote liberty servebureaucratic interests or occur out of inertia policymakers justify them witharguments about security Ideological arguments are made too but danger is abetter pitch People see threats as more legitimate justifications for policiesthan ideological ends The search for enemies is constant52

The structure of American government heightens this tendency to repack-age policies especially new ones as security projects Even in foreign policypower in the US government is uniquely diffuse Both in the executive branchbureaucracy and Congress there are a variety of actors (veto players) whoseapproval may be needed to make new policy One way to enact change isalarm a sense of crisis that either alarms other veto players into supportingchange or convinces them that because the public thinks so compliance isnecessary53 Policymakers including the president both generate and employfear to make policy

Because of these two factorsmdashthe need to sell commitments and the dif-fusion of power in American governmentmdashalmost every recent US foreignpolicy strategy or proposal has been said by someone in power to combatterrorism Even before September 11 the tendency existed The administrationof Bill Clinton portrayed its defense budgets as a means to spread global order

52 Similar arguments are John A Thompson ldquoThe Exaggeration of American Vulnerability TheAnatomy of a Traditionrdquo Diplomatic History 16 (Winter 1992) 23ndash44 John Schuessler ldquoNecessityor Choice Securing Public Consent for Warrdquo (paper presented to the Midwest Political ScienceAssociation Chicago 15 April 2004) Michael Desch ldquoAmericaʼs Liberal Illiberalism The Ideo-logical Origins of Overreaction in US Foreign Policyrdquo International Security 32 (Winter 2007ndash2008)7ndash43

53 Theodore J Lowi The End of Liberalism The Second Republic of the United States 2d ed(New York W W Norton 1979) 50ndash63 127ndash165 On the use of fear to sell largely unrelated poli-cies in US foreign policy see Jane Kellett Cramer ldquoNational Security Panics OverestimatingThreats to National Securityrdquo (PhD diss Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2002) 133


which would combat numerous ills including terrorism54 The administrationof George W Bush fashioned its Wilsonian impulse to spread democracy byforce as counterterrorism The invasion of Iraq is just the most prominent ex-ample55 Different officials in the administration had different reasons for warbut President Bushʼs main goal seems to have been to spread liberalism in theMiddle East56

Other examples of repackaging policies as counterterrorism albeit lessdisciplined and effective than the selling of the war in Iraq abound Policies thatthe Bush administration sold as counterterrorism include foreign aid tradeagreements anti-drug efforts and the Presidentʼs energy plan including theproposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge57 As a presidentialcandidate Barack Obama argued that US intervention in Sudan would servecounterterrorism58 His administration now uses similar arguments to championforeign aid and other programs that promote good government abroad59

It might seem that the tendency of leaders to use public fears of ter-rorism to sell policies reflects fear rather than causes it Actually both occurAs an echo increases noise by reflecting it elite efforts to employ public fearincrease it

54 National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington DC White House1995) 1ndash2

55 On executive dominance of the debate about Iraq and oversell see Chaim Kaufman ldquoThreatInflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas The Selling of the Iraq Warrdquo InternationalSecurity 29 (Summer 2004) 5ndash48

56 This conclusion is based on limited and preliminary accounts of former officials so it could bewrong Scott McClellan What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washingtonʼs Culture ofDeception (New York PublicAffairs Books 2008) 128ndash129 George Tenet with Bill Harlow At theCenter of the Storm My Time at the CIA (New York HarperCollins 2007) 321

57 For a discussion of efforts to justify drilling for oil in Alaska as a counterterrorism project seeSheldon Rampton ldquoTerrorism as Pretextrdquo PR Watch 8 (Fall 2001) accessed at httpwwwprwatchorgprwissues2001Q4terrorhtml 7 July 2010 To see alternative energy policies sold the same waysee for example Barack Obama ldquoEnergy Security Is National Securityrdquo remarks to GovernorsʼEthanol Coalition Washington DC 28 February 2006 accessed at httpobamaspeechescom054-Energy-Security-is-National-Security-Governors-Ethanol-Coalition-Obama-Speechhtm 7 July 2010For the argument that free trade combats terrorism see then-United States Trade RepresentativeRobert B Zoellick ldquoCountering Terror with Traderdquo The Washington Post 20 September 2001 Onforeign aid as an anti-terror tactic see Howard LaFranchi ldquoForeign Aid Recast as Tool to StymieTerrorismrdquo Christian Science Monitor 26 February 2002 The argument that Americans who usedrugs unwittingly support terrorists was made by President George W Bush who said ldquoThe trafficin drugs finances the work of terrorrdquo Remarks by the President in signing Drug-Free CommunitiesAct Reauthorization Bill Washington DC 14 December 2001 accessed at httpgeorgewbush-whitehousearchivesgovnewsreleases20011220011214-2html 26 July 2010

58 Barack Obama CNN GPS with Fareed Zakaria 13 July 200859 For example see ldquoA New Approach for Safeguarding Americansrdquo (speech by John Brennan

assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies Washington DC 6 August 2009) accessed at httpcsisorgfilesattachments090806_brennan_transcriptpdf 7 July 2010


The two-party system also encourages US politicians to inflate the ter-rorist threat A multiparty system might include dovish or isolationist partieswith an interest in downplaying the danger to appeal to supportersʼ anti-warpositions In the United States the parties engage in competitive threat infla-tion Neither sees advantage in helping Americans perceive their safety Bothparties are generally hawkish the Republicans more so due to their determi-nation to stay to the Democratsʼ right on security issues They do not alwaysagree on counterterrorism policy but the argument generally concerns thebest way to combat the threat not its size For example in recent yearsDemocrats framed their opposition to continuing the war in Iraq as evidenceof their dedication to counterterrorism They said that Iraq was taking re-sources from the more important counterterrorism mission in Afghanistannot that terrorism is too small a threat to justify indefinite participation inforeign civil wars Democrats deflected Republicansʼ claims that they are softon terrorism by urging more homeland security spending60

