It’s time we learned form the success of America’s competitive, open-ended higher education system and applied the same principles of choice and competition to K-12 learning. We would immediately increase learning and dramatically reduce the ineffective, unionized bureaucracy. America would be stronger on both counts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Why the Second Amendment Is Vital to Preserving Our Freedom
In order to preserve liberty from encroachment by government and politicians, the Founding Fathers passed a Bill of Rights consisting of ten amendments to the Constitution. The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The secular-socialist Left argue that militias no longer exist the way they did in the eighteenth century. Thus, they say, the Second Amendment is antiquated and the individual’s right to arms is no longer relevant.
This is a willfully false reading of the amendment. The experiences and writings of the Founding Fathers indisputably demonstrate they intended for the Second Amendment to be understood as an individual right that exists outside the context of using weapons as part of service in a militia.
Nine provisions written in state constitutions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included language asserting the people’s right to “bear arms in defense of themselves” as well as in defense of their state. So the right to bear arms was commonly understood at the time as applying to self-defense.
But more important, the Second Amendment not only guarantees the individual’s right to defend one’s self, family, and property, but to defend against the inherent danger of tyrannical government.
The men who wrote and enacted the Second Amendment had a keen sense of words and a thorough knowledge of history. In addition to their own experiences fighting against British tyranny, they were steeped in Greek, Roman, and English history. From this, they concluded that politicians could not be trusted, that power corrupts, and that governments were a permanent threat to liberty.
The lessons of the English Civil War taught the Founders that government had to be controlled by the people or it would drift into a tyranny over the people. And the experience of their own American Revolution, especially the battles of Lexington and Concord, convinced them that an armed citizenry was an essential requirement for preserving freedom.
David Hackett Fischer, in his brilliant history Paul Revere’s Ride, captures the lesson. The British Army had had a long experience of crushing peasant rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, and rural England. Faced with rabble, the disciplined force of a relatively few men could dominate and impose the government’s will.
That is why the colonists’ victories at Lexington and Concord were such an enormous shock for the British Army. As Fischer recounts in vivid and compelling detail, more than a century of self-defense, self-organization, and self-government had created communities capable of governing themselves and defending themselves. When the British collided with this organized community, they were outnumbered and in many ways outgunned.
Civilian soldiers made a crucial contribution to victory during the agonizing eight years of the Revolutionary War. At Saratoga, one of the greatest victories of the entire war (and the key event in convincing France to enter the war on our side), the militia played a decisive role in isolating and surrounding an entire British Army.
The Founding Fathers knew full well the original march to Concord and Lexington aimed to seize the largest powder supply in New England. They knew the British believed disarming citizens was the key step toward controlling and subjugating them.
Throughout history, we have constantly seen regimes attempt to disarm and thereby control people—and with good reason. Armed, independent civilians are a threat to tyrants.
Thus, the right to bear arms became a key building block in the fabric of freedom.
Since the Founding Fathers deeply believed in the weakness of human nature and the tendency of power to corrupt those who wield it, they wanted to preserve the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against tyranny, even against a tyrant of their own nationality.
In The Federalist No. 46, James Madison wrote that if the federal government were ever to act in a way that violated the rights of Americans, a federal army “would be opposed [by] a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands.” Madison argued that if the people of Europe, where “the governments are afraid to trust people with arms,” had a militia organized by local government, “the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.”
Madison’s point has held true in more modern times. Imagine a Nazi Germany in which the Nazis hadn’t passed special laws to disarm Jews and other anti-Nazi groups. Under those conditions, the Holocaust would have been virtually impossible to implement.
Anyone who has studied Afghan history knows that the power of the Afghan people to resist every foreign invader—including the British, Russian, and Soviet empires—is based on the Afghans’ widespread ownership of arms and skill in their use. Our own commanders in Afghanistan know if they were to alienate the Afghan population, the country would be ungovernable. We can be in Afghanistan as liberators and allies, but never as conquerors or dominators.
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, lo
ng-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-deliverable, 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.
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