THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
When war comes home, so must war strategy. Lesson one: Disperse vulnerabilities - which means breaking up everything from the energy industry to air travel to, yes, operating systems.
It's a pretty good rule of military thumb that the greater the concentration of value, the more attractive the target. If you have all your fuel, or all your tanks, or all your intelligence-gathering capability in one place, then that's the place the enemy wants to hit. To keep things safe, you need to spread things out.
Guerrillas have understood this for centuries, arranging themselves in a network that minimizes the concentration of value as much as possible and makes the remaining concentrations hard to see. Terrorist cells operate on a similar principle. Increasingly, so does the regular military; much of the use of new technology by the US armed forces is intended to make it easier to coordinate dispersed assets. This is because warriors are used to seeing the systems they are part of as targets. The rest of us, until recently, were not.
As targets on the battlefield grow increasingly diffuse, it becomes all too clear that value elsewhere is still concentrated in the most terrible way. A town's worth of people becomes a single target if you put them in one great big building. And physical crowding is not the only way to amass something into a valuable target. It's not even the most worrisome. Creating targets with what we might call a concentration of consequence can be just as risky. If a city's water supply relies on a single river, or if all of its electricity comes from a grid that can be brought down at a single switching station, then there is a concentration of consequence in the river or the grid, and that makes them high-value targets.
The concentrations of assets and people that make valuable targets are to some extent unavoidable. Until recently, coming together in a single place was the only way people could enrich the textures of their lives, and that's not a freedom you want to give up. Mao saw China's peasantry as a form of defense through distribution that made the country indomitable, since an attack that destroyed all of China's cities would leave most of its people initially unscathed. But most people, given the choice, don't want to live as peasants. The urban thrill of connectivity has been one of the driving forces of civilization more or less since people started to notice that a civis was an exciting place to live.
Concentrations of consequence, though, are not a necessary element of civilized life. They come about not because of the nature of the world or the fundamental needs of humanity, but because they have some sort of economic or political appeal. The vulnerabilities they entail persist because they are either underappreciated or not understood at all. If civilization is going to come under attack - not just by Islamic extremists, but by any number of other groups or even individuals who fail to see its merits and wish to destroy or cripple it - then those vulnerabilities need to be addressed.
Protecting particularly vulnerable targets is one answer. But a more radical response is to look for changes to the infrastructure itself, changes that more evenly spread out the risks and consequences of failure. Defense requires distribution, and military strategists are increasingly looking to technology to provide it. We should look for similar help at home. The development of distributed systems throughout the national infrastructure should be seen as a priority by all the countries of the world.
Take energy. A nuclear power plant represents an almost unthinkable degree of concentrated vulnerability. Nuclear plants can be well engineered, but they cannot be made immune to all forms of attack, nor can they normally be stopped from producing plutonium. If there's an alternative, it has to be worth pursuing. And there is an alternative: a lot more small generators, and a much more robust grid to hold them together.
A wind farm, for instance, represents a challenge that may be beyond the most brilliant terrorist. The energy source is diffuse; the fuel isn't toxic or flammable. There tend to be few people in the immediate vicinity. And the energy from a single wind farm never represents a vital, unmissable resource. Similar arguments apply to solar cells and to distributed hydroelectric power, with high tech waterwheels along the course of a river replacing a single big dam across it. (As the Lancaster bombers of 617 Squadron demonstrated in 1943, the way dams concentrate value and consequence makes them particularly appealing military or terrorist targets.)
Yes, to replace a significant number of the West's nuclear power plants (let alone the big oil- and gas-fired plants, which, though less hazardous to the public at large, still represent highly valuable targets) you would need a great many wind farms, solar cells, and other low-density installations. But that's the point; a greater number of small systems is inherently safer, as is a diversity of supply. Basing your whole economy on the import of petroleum products from the least stable part of the world is a really serious concentration of consequence.
The widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cells as part of a decentralized energy infrastructure would be a further means to the same end. Hydrogen is a way of storing energy and thus increasing the period during which supply and demand may be matched; it's a way of distributing energy generation through time as well as space.