This competition in alarmism created the Department of HomelandSecurity In 2002 Democrats led by presidential candidate Senator JosephLieberman advocated creating the department taking up a recommendationmade by the blue-ribbon Hart-Rudman Commission61 The Bush administra-tion did not believe that the government deficiencies revealed by the Sep-tember 11 attacks required a new cabinet department or security grants tostates and localities They preferred more-limited reforms including the crea-tion of a Homeland Security Council in the White House But there was nopolitical benefit in making its case and they capitulated62

Creating the department meant increasing the incentives to herald theterrorist threat to the United States William Clark writing about the historyof risk assessment notes that medieval Europeans did not much fear witchesuntil they created an inquisition to find them63 The inquisition provided itsmembers work which they justified by promoting the witch threat Institution-alizing the hunt heightened fear of the danger hunted

60 See for example Jill Zuckman ldquoDemocrats Take Bush to Task over Homeland Security Fund-ingrdquo Chicago Tribune 2 April 2003 ldquoAmerica at Risk GOP Choices Leave Homeland Vulnerablerdquoreport prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Select Committee on Homeland SecurityOctober 2004 Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray ldquoDemocrats Promise Broad New AgendaNow in Control They Plan to Challenge Bushrdquo The Washington Post 8 November 2006

61 ldquoRoad Map for Change Imperative for Change Phase III Report of the US Commission onNational Security21st Centuryrdquo 15 February 2001 accessed at httpgovinfolibraryuntedunssgPhaseIIIFRpdf 7 July 2010

62 Richard A Clarke Against All Enemies Inside Americaʼs War on Terror (New York Free Press2004) 249ndash251 Cohen Cueacutellar and Weingast ldquoCrisis Bureaucracyrdquo 687ndash700

63 William C Clark ldquoWitches Floods and Wonder Drugs Historical Perspectives on Risk Man-agementrdquo in Richard C Schwing and Walter A Albers eds Societal Risk Assessment How Safe IsSafe Enough (New York Plenum 1980) 287ndash318


Modern national security organizations do not burn heretics but they toopromote fear to protect their mission Threats fade but the organizations thatcombat them remain making todayʼs fear tomorrowʼs64 Public organizationsare reliable servants of their purpose or mission for three reasons First themission serves the organizationʼs power structure The division of labor withinthe organization requires a hierarchy which a new mission would threatenThe beneficiaries of the current arrangement rarely embrace changes thatupset it65 Second successful public organizations tend to infuse their memberswith its values making them servants of the organizationʼs mission Memberstend to see their organizationʼs interest as the publicʼs66 Third current ways ofdoing business have reliably brought outside support especially funding67 Inthe national security realm preserving the mission means preserving the senseof threat that justified it Organizations can promote threats via congressionaltestimony reports leaks press conferences and releases sponsored researchand congressional allies whose districts benefit from the provision of defensesagainst the threat

The tendency to promote threats to protect missions is strongest in largeand highly focused organizations like the Air Force which mostly hypesthreats requiring strategic airpower its preferred mission The tendency isweaker in more-fractious and smaller organizations like those that composeDHS Reduced sense of mission means less incentive to sell a particular threatFewer resources mean less ability to do so

Like the Defense Department which was its model DHS is a managementapparatus uniting several mostly independent organizations Its critical func-tions are carried out by these subsidiary agencies Where the counterterrorismmission complements their legacy missions the agencies have an incentiveto promote the terrorist threat The mission of the Bureau of Customs andBorder Protection for example is basically to guard borders against illegalimmigrants and search entrants for contraband Protecting borders againstterrorists requires few doctrinal changes but arguably more manpower andbudget Counterterrorism is good for the agency consistent with its mission

64 This is an example of path dependence the idea that certain outcomes last even in the absence oftheir original causes due to some self-perpetuating phenomenon Paul Pierson ldquoPath Dependence In-creasing Returns and the Study of Politicsrdquo American Political Science Review 94 (June 2000) 251ndash267

65 James QWilson ldquoInnovation inOrganization Notes toward a Theoryrdquo in JamesO Thompson edApproaches to Organizational Design (Pittsburgh PA University of Pittsburgh Press 1971) 195ndash218Stephen Peter Rosen Winning the Next War (Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 1991) 1ndash22

66 On the infusion of values see Philip Selznick Leadership in Administration A SociologicalInterpretation (Berkeley University of California Press 1957) On the confusion of national andparochial interests as an organizational pathology see Jack Snyder The Ideology of the OffensiveMilitary Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 1984) 15ndash34

67 James Q Wilson Bureaucracy What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New YorkBasic Books 1989) 25ndash26 246ndash247 On mission or purpose in military organizations see Barry RPosen The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 1984) 13ndash80


but not essential to its survival Similar dynamics exist in other DHS agencieslike the Secret Service where guarding the president against terrorists com-plements the legacy mission In some cases however counterterrorism maycompete with traditional missions for resources diluting incentives to in-flate the threat Small budgetsmdashless than one-tenth the size of US militaryservicesʼmdashlimit these agenciesʼ ability to influence public opinion CollectivelyDHS agencies contribute to the publicʼs fear of terrorism but not much

The departmentʼs managers perform two functions that encourage them topromote the terrorist threat First they promote the departmentʼs budgetwhich means harping on vulnerability to terrorism Second the secretary hasbecome a public advocate for safety somewhat like the US surgeon generalThough DHS leaders no longer talk about or change the much-mocked nationalcolor-coded threat system the department still preaches vigilance and prepara-tion for disaster68 Despite vagueness about the type of disaster these exhorta-tions remind people of terrorismʼs danger

The department also promotes threat inflation by distributing grants forpreparednessmdashmainly via the Office of Domestic Preparedness and the Fed-eral EmergencyManagement Agency69 The Science and TechnologyDirectoratealso awards research grants These grants amount to less than $5 billion annuallysmall money in the US federal budget but they encourage rent seeking amongnearly everyone who has a large hand in commerce or a small hand in publicsafety ports police firefighters mayors governors college deans nurses hos-pital administrators and even schools Along with funds the grants distributeclaims of vulnerability

