INTERNATIONAL GUN GRABBERS
Despite the clear link between freedom and the right to bear arms in self-defense, today we find intense opposition to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Secular socialists, with their mania for government power, deeply oppose the notion of armed Americans preserving their freedom by bearing their own firearms. And so they’ve decided to do something about it.
Because the National Rifle Association has so effectively organized grassroots Americans to protect their Second Amendment rights, the Left have opted for an international strategy to take away those rights. They know they cannot pass such legislation through the United States Congress because Republicans and even many Democrats would oppose it.
Thus, George Soros, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others have been pushing for a United Nations agreement that could limit the right to keep and bear arms in the United States.
Proponents of this “UN Arms Trade Treaty” say it would not affect the individual’s rights to bear arms, that it is solely aimed at regulating international gun trafficking.
As Bob Barr and John Bolton have pointed out, however, it’s hard to imagine an effective set of laws to regulate international small arms sales that would not require some sort of new regulations and tracking on the national level.
Since all international treaties require two-thirds of the Senate to enact, it’s vital that defenders of the Second Amendment oppose this treaty as vigorously as they have opposed all previous attempts to infringe on this unalienable right, whether originating at home or abroad.
Americans must understand that our opponents are well-organized and relentless. The international Left have already succeeded in ginning up support for laws radically restricting gun rights in Australia and elsewhere. America, though, is their prime target, for if they could disarm the citizenry in a country with such a strong tradition of gun rights, then they probably could do it just about anywhere.
Everyone who believes in protecting freedom and everyone who believes in the Second Amendment should prepare for an all-out fight against any effort by the secular-socialist Left to strip us of our constitutional rights.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Twenty-first Century Threats to National Security
Imagine that someone said to you, “I’ve been driving for years, and I’ve never had a wreck, so I’m going to stop using my seat belt.”
What would you say to convince him of the danger he’s courting? How would you persuade him that the other driver might be at fault, or there might be a mechanical failure, or the weather might cause a crash?
The point is, long-term success can lead to overconfidence and a lack of imagination. This is a problem we face in national security after seventy years of nearly uninterrupted success. In just forty-four months after the attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, we built up the forces that defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. By 1945 we had become the most powerful military force in history.
Then for forty-four years, from 1947 to 1991, we maintained a worldwide coalition and a powerful military to contain the Soviet Union and win the Cold War.
Because we never endured a nuclear attack, it’s easy to forget how dangerous the Soviet Union really was. I remember walking to my part-time job at the Atlanta Public Library in October 1962 and wondering if the Cuban Missile Crisis would go nuclear and wipe out the whole city.
It actually could have gone that way. The threat we faced in the Cold War was real and ever-present. The Soviets could have launched a nuclear spasm attack (firing everything at once) to annihilate the United States. President Eisenhower captured some of the danger when he said he would not want to survive an all-out nuclear attack because he would not want to confront the horrors of a post-nuclear world.
Since the Soviets did not actually attack us, it’s easy to shrug off the threat as an exaggeration. That’s exactly like not using your seat belt because you have not yet crashed. And even after 9/11, many people assumed the enemy had pulled off a lucky attack that could never be repeated.
The unfortunate reality is that America now faces five national security threats, each as great as the Soviet Union was at its peak.
All these dangers are challenging our national security establishment in new ways. Because we invest so much in our current, highly effective capabilities, inertia prevents our leaders from considering wrenching changes or assuming additional burdens to respond to new threats.
In many ways, U.S. national security today is like the leading companies cited by Clayton Christiansen in The Innovator’s Dilemma. He describes companies that dominated existing technologies and so satisfied their existing markets that they had trouble adapting to emerging, disruptive technologies.1 Thus IBM dominated big computers but found it hard to invest in small, home computers. Similarly, the very strengths of U.S. national security make it hard to contemplate fundamental shifts in strategy, structure, and investments to meet emerging threats.
Yet these threats are potentially catastrophic.
We cannot merely shift resources from current activities. Instead, we must create a bigger national security system with a bigger budget and a more robust capacity to deal with multiple threats simultaneously.
We face this problem of parallel investment all the time in our daily lives. You don’t get to choose between gasoline, oil, and tires for your car. You have to find a way to invest in all three, or your car eventually becomes useless.
Likewise, we do not get to pick and choose which threat we will meet and which we will ignore. Any threat we ignore could potentially destroy us, so we must develop a national and homeland security system that meets all the dangers.
The five potentially catastrophic threats to American national security are:1. Terrorists with nuclear weapons
2. Electromagnetic pulse attack
3. Cyberwarfare
4. Biological warfare
5. The potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities over the next generation
Each of these threats could destroy our economy and our freedom.