Another example is air travel, where ever larger aircraft serve ever larger hubs. Author James Fallows has recently argued for an alternative vision of air travel, one that involves more, smaller aircraft flying in and out of more, smaller airfields. Fallows doesn't argue for this on the basis of infrastructure security, but he could. Smaller aircraft are smaller potential missiles. More airports means less reliance on superhubs like O'Hare and Atlanta, which, given terrorism's long-standing infatuation with air travel, have to be seen as tempting concentrations of targets.
Small aircraft can't do everything that large aircraft can do, but they don't have to. What's important is that the addition of small aircraft to our skies is a good way to increase diversity and, as a result, get the benefits of a more distributed system. In many ways, diversity is just another sort of distribution; building it into your system is really just a way of spreading your assets across the realm of technical possibilities. So to redistribute travel in a less concentrated way, you don't just want to move people from big airports and big aircraft onto smaller ones; you also want to diversify the total mix of traveler miles by making increased use of systems beyond aviation.
In America, the obviously underutilized modality for passenger transport is rail. Elsewhere in the developed world, high-speed trains are increasingly competitive for leisure and business travel in the 300-mile range; in the US, with two partial exceptions, there are no high-speed train lines. Well-implemented high-speed links such as those under discussion in Florida, between the main cities of Texas and Oklahoma, and in the region between Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit, and St. Louis could add a lot of redundancy to a transport infrastructure that currently concentrates passengers on aircraft and in airports. Trains are potential terrorist targets, too, but it's very hard to use one as a missile.
The most famously distributed piece of infrastructure could use a little more diversity, as well. Though the Internet was not, in fact, "designed to withstand a nuclear attack," it was designed to be highly robust. So it has proven, by and large. But its robustness is severely diminished by the fact that so many of the computers linked to it are running the same highly vulnerable software. Looked at in this way, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are not just an antitrust issue; they're a serious national, even international, security issue.
If computer viruses and worms shouldn't have their quasilives made too easy by an absurdly homogenous host population, neither should real-life viruses. High-intensity monoculture farming is vulnerable enough to diseases that come along naturally; a well-chosen or cleverly tailored infection delivered on purpose could wreak havoc. Concentrate your food supply on a few highly profitable agricultural genotypes, and you create some very high-value targets indeed. Diversify the food production process, and you make the system more robust and reliable.
For biological attacks against humans rather than livestock or cereals, the arguments are a little different. Contagion makes viruses and bacteria fundamentally unlike other weapons. A biological attack, gaining new targets as it goes on, has no need to seek out concentration; it can be diffuse in its essence, its impact building up over time. There is no way to design around such a risk. But there are ways to lessen its potential impact, and one is to become aware of what is going on as quickly as possible. According to studies by the CDC, in the case of an attack using tularemia (a disease, normally spread by insects, that can be dispersed in the air), starting treatments on the day after the attack reduces the death toll by a factor of three; reacting on the fifth or sixth day has basically no effect.
This sort of fast response is another defense that a distributed infrastructure can help provide. To detect an attack quickly requires a nimble, well-distributed public health information system, one that can pick small epidemiological changes out of the noise. The Internet-based Rapid Syndrome Validation Project led by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories shows some of what such a system might achieve. RSVP will use a neural-net system or traditional statistical analysis to see whether reports of symptoms from emergency rooms are revealing unusual patterns of disease. Such systems could provide warning of an attack much faster than would the current system of disease notification, which in the US involves diseases being reported at the state and then federal level in a centralized process that takes weeks. Besides speed, such systems would allow better coverage of outbreaks in other countries, a basic requirement for any biowarfare early warning system. As Christopher Chyba of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation points out, any attack using an agent with an incubation time significantly longer than an international flight is not going to respect borders.
Other aspects of the response can be distributed through time. Stockpiles of vaccines and antibiotics need to be built up and made available at a range of locations in a range of countries. Another distributed response to biological attack is partial immunity. There are already vaccines against most plausible bioweapon agents. If a small percentage of health workers - and indeed of the population at large - were to choose to be vaccinated against one or some of these diseases, then a reservoir of manpower would always be on hand in an emergency, ready to help with the vaccination of others or to do whatever else was necessary in places where infection was rife. You can't vaccinate everyone against everything; but if some people are vaccinated against most things and you know where to find them, their distributed immunity could be a powerful asset.