Despite all this homeland security organizations are not the main pro-moters of the terrorist threat That distinction belongs to the militaryndashindustrialcomplex or iron triangle This is a not conspiracy but a set of actors in thePentagon Congress think tanks academia and the defense industry with acommon interest in high military spending and thus in public fear of enemiesthat justify it which have been lacking since the Cold War70 The elements of

68 See for example a DHS website Readygov Various efforts to promote vigilance and readinessexist For example ldquoReady Campaign Launches Social Media Initiative to Encourage Americans toPrepare for Emergenciesrdquo 16 January 2009 accessed at httpwwwdhsgovxnewsreleasespr_1232126867101shtm 7 July 2010

69 Lists of homeland security grants are found at ldquoState Local and Tribal Grant ProgramsrdquoDepartment of Homeland Security accessed at httpwwwdhsgovxopnbizgrants 7 July 2010ldquoFY 2010 Homeland Security Grant Programrdquo Federal Emergency Management Agency accessedat httpwwwfemagovgovernmentgranthsgpindexshtm0 7 July 2010

70 On the confluence of interests called the militaryndashindustrial complex and how it affects publicthreat perception see Stephen P Rosen ldquoTesting the Theory of the MilitaryndashIndustrial Complexrdquo inStephen P Rosen ed Testing the Theory of the MilitaryndashIndustrial Complex (Lexington MALexington Books 1973) 23ndash24 Stephen Van Evera ldquoMilitarismrdquo unpublished manuscript July 2001accessed at httpwebmitedupolisciresearchvaneveramilitarismpdf 7 July 2010 Friedman ldquoTheTerrible lsquoIfsrsquordquo


the complex do not always agree of course The Army has a different idealenemy than the Navy Members of Congress with shipyards in their districtsworry about China more than those with Army bases Missile defense boosterswarn of North Korean missiles not insurgents

One can imagine a counterterrorism strategy that relies only on organiza-tions that most directly combat terrorism the FBI the Special OperationsCommand and the organizations that compose it the intelligence agenciesand military units like the National Guard and Northern Command that par-ticipate in homeland defense After September 11 we might have reduced thefunding for conventional military forces to increase funding for these entitiesIn that case these relatively small agencies would have heralded the terroristthreat while the military services whose missions are largely unrelated to terror-ism would have ignored or even denigrated the danger to protect their budgets

Instead the United States at least during the Bush administration definedcounterterrorism as a military struggle requiring global effort two indefinitecounterinsurgency campaigns and conventional wars against states said tobe aligned with terrorists As a result the whole militaryndashindustrial complexbenefited from our national fixation on al Qaeda Fear of terrorism helpedthe defense budget grow by roughly 40 percent adjusting for inflation from2001 until the present That increase does not include direct spending on warsThat rising tide lifted all Pentagon boats though not equally Even the elementsof the services least connected to counterterrorism like the Navyʼs surface fleetand the Air Forceʼs fighter community shared in the counterterrorism spoils

Today the idea that attacks on states can serve counterterrorism has fallenfrom official favor thanks to Iraq and the end of the Bush administrationBut the military remains linked to counterterrorism by the idea that the UnitedStates must plan on a series of unconventional wars to prevent unruly statesfrom becoming terrorist havens71 Though the ground forces still prefer con-ventional missions they increasingly embrace counterinsurgency and sell itas counterterrorism The argument for the relevance of the Air Force andNavy to the threat is more tenuous but both services make it largely byfocusing on their platformsʼ ability to strike land-based targets72 The servicesʼ

71 For a critique of this idea see Justin Logan and Christopher Preble ldquoFailed States and FlawedLogic The Case against a Standing Nation-Building Officerdquo Cato Institute Policy Analysis560 (11 January 2006)

72 The Navy claims relevance to counterterrorism throughout its FY10 budget justification High-lights of the Department of the Navy FY 2010 Budget (Washington DC Department of the Navy2009) Those claims are summarized by Ronald OʼRourke ldquoNavy Irregular Warfare and Counter-terrorism Operations Background and Issues for Congressrdquo Congressional Research Service31 March 2010 accessed at httpfasorgsgpcrsnatsecRS22373pdf 7 July 2010 The Navy alsoissues press releases such as ldquoNavy Surges Ships to Deny Terrorists Use of Maritime EnvironmentrdquoNavy Newsstand 25 March 2005 accessed at httpwwwnavymilsearchdisplayaspstory_id51850726 July 2010 Examples of the Air Forceʼs claim of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency relevance


willingness to promote the threat while diminished remains Contractors andcongressional allies reflect these views

Experts in think tanks and academia also fuel Americansʼ overwroughtfear of terrorists After September 11 a new set of academic institutions andthink tanks appeared to absorb federal homeland security funds overlappingpartially with the entities that already existed to aid the military establish-ment73 Homeland security degree programs emerged to provide manpowerto federal and state agencies that participate in homeland security74

Ideological inclination careerism and funding cause think tanks andacademic security experts to write about how to control danger not its prob-ability Relative to their peers people who study war tend to support defensemeasures just as people who study development tend to support foreign aidThe hope for political appointments encourages some experts to reflect onepartyʼs perspective Because neither party is reliably honest about the limitedterrorist threat neither are ambitious experts Many receive funding from apart of the national security bureaucracy and reflect its biases

The problem is not lying although that occurs The problem is the imbal-ance of perspectives and its effect on public threat perception When everyonein the counterterrorism business simply does his or her job and conveys infor-mation about how to limit vulnerability they focus public attention on thedanger rather than on its low probability