Each could lead to the end of America as we know it.
Each has to be understood and met on its own terms.
THREAT NUMBER ONE: TERRORISTS WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Those of us who advocate an aggressive campaign to defeat the irreconcilable wing of Islam know this danger will eventually evolve from a conventional threat to a nuclear threat. We also know we face a more urgent threat from nuclear weapons in the hands of suicidal Islamic fanatics than from nuclear weapons controlled by a Russian or Chinese bureaucracy.
The militant wing of Islam—comprising 3-6 percent of Islam, or around 36-100 million people worldwide—cannot be reconciled with the modern world. Its adherents do not accept women in public, or working, or driving, or voting, or shopping unaccompanied by their husbands. They want medieval sharia law that allows a husband to murder his wife or daughter in an honor killing. Contrary to politically correct pieties, we will never find an accommodation with these zealots.
Since they know their way of life is incompatible with ours and since they believe Allah wants them to die while killing infidels, they are prepared to commit unfathomable levels of violence against civilians.
The result is a mortal threat to our very existence as a free society. Now ask yourself this: if someone is willing to kill himself in an attack using a body bomb or a car bomb, why would you think he would refuse to do the same with a nuclear weapon?
If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian ayatollahs are as religiously committed to their cause as are suicide bombers, what would constrain them from launching nukes if they succeed in developing them?
Aside from the Iranians’ breakneck nuclear development program, there are other ways for Islamic terrorists to get hold of nuclear weapons. North Korea could sell one, or Islamist sympathizers in Pakistan might give one away. And these devices don’t have to be a sleek, missile-delive
rable, modern system. A large, clunky, truck-carried or boat-delivered device would be devastating if delivered effectively.
Facing such a dire threat, we need to get serious about the war we are fighting. But when our border is still porous and open to easy infiltration, we are not yet serious.
When a father—a well-known Nigerian banker—warns the U.S. embassy his son may be a terrorist, and we can’t bring ourselves to block the son from getting on an airplane with an underwear bomb, we are not yet serious.
When a U.S. army major can make viciously anti-American statements, publicly advocate jihad, communicate with a radical imam in Yemen with links to the 9/11 attackers, and no one stops him until he massacres thirteen Americans at Fort Hood, we are not yet serious.
When we have an energy policy that enriches Saudi sheikhs who are the leading funders of worldwide Islamic extremism, we are not yet serious.
When we cannot even use honest language to describe our enemies, we are not yet serious.
Every time you read about a terrorist incident, remember, “That, but for the grace of God, could have been a nuclear event.”
Every time you read about our pathetic inability to secure our border, remember that a nuclear weapon delivered by truck could be as devastating as one delivered by missile.
We have been under attack by the irreconcilable wing of Islam since the Iranians illegally seized our embassy in 1979. For thirty-one years our enemies have been plotting and maneuvering to kill us.
Time is not on our side.
We have to defeat them decisively before they acquire weapons that could destroy our very civilization.
THREAT NUMBER TWO: ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE ATTACK
We have known about electromagnetic pulse effects (EMP) for more than a generation. In the mid-twentieth century, it became apparent that with the right design and at the right altitude, a nuclear weapon could be shaped to give off the equivalent of an enormous lightning strike. The power of the energy wave would burn out lights, electric generators, car engines, and anything else that used electricity. Early tests of hydrogen weapons in the Pacific knocked out electric lights in Honolulu 1,200 miles away.2
Anyone who has had an electric surge knock out appliances can understand the effect of an EMP attack.
While our military has taken a few measures against this threat, for years we have not seriously considered the civilian implications of an EMP attack.
One of the few comprehensive studies of a potential EMP attack was done by a panel convened by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett in 2005 on behalf of the Armed Services Committee. The panel, comprising prominent nuclear physicists with deep experience in the Cold War, reported that EMP was a real threat, that one EMP weapon over Omaha would knock out half the economy, that China, Russia, and North Korea were all working on EMP weapons, and that we were much more vulnerable to a catastrophic EMP attack than anyone in the national security system was willing to consider.
Ironically, the very scale of the problem caused our military leaders to dismiss the threat as unsolvable.
My friend and coauthor Bill Forstchen wrote a horrifying novel about an EMP attacked titled One Second After. In that remarkable adventure story, he outlined a year in the life of a small North Carolina town after electricity had been knocked out by an EMP assault.3 If you have any doubt how serious this threat is, you should read his novel. You’ll never be complacent about EMP again.
The United States needs to develop and fund a national security and homeland security plan to migrate our entire society to a hardened, survivable system over the next decade. The need for such a plan should be a major issue during the next few elections. In light of this potentially catastrophic threat, we have no choice but to prepare for it as a matter of national survival.
