Homeland defense's profile was raised before attacks

By Los Angeles Times

Last update: September 15, 2001 - 11:00 PM

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For months before last week's attacks on the United States, Bush administration officials had been increasingly preoccupied with the possibility of threats to the homeland.

In addition to urging the development of an antimissile shield, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been calling since early in the year for vastly expanding the military's role in defending against computer, biological and chemical warfare waged at home.

Rumsfeld and senior aides also have discussed pulling some Reserve and National Guard troops out of foreign trouble spots so they could be better prepared to respond to attacks on U.S. soil.

Those plans were notable for their stark contrast with several decades of military doctrine that had focused on deploying U.S. forces abroad.

"This administration is more serious about actually doing something about those threats," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in August.

"I think the country as a whole is getting a growing sense of the danger from a variety of hostile countries and nongovernment groups that are beginning to have those capabilities. And I think it's not only a matter of being prepared if they use them, but of being prepared to persuade them not to use them."

When the Bush administration came to power this year, many of its policymakers viewed the United States as considerably more vulnerable than their immediate predecessors did.

In July, defense of the homeland was incorporated for the first time into guidelines for strategy used to request money for the military. The elevation of homeland defense into one of the four main military "capabilities" referred mostly to administration plans to spend billions on developing a high-tech missile defense. But it also officially gave the military domestic duties in battling terrorism waged at home.

"We're unlikely to be attacked on the high seas because of the power of our Navy and ... we're unlikely to be surpassed in the air," Rumsfeld told reporters in July, shortly after the guidelines were released. "Clearly, it is the asymmetric threats that are a risk, and they include terrorism, they include ballistic missiles, they include cyberattacks."

The Pentagon was not alone in worrying about attacks on Americans at home. In February, a 14-member bipartisan commission reported that the United States was vulnerable to terrorist attack and had inadequate homeland defenses.

The commission, which included former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., made 50 specific recommendations for building up homeland defense.

"We must assume that the events of Tuesday were not the end," Hart said last week. "I think we must assume further attacks. We are not prepared to prevent them or to address them when they have occurred."

Suddenly, with the theoretical transformed into reality, the challenge for the Pentagon is no longer how to sell the idea of homeland defense politically. It is how to make it work.

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