The media famously called a free marketplace of ideas is a failed marketwhen a strong interest faces no like interest to generate competing ideas75 Onmatters of national security unlike environmental issues for example there israrely a strong interest that gains from correcting overestimation of dangerReporters lack the time and incentive to challenge conventional ideas In partbecause of the cognitive biases discussed above alarmism sells

are John W Bellflower ldquoThe Soft Side of Airpowerrdquo Small Wars Journal (JanuaryndashFebruary 2009)accessed at httpsmallwarsjournalcomblogjournaldocs-temp161-bellflowerpdf 26 July 2010 andCharles J Dunlap Jr ldquoDeveloping Joint Counterinsurgency Doctrine An Airmanʼs PerspectiverdquoJoint Forces Quarterly 49 (April 2008) 86ndash92 An example of a press release heralding Air Forcecounterterrorism prowess is ldquoMarch 10 Airpower ISR Missions Critical in War on Terrorismrdquo AirForce News Service 10 March 2007

73 In 2002 Congress authorized DHS to fund 12 homeland security ldquocenters of excellencerdquo atuniversities See ldquoHomeland Security Centers of Excellencerdquo Department of Homeland Securityaccessed at httpwwwdhsgovfilesprogramseditorial_0498shtm 27 July 2010

74 Julia Neyman ldquoColleges Embrace Homeland Security Curriculumrdquo USA Today 24 August 200475 The idea of freedom of speech producing a free marketplace of ideas is from John Stuart Mill

ldquoOn Libertyrdquo in Marshall Cohen ed The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill Ethical Political andReligious (New York Modern Library 1961) 185ndash319 An explanation of how the marketplaceof ideas fails in national security politics is Stephen Van Evera ldquoWhy States Believe Foolish IdeasNon-Self-Evaluation by States and Societiesrdquo in Andrew K Hanami ed Perspectives on StructuralRealism (New York Palgrave 2003) 163ndash198


These various incentives to promote the terrorist threat are more than thesum of their parts Socialization heightens their power People adapt theiropinions to their peersʼ because they learn from them and because conformityis socially easier than dissent Agreement tends to make peopleʼs views moreextreme76 One result is blowback where self-interested threat inflation isbelieved not only by the public but also by the organizations that purvey it77

FIGHTING OVERREACTION

Cognitive bias and the variety of interests that bias the information thatAmericans get about terrorism nearly guarantee that Americans will excessivelyfear terrorism and demand overwrought policy responses to it Democratic gov-ernment encourages politicians to act on these demands Overreaction is thenhighly probable for the foreseeable future Experience in dealing with otherdangers however suggests strategies to control overreaction The rest of thisarticle discusses these strategies

Communication

The obvious response to threat inflation is to point out that it is wrong anddemand that policymakers be honest This tactic is not wholly ineffective Ifanalysts demonstrate that terrorists are not all they are cracked up to be partsof the public will get the message That message may encourage people whohesitated to express similar views to be more open creating a ripple effectMoreover if analysts attack overwrought statements their authors might thinktwice about fear mongering Politicians are not immune to embarrassmentThe prominence of the term ldquofear mongeringrdquo in American political discourseis evidence that a social norm may restrain egregious threat inflation Yetamong the incentives that influence the way our leaders talk about threats thisnew norm if it exists is a small force

Other communications strategies depend on the willingness of policy-makers to articulate more-restrained views of terrorist capability As notedabove while doing so is unlikely to serve leadersʼ personal interests somemay still try it One method is to emphasize our strength and al Qaedaʼsweakness We mythologize the British for keeping calm and carrying on amidthe blitz We call our country the home of the brave Action heroes in ourmovies are steely amid danger And yet we insist that terrorists can easilywreck our society an enemy so menacing that every American must discussplans to escape from their attacks with their children and maintain vigilanceon highways and trains

76 Sunstein Risk and Reason 78ndash9977 Jack Snyder Myths of Empire Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca NY

Cornell University Press 1991) 41


Leaders should point out that terrorists are in the fear business so we candefeat them by not fearing them78 Instead of treating our enemies like super-men leaders could call them what they are desperate weak people whononetheless occasionally cause tragedy Some politicians have talked thisway without being ejected from office New York Mayor Michael Bloombergfor example when asked about an unfeasible plan by would-be terrorists toblow up fuel tanks at JFK airport said

There are lots of threats to you in the world Thereʼs the threat of a heart attack forgenetic reasons You canʼt sit there and worry about everything Get a lifehellip Youhave a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist79

Another strategy is to adopt communications policies mindful of the cog-nitive biases discussed above This strategy should occur as part of a culturalchange in DHS it ought to think of itself as not just a risk manager but alsoas a fear manager Scholars of communication have outlined ways in whichofficial communication can avoid triggering excessive fears80 DHS shouldinstitutionalize these methods Still it must be noted that scholars know moreabout cognitive biases than about how to fix them And the departmentʼsinterests limit its willingness to downplay the terrorist threat

Science

A more promising strategy to fight overreaction to terrorism is to expand theuse of risk management as a justification for avoiding wasteful counter-terrorism policies Risk management means using processes employing costndashbenefit estimates to make policies This sort of analysis helps policymakersfigure out whether policy proposals make sense but it is more useful as a jus-tification for decisions already made It enhances the power of central decisionmakers that must consider the opportunity costs of chasing after particulardangers It takes power from agencies whose more parochial perspectivesencourage them to overspend against those dangers

Government ultimately belongs to interests not science but science hasmore legitimacy One reason people obey authority as Max Weber explainedis because they agree that rationality ought to triumph Science is powerful in asociety dominated by enlightenment values A formal process of employing

78 Friedman ldquoLeap before You Lookrdquo 29 James Fallows ldquoWhat Would Bogey Dordquo 11 Sep-tember 2006 accessed at httpwwwforeignaffairscomdiscussionsroundtablesare-we-safe-yet7 July 2010