THREAT NUMBER THREE: CYBERWARFARE
The United States is engaged in cyberwarfare every day.
There are constant skirmishes in cyberspace between attacking hackers and security systems. Companies are routinely penetrated and their secrets stolen. Even the Pentagon is under siege as thousands of hackers—most of them Chinese—try to penetrate its security walls.
There are three aspects of this emerging cyberwarfare: offensive, defensive, and strategic.
Offensively, we try to penetrate other systems, and they try to penetrate ours. This has been going on at least since America and Britain began stealing German and Japanese communication codes in the 1930s. (Back then it was called signals intelligence.) Many of the biggest advantages the Allies had in World War II came from their extraordinary success in breaking enemy codes. Indeed, the American victory at Midway would have been impossible without our codebreakers.
The entire Cold War was marked by massive, continuing efforts to “read each other’s mail.” In fact, the National Security Agency is the most sophisticated electronic systems developer, interceptor, and analyzer in the world.
And of course, while each of us is trying to penetrate and understand the other, we are simultaneously on defense trying to block others from penetrating and understanding us.
Despite our historic advantage in these efforts, today our competitors’ capabilities are growing quickly. The Russians are technically the best. The Chinese are still learning, but they make up in sheer numbers what they lack in sophistication. By some estimates there may be as many as 150,000 or more Chinese nationals engaged in cyberintelligence.4
All of us understand the importance of virus protection on our computer. Imagine the depth of defense the Pentagon and other institutions now must build to block competitors from penetrating and learning our secrets. Cybersecurity is clearly a growth industry.
Cyberdefense will become a more expensive part of national security, increasingly pervading the entire system of both government and private sector communications. It will involve deep investments in math and science education to produce people who are good enough to stay ahead of the Russians, Chinese, and others.
Strategic cyberwarfare is a fundamentally different type of threat from anything we’ve previously seen. In strategic cyberwarfare your opponents use their capability to disrupt your society. For example, smartgrids are a current buzzword in electricity distribution. Yet, the very nature of a smartgrid makes them vulnerable to cyberpenetration. Imagine an opponent turning off all the electricity distribution in the United States.
The first strategic cyberattack occurred in 2007 in Estonia, after that government relocated a Soviet World War II memorial along with the graves of some Soviet soldiers.5 The move incensed the Russian government and provoked retaliation from Russian computer hackers. Since Estonia had recently become a paperless government, its pride in its new Internet- and computer-based administrative system suddenly became a nightmare as the Russians systematically disrupted it, along with basic Internet service.
The Estonian incident provides a case study in cyberwar. Without killing or even injuring anyone, Russia put enormous pressure on a small neighbor and intimidated other countries.
How vulnerable is America to a cyberattack? It’s hard to say, because no one really knows exactly how sophisticated Russian, Chinese, and other investments in strategic cyberwar have become.
This is not a threat of the future.
This is the reality of today.
Because cyberattacks are non-lethal, they don’t receive much attention. But views would change if our economy and our government were wrecked in a cyberattack.
We must make as big an investment in cyber capabilities as we made over the last two generations in strategic nuclear systems. This goal will require an increase of about two orders of magnitude (100-fold) from our current cyber investments.
THREAT NUMBER FOUR: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
Biological warfare is probably less of a threat than nuclear, EMP, or cyber attacks. Nonetheless it has to be taken seriously both because of the explosion of new knowledge in biology and because of the level of mass fear that even a small biological attack would generate.
However, the routine work done by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, combined with the specialized work of national security labs, creates a reasonably strong capability to respond to a biological threat.
Our greatest vulnerability is in having a public health system and a health information system that react and share information too slowly. We should invest in an electronic health system to ensure that any attack would be detected early and analyzed quickly, and that countermeasures would be rapidly implemented.
Such a real-time electronic health system will save thousands and possibly even millions of lives if we are hit with a biological attack. It would also save lives in the event of a pandemic.
Investing in these health systems is less expensive than preparing for cyberattacks or EMP attacks, but it’s a vital national and homeland security measure to enable us to outlast our enemies and protect the American people.
THREAT NUMBER FIVE: THE GROWING GAP BETWEEN CHINESE AND AMERICAN CAPABILITIES
As this book details, the United States has become mired in many policies and institutions whose development is increasingly being outpaced by China.
While we remain a bigger economic power than China and our military is vastly stronger, all the trend lines are in the wrong direction.
Our schools are inadequate.
Our litigation system is destructive.
Our regulatory system ties us up and inhibits effective development.
Our tax policy is anti-investment, anti-saving, and anti-jobs.
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