These ideas share two problems: One is finding someone to champion them; the other is dealing with the costs. Distribution and diversity require champions, and there are good reasons to expect people in power, by and large, to be reluctant to take on that role. Large corporations like concentrations of capital and market share; they have a great taste for economies of scale. Politicians like concentrations of power and have a love for order (or perhaps a fear of division) that leads many to distrust diversity. "How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 kinds of cheese?" Charles de Gaulle is said to have cried out in despair.
Sorting out a means by which governments might encourage the sort of changes I'm talking about would be hard even if there were no costs involved. And there will be costs. Distributing and diversifying may, in many cases, mean introducing some waste into the system. This waste is unavoidable; indeed, it will often be the very thing that provides the resilience that the system needs. But the savings involved in reducing vulnerability to attack, though real, will in all likelihood not show up in the bookkeeping. The costs will. This means that making changes will in some cases involve subsidies. To those opposed to any governmental involvement in the workings of the economy (other than, presumably, a willingness to defend its works, even if they are indefensible), this will never be acceptable. Grover Norquist, that nice man in charge of Americans for Tax Reform, has been quoted as saying that advocates of new money for Amtrak in the post-Twin Towers world "should be hanged as war profiteers."
In reply to these points there are principles, precedents, and potential profits. In times of war, individual citizens are expected to do their bit for national - or international - security. Surely the enterprises responsible for crucial concentrations of value and consequence should be expected to do the same. The status quo is making developed countries, and particularly the US, harder to defend. That must constitute a case for change. In a climate where serious curtailments of civil liberties are being suggested and debated, is it really out of line to ask that vital infrastructure be shaped by something other than market forces and institutional inertia?
In terms of precedents, look no further than your nearest interstate. The 43,000 miles of the interstate highway system (a mile for each window in the Twin Towers) represent a defining piece of American infrastructure. They were built by the government with something like $250 billion (in today's dollars) raised through taxes dedicated to the purpose. Part of the justification for this was economic: Eisenhower wanted to generate a lot of employment after the Korean War. And another part was military: The interstates, it was said, were a way to move armies across the country quickly and to get people out of cities threatened by nuclear attack. They were a means by which to undo concentrations of value. To this day, the road network is officially called the System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
If arguments over national defense could reshape America's infrastructure in the 1950s, why not again? The parallels aren't perfect, but they are suggestive. The interstates were conceived long before the military rhetoric that surrounded their creation took form; the same is true of today's ideas for reengineering the infrastructure. There's the possibility that a serious recession might bring out a surge of latent Keynesianism. And then there's the fact that, as with the interstates, the military reasons for more distributed infrastructure are only part of the argument. It's a general truth that the systems history locks us into are not necessarily the best, and that economic forces on their own will not necessarily sort out such problems. There are strong environmental cases for investment in micropower, renewables, and the transition to a hydrogen economy. A less virus-prone Internet and less congested airports would have benefits beyond defense. A better international public health information system - a far cheaper proposition than a new energy infrastructure - would have huge advantages on its own terms for all the countries concerned, not least because of the message it could send about global priorities.
There's also an important difference, though, between the possibilities open today and the birth of the interstates. According to Bruce Seely, a historian at the National Science Foundation, the military arguments for the interstate system - even if they were enshrined in its name - were mostly rhetorical; the forces driving the decision within and beyond government were not defense-related. And the interstates were never put to their "military" use as conduits for Cold War evacuations. This time around, it may be that, at least in some cases, the military arguments do stand up, and the military objectives - avoiding catastrophic attacks by removing targets of concentrated consequence - might be met. The infrastructure of the developed world has real weaknesses that could be mitigated by new approaches and fresh thinking. Distributed defense could save the lives of a lot of people. And improved infrastructure could make those lives better, too.