79 Marcia Kramer ldquoBloomberg on JFK Plot lsquoStop Worrying Get a Lifersquordquo 5 June 2007 accessed athttpwcbstvcomtopstoriesTerrorismNewYork2244966html 7 July 2010 See also John McCain andMark SalterWhy Courage Matters The Way to a Braver Life (New York Random House 2004) 35ndash36

80 See for example Priscilla Lewis ldquoThe Impact of Fear on Public Thinking about Counter-terrorism Policy Implications for Communicatorsrdquo in Friedman Harper and Preble TerrorizingOurselves 213ndash229


technical expertise helps convince people that policy is wise Costndashbenefitanalysis may not be especially scientificmdashit is more like common sense dressedup with footnotes and formulasmdashbut what matters is that it seems scientificIf DHS tells the people of New Hampshire for example that the federalgovernment will not fund port security in Portsmouth it is useful to have alengthy report full of charts and graphs making that case

The regulatory review system managed by the Office of Information andRegulatory Analysis (OIRA) in OMB serves this function As the regulatorystate grew in the mid-twentieth century so did the idea of creating institutionsin the executive branch to determine whether the new health and safety regu-lations were worth their cost Business interests that bore much of that costnaturally favored this approach81 Behind the process lies the idea that thepublicʼs alarmist view of particular risks creates a demand for overreactionwhich Congress translates into agencies with a tendency to over-regulate82 OIRAis a countervailing force albeit a weak one given its limited influence on publicopinion and Congress Indeed in many cases Congress mandates rules via legis-lation so OIRA cannot stop them

The regulatory review process took on much of its current form withExecutive Order 12291 during the administration of Ronald Regan The pro-cess which subsequent administrations have left mostly intact requires mostregulatory agencies to prepare regulatory impact statements before issuingmajor new regulations The statements are supposed to demonstrate that theregulation is cost-effective and that no better alternative exists OIRAʼs civilservants then review these statements and reject those regulations foundlacking preventing them from taking effect In practice there is ongoing giveand take between OIRA and the agencies83

Regulatory review is far from perfect Attempts to evaluate alternatives toregulation are generally perfunctory Limited scientific knowledge preventsaccurate estimates of regulatory impact Scholars who study regulation debatehow much the process has done to avoid overly onerous regulations84 Whatthey do agree on however is that regulatory review is a tool of execu-tive branch officials willing to use it85 Rejected regulations tend to have two

81 Thomas O McGarity Reinventing Rationality The Role of Regulatory Analysis in the FederalBureaucracy (New York Cambridge University Press 1991) xiv

82 Sunstein Risk and Reason 99ndash15283 McGarity Reinventing Rationality 27184 Sunstein Risk and Reason 26ndash27 Robert W Hahn and Paul C Tetlock ldquoHas Economic Analy-

sis Improved Regulatory Decisionsrdquo Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (Winter 2008) 67ndash84W Kip Viscusi and Ted Gayer ldquoSafety at Any Pricerdquo Regulation 25 (Fall 2002) 54ndash63 StuartShapiro ldquoPolitics and Regulatory Policy Analysisrdquo Regulation 29 (Summer 2006) 40ndash45

85 William A Niskanen ldquoMore Lonely Numbersrdquo Regulation 26 (Fall 2003) 22 William WestldquoThe Institutionalization of Regulatory Review Organizational Stability and Responsive Compe-tence at OIRArdquo Presidential Studies Quarterly 35 (March 2005) 76ndash93


characteristics they fail costndashbenefit analysis and White House officialsoppose them86 Employing a scientific decision-making process does not makedecisions scientific but it has political value

Systems analysis in the Pentagon performs a similar role When he becameSecretary of Defense at the start of the administration of John F KennedyRobert McNamara created the Systems Analysis Office (later the Office ofProgram Analysis and Evaluation) to employ quantitative methods of com-paring weapons systems He also created a new budgeting system to empowerthe officeʼs analysis87 The new system doubtless produced many usefulinsights but its true value intentional or not was in overcoming oppositionto those decisions from the military services and their allies on Capitol Hill88

Eventually the services learned the new lingo and developed their own cadresof technical analysts lessening the civilian advantage This arms race in ana-lytical expertise demonstrates the power of the tool

Though risk management has become a mantra in DHS it remains under-used The second Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff habitu-ally expounded on risk management to resist congressional efforts to usehomeland security grants as pork even as he exaggerated the terrorist danger89

The department now has several offices dedicated to risk management90 Ithas adopted formulas to determine what regions are vulnerable enough toterrorism to deserve preparedness grants Much of Congress has fought thesereforms preferring to keep set-asides for all states But grants as noted are asmall portion of the departmentʼs budget

DHS and its OMB overseers should expand the use of risk management intwo ways First they should better use the regulatory review process Becausethe relevant executive orders cover DHS its regulations require regulatoryimpact statements and OIRA review Thus far however the impact statements

86 Shapiro ldquoPolitics and Regulatory Policy Analysisrdquo87 Alain C Enthoven and K Wayne Smith How Much Is Enough Shaping the Defense Program

1961ndash1969 (New York Harper amp Row 1971) 32ndash7288 Harvey Sapolsky Eugene Gholz and Caitlin Talmadge US Defense Politics The Origins of

Security Policies (New York Routledge 2009) 100ndash10389 On Chertoffʼs embrace of risk-management rhetoric see for example Michael Martinez

ldquoChertoff Touts Risk Management Approachrdquo CongressDaily 20 December 2005 On the linkbetween this approach and congressional demands for funds see Cohen Cueacutellar and WeingastldquoCrisis Bureaucracyrdquo 715ndash716 For one example of Chertoffʼs alarmism see Michael ChertoffldquoMake No Mistake This Is Warrdquo The Washington Post 22 April 2007

