[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Conception of National Security
The 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a drastic shift in the United States’ conception of national security.For the first time since 1814, the American heartland was massively attacked. The vulnerability of its people, transportation networks and economic lifelines were exposed. No longer were oceans a buffer against attack, and no longer was military superiority sufficient to deter it. It also became clear that al-Qaeda’s transnational threat is different in kind from the more limited one posed by, say, the Irish Republican Army or even Hamas.
Unlike those ‘old’ ethno-nationalist or ideological terrorist groups, al-Qaeda has no interest in bargaining – therefore no incentive to limit violence – and seeks to cripple the US and its allies by inflicting mass casualties, potentially with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Al-Qaeda’s complaints have been transformed into religious absolutes and cannot be tamed or controlled through political compromise or conflict resolution.( Stevenson, J, pp. 37–8). These realizations dictated a sustained preoccupation with consequences rather than probabilities. In addition to maintaining the capacity to respond to identifiable threats, preferably before they are carried out, the United States Government determined that it now had to minimize vulnerabilities to ill-defined and non-specific threats.
Intelligence – General Considerations
Warnings gleaned from intelligence are by nature ambiguous, since intelligence analysts deal in uncertainties and probabilities. Thus, the 11 September attacks cannot be laid solely at the door of the intelligence community but rather reflect a security failure writ large. (Gormley, D.M, pp. 19–35). Nevertheless, the attacks did reveal flaws in the US intelligence system that affected homeland security. The main problem is that while the US intelligence agencies are capable of gathering massive quantities of raw data, they are less adept at processing it and developing an in-depth analytic understanding of an increasingly complex and borderless world......