90 For example the Office of Risk Management and Analysis was created in April 2007 in theNational Protection and Programs Directorate On this and other efforts to bake risk managementinto DHS see David H Schanzer and Joe Eyerman Improving Strategic Risk Management at theDepartment of Homeland Security (IBM Center for the Business of Government 2009) 7ndash39 Reviewof Department of Homeland Securityʼs Approach to Rise Analysis Committee to Review of theDepartment of Homeland Securityʼs Approach to Risk Analysis National Research Council of theNational Academies (The National Academies Press Washington DC 2010) 22ndash43


have not made an honest effort to evaluate regulatory benefits and OIRA hasnever rejected them91 DHS either asserts that benefits are unknowable estimateswhat the regulations would have to accomplish to make sense or claims that aregulation prevents an annual September 11 exaggerating benefits92As discussedabove benefits cannot be assessed precisely but rough estimates using historyrather than imagination show far less danger averted and thus very high costper life saved Impact statements should be made even for regulations thatCongress mandated such as the requirement that people crossing into theUnited States from Canada provide a passport or the requirement that USinspectors ultimately inspect every shipping container entering US portsThe exercise will aid those arguing against these laws OIRA should startrejecting DHS regulations that fail costndashbenefit tests

More importantly DHS should use risk management in the rest of itsbudgetmdashin allocating funds within and across its agencies DHS has an Officeof Program Analysis and Evaluation This office should produce analysis thatshows where DHS can most efficiently deploy its dollars93 It might show thatthe Coast Guardʼs new cutters are unlikely to contribute to counterterrorismfor example or that attempting to defend trains against terrorism is not cost-effective DHS leaders have not truly made this office part of the budget-making process despite its official role and have not shifted money acrossagencies from year to year94 There is little evaluation of the efficacy of pastspending Future secretaries should take a more active role in guiding the budgetand should use the program analysis office to do so They should try to placeanalysts fluent in costndashbenefit analysis throughout the organization particularlyin the program analysis office That means more people with economics trainingas opposed to military experience The downside of this approach is that it mayupset Congress (just as the House Armed Services Committee threatened todefund the Pentagonʼs Office of Systems Analysis under McNamara)95 Butthat is a fight worth institutionalizing

Because of its reliance on unelected technocrats to resist overreaction thisstrategy is somewhat undemocratic In another sense though it is simply a wayof strengthening the national interest by better balancing parochial concerns Thisbrings us to the next strategy which is to structure decisions about homelandsecurity spending so that more risks competemdashto make trade-offs more explicit

91 On the weakness of regulatory review in considering homeland security regulations see Robert WHahn ldquoAn Analysis of the 2008 Government Report on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regula-tionsrdquo Regulatory Analysis 08-04 (AEI Center for Regulatory and Market Studies December 2008)8ndash9 Farrow and Shapiro ldquoThe BenefitndashCost Analysis of Security Focused Regulationsrdquo

92 Farrow and Shapiro ldquoThe BenefitndashCost Analysis of Security Focused Regulationsrdquo 3ndash5 11ndash1293 Cindy Williams ldquoStrengthening Homeland Security Reforming Planning and Resource Alloca-

tionrdquo (IBM Center for the Business of Government 2008) 3ndash58 at 20ndash2394 Williams ldquoStrengthening Homeland Securityrdquo 12ndash1395 Enthoven and Smith How Much Is Enough 79


Institutional Design

In How Much Is Enough Alain Enthoven and K Wayne Smith write that thesecretary of defense should make decisions about defense spending notbecause he has the most expertise but because he is in the best position todo so96 The military services focus on the dangers that they best defendagainst The secretaryʼs job is to balance their concerns The president usesthe Office of Management and Budget to balance resource allocation amongnational security dangers and other kinds

This observation is consistent with pluralism97 Pluralists say that govern-ment is the arena for the competition of interests manifest in particular congres-sional agencies and executive agencies Federalism is supervised competitionamong them to produce a national interest A similar way to think about gov-ernment is as a competition of risk preferences One person frets about Iranʼsmissiles Someone else fears environmental degradation A third worries aboutthe tax burden on wealth creation Agencies and members of Congress servesome of these preferences They clash in the formation of the federal budget

Theoretically the job of OMB and other central agents in the governmentis to distribute resources among cabinet departments and the agencies withinthem to maximize spending efficiency across risk categories In reality thingsrarely work like that Resource competition intensifies with bureaucraticproximity Missions and the threats they confront compete mostly within agen-cies and to a lesser extent within cabinet departments The location of mis-sions within agencies and departments determines who fights whom and thusaffects the resources they receive Institutional design is the arrangement oftrade-offs among competing risk preferences

If you want to constrain spending against a particular danger put it in anagency dominated by other concerns Missile defense skeptics for exampleshould push for missile defense to be the business of the Air Force not theMissile Defense Agency The Air Forceʼs preference for new fighters wouldconstrain spending on missile interceptor technology Something similar occurstoday with the Navyʼs mine warfare community which more-powerful Navycommunities keep down Subcomponents of every federal agency includingDHS compete

As discussed above the Bush administration populated DHS with agen-cies that have missions unrelated to terrorism It attempted ultimately unsuc-cessfully to make DHS ldquorevenue neutralrdquo meaning that it would not add to

96 Ibid 697 David B Truman The Governmental Process Political Interests and Public Opinion 2d ed

(Berkeley CA Institute of Governmental Studies 1993) For more critical takes on pluralism seeRobert A Dahl Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago IL University of Chicago Press 1956)Charles E Lindblom ldquoThe Science of Muddling Throughrdquo Public Administration Review 19 (Spring1959) 79ndash88


federal spending That created competition between the legacy missions ofDHS agencies and their new counterterrorism mission probably restrainingspending on both98 But public alarm about terrorism increased spending onDHS loosening that restraint

A better way to limit spending on homeland security would have been toavoid creating the department in the first place Domestic counterterrorismwould then have been performed by agencies without that as their primarymission limiting enthusiasm for it This resistance occurs today in homelandsecurity agencies left out of DHS The Defense Department for example isnot eager to assign troops needed for wars to Northern Command whichwants them for homeland security missions Because the FBI got responsibilityfor domestic intelligence as opposed to a new agency the tendency to over-invest in that function is muted The FBI leadership remains attached to itsprimary crime-fighting function

We are probably stuck with the department however so other solutionsare needed The most obvious has been discussed heighten the power ofcentral decision making in DHS to balance the various harmsmdashstorms illegalimmigration terroristsmdashthat the department confronts Another approach isto beef up the staffs of those in OMB and congressional budget committeeswho oversee various agencies and encourage overseers to look at securityspending as a zero-sum endeavor That is a dollar on homeland securityshould be a dollar less for defense or intelligence Make the al Qaeda hawkscompete with the China hawks or even the environmentalists

A counterterrorism strategy that gave budgetary priority to nonmilitarytools would enhance this competition of risks As discussed above if the WhiteHouse tells the militarymdashin strategy documents decisions and speechesmdashthatit is no longer an agent of counterterrorism except on rare occasions it willdiscourage services from hyping the threat If they lost budget to the agenciesthat fight terrorism the services might even publicly downplay the danger andencourage their agents to do so99 Similar risk competition could occur acrossthe entire government if the White House frames budget decisions as com-petitive and deficits mount If federal health care expenses grow without over-all spending increases that spending may come at the expense of securityspending That fight might create a more-functional marketplace of ideasabout security dangers improving public threat perception

98 One recent study argues that the Bush administration created DHS to take funding and attentionfrom DHS agenciesʼ legacy missions Cohen Cueacutellar and Weingast ldquoCrisis Bureaucracyrdquo 714ndash755

99 Such budgetary competition might however simply produce competitive threat inflation Oncompetition of interests as a cause of innovative military doctrine see Owen R Cote Jr The Politicsof Innovative Military Doctrine The US Navy and Fleet Ballistic Missiles (PhD diss MassachusettsInstitute of Technology 1995) Harvey M Sapolsky ldquoThe Inter-Service Competition SolutionrdquoBreakthroughs 5 (Spring 1996) 1ndash3


A related tactic is to devolve decision making about spending on homelandsecurity to states or localities That means stopping federal homeland securitygrant making Because of their organizational perspectives and the ability torun deficits federal homeland security officials need not much consider thegrantsʼ opportunity costs States and cities however do not fully share thesecharacteristics If they pay for homeland security they appreciate the cost interms of less traditional policing fewer new roads and so on They have abetter perspective on relative priorities

Security Theater

A final strategy to contain overreaction to terrorism is to deflect it Securitytheater describes measures that provide not security but a sense of it100 Peopletend to dismiss this strategy as dishonest and useless Only the former is trueThe reduction of exaggerated fears is useful particularly if it prevents morecostly responses

The downside of this approach is that the spectacle of security mightsimply remind people of danger and heighten fear You then get the worstof both worlds increased fear without increased security For that reason thisstrategy should be used only if other methods fail to contain fears But if publicfears cannot be dispelled the response might be to put on a cheap show toanswer fear without breaking the bank Cass Sunstein the current head ofthe Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Richard Zeckhauseradvocate this approach

The government should not swiftly capitulate if the public is demonstrating actionbias and showing an excessive response to a risk whose expected value is quitemodest A critical component of government response should be informationand education But if public fear remains high the government should determinewhich measures can reduce [sic] most cost effectively almost in the spirit oflooking for the best ldquofear placebordquo Valued attributes for such measures will behigh visibility low cost and perceived effectiveness101

The quintessential example of this strategy in homeland security is puttingNational Guard troops in airports in the panicked days after September 11The troops did little to stop hijackings but they may have made people feelsafer and more willing to fly

A related approach is to channel fear of a danger into measures thataccomplish other useful ends An example is the reaction of the administration

100 Bruce Schneier Beyond Fear Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (NewYork Copernicus Books 2003) 38ndash40 Cass R Sunstein and Richard Zeckhauser ldquoOverreactionto Fearsome Risksrdquo (faculty research working paper RWP08-079 John F Kennedy School of Gov-ernment 3 December 2008) accessed at httpwebhksharvardedupublicationsgetFileaspxId5330 7 July 2010

101 Sunstein and Zeckhauser ldquoOverreaction to Fearsome Risksrdquo 13


of Dwight Eisenhower to Sputnik which is recounted by historian RobertDivine102 The Soviet satellite launch in 1957 alarmed the US public Theyfeared that the Soviets had bested Americans in technological prowess andwould soon have the ability to attack the continental United States with anintercontinental ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead Eisenhowerknew that these fears were overwrought US ballistic missiles programs wereahead of their Soviet rivals in targeting and reentry which space shots donot require Secret U-2 flights revealed limited Soviet progress in deployingintercontinental ballistic missiles Eisenhower worried that alarm would causeruinous increases in defense spending He tried to calm the public in pressconferences and in his ldquochin-uprdquo speeches but mostly failed Hawks in bothparties echoed public fears and called for higher defense spending The publicremained worried

Eisenhower decided that ldquothis alarm could be turned into a constructiveresultrdquo as Edward Land founder of Polaroid and member of a key WhiteHouse advisory committee put it103 The White House harnessed alarm toseveral ends The first was science education Despite Eisenhowerʼs generalopposition to federal education spending the administration encouragedlegislation that created scholarships for college and increased National ScienceFoundation grant spending They created a White House science adviser Theyused concern about US missile programs to push Congress to strengthen thepower of the defense secretary over the services To manage civilian spaceprograms they backed creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Ad-ministration These changes were cheap at least in the short term They madeit easier for Eisenhower to resist calls for higher defense spending a massivecivil defense program and other measures he thought harmful Even so hecould not prevent hawks from harping on a phony missile gap and forcingthrough some spending increases

US homeland security policy might be thought of as security theater TheBush administration arguably saw homeland security as politically necessarybut ineffective counterterrorism It collected a set of agencies tangentiallyrelated to domestic counterterrorism in DHS made a fuss about it and triedto hold down the bill104 The department bought fancier Coast Guard shipshired more border guards and declared that vulnerability to terrorism had

102 Robert Divine The Sputnik Challenge (New York Oxford University Press 1993) See alsoSapolsky Gholz and Talmadge US Defense Politics 139ndash140

103 Divine The Sputnik Challenge 13104 On Democratic calls for more spending see note 61 For analysts making the case see Emer-

gency Responders Drastically Underfunded Dangerously Underprepared report of an independenttask force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations Warren B Rudman chair Richard AClarke senior adviser Jamie F Metzl project director (New York Council on Foreign RelationsPress 2003) Jonathan Chait ldquoThe 910 President Bushʼs Abysmal Failure on Homeland SecurityrdquoThe New Republic 3 March 2003 18ndash23


been lowered The administration used fear of terrorism to justify policies likewar in Iraq and higher defense spending that it supported for reasons largelyunrelated to terrorism

Although it does not seem inclined to do it the current administrationmight stem demand for excessive homeland security especially if additionalattacks occur by holding down spending and declaring that other prioritieslike increased hospital capacity or more police serve homeland security Thissolution resembles the prior one in that where you put government functionsaffects how people perceive their use If you call activities homeland securityespecially by sticking them into the department with that name they appear toserve that end

CONCLUSION

Our first line of defense against our tendency to overreact to terrorism is to betruthful about the threat and push for the same from politicians and securityofficials But peopleʼs psychological tendency to overrate remote dangers liketerrorism and leadersʼ interest in exploiting those fears make these toolsinsufficient Lessening threat inflation requires addressing its causes

Better communication methods may reduce psychological errors butpolitical incentives limit the number of elites eager to communicate betterOne strategy to alter these incentives is to enhance the use of costndashbenefitanalysis in DHSmdashinstitutionalizing rationality in a more technocratic DHSWe can further limit overreaction by cutting the number of organizationsengaged in counterterrorism Declaring that terrorism is not a military prob-lem diminishes the militaryndashindustrial complexʼs incentive to hype its dangerIt would be better still if counterterrorism and military spending are consid-ered zero-sum That would discourage the military and its agents from hypingthe terrorist threat Enhancing the executive branchʼs ability via OMB tocompare dangers across government agencies might have a similar effectparticularly as deficits strain spending A last resort for limiting fearʼs damageis to embrace the spectacle of homeland security answering exaggerated fearsof terrorism with cheap displays of security that do little harm If you cannotquiet nightmares with truth use myth A less cynical relative of this strategy isto declare other priorities to be homeland security so that fear of terrorismfunds them This strategy is wise if those priorities are


reader should take away the point that fear of terrorism is a bigger problemthan terrorism Terrorism after all takes its name not from violence but fromthe emotion it provokes But homeland security policy considers mostly theformer That is a shame especially because the defenses we mount againstterrorists often heighten our fears of them

Here the term ldquooverreactionrdquo refers to policies that fail costndashbenefit analysisand thus do more harm than good or to advocacy of those policies This is not tosay that all goods and harms easily reduce to economic value But when we con-sider the wisdom of policies including their contribution to values like our senseof right we have a kind of costndashbenefit ledger in our minds We are prepared tocall some actions excessive to their purpose and therefore overreactions

Homeland security means domestic efforts to stop terrorism or mitigate itsconsequences In that sense the name of the Department of Homeland Secu-rity (DHS) misleads Much of what DHS does is not homeland security andmuch of its budget does not count as homeland security spending accordingto the Office of Management of Budget (OMB)2 I use the phrase ldquohomelandsecurityrdquo with regret only because it is so common Only a nation that definesits security excessively needs to modify the word ldquosecurityrdquo to describe defenseof its territory In most nations ldquosecurityrdquo or ldquodefenserdquo would suffice

VULNERABILITY RISK AND FEAR

Vulnerability to terrorism is inevitable We can focus our defenses on high-value targets like crowded football stadiums jumbo jets nuclear power plantsthe White House and the Capitol but there remain countless malls festivalsand trains to bomb We can make it harder for malfeasants to enter the UnitedStates costing ourselves via lost travel immigration and business But bordercontrol can only be an aspiration in a country that has 12883 miles of coastlegally admits 177 million foreigners each year and shares 5500 miles ofborder with its top trading partner3 If invulnerability is the goal there is nolimit on homeland security spending

(Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 2006) Benjamin H Friedman ldquoLeap Before YouLook The Failure of Homeland Securityrdquo Breakthroughs 13 (Spring 2004) 29ndash40 Benjamin HFriedman ldquoThink Again Homeland Securityrdquo Foreign Policy (JulyndashAugust 2005) 22ndash28

2 On what counts as homeland security spending see the section on ldquoHomeland Security MissionFunding by Agency and Budget Accountrdquo in the Crosscutting Programs of the Analytical Perspectivesvolume of the ldquoBudget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2010rdquo accessed at httpwwwwhitehousegovombbudgetfy2010assetshomelandpdf 6 July 2010

3 The length of the border comes from the International Boundary Commissionʼs website ac-cessed at httpwwwinternationalboundarycommissionorgboundaryhtml 7 July 2010 The numberof foreign visitors comes from the US Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of ImmigrationStatistics 2008 (Washington DC Office of Immigration Statistics US Department of HomelandSecurity 2009) 65 accessed at httpwwwdhsgovxlibraryassetsstatisticsyearbook2008ois_yb_2008pdf 24 July 2010
















































































Cognitive Errors

























Political Motives



































































Communication









Science




















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION


















































































Cognitive Errors

























Political Motives



































































Communication









Science




















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION



















Political Motives



































































Communication









Science




















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION

































































Communication









Science




















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION







Science




















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION

















































Security Theater


















CONCLUSION













CONCLUSION




managing fear: the politics of homeland security · pdf filemanaging fear: the politics of...

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