The Real Cost of Homeland Security

[Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series of Audits of the Conventional Wisdom, a project of the Center for International Studies at MIT.]

Conventional wisdom says that none of us are safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are. The conventional belief is that in response to terrorism, the federal government has spent massive sums on homeland security. The fact is that the increased federal spending on homeland security since September 11 pales in comparison to increases in the U.S. defense budget. But homeland security has costs beyond spending, costs that conventional thinking rarely considers. U.S. homeland security policy conjures up a flawless enemy that could strike at any moment, in any place. That policy institutionalizes the fears terrorists created and harms liberal values.

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about. By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road, and lightening have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism. In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the number killed by car accidents.

Most experts dismiss this history. They contend that because both weapons technology and Sunni extremism are spreading, the terrorist danger is ahistorical. But while both these trends are real, we should not leap to the conclusion that the threat is growing or greater than more mundane dangers. There is no obvious reason to believe that September 11 was the start of an era of ever deadlier terrorism, rather than its high-water mark.

Why Terrorism is Difficult

There are several reasons why terrorism is harder than we generally hear. First, terrorists have to get here. There isn't a militant Islamic population in the United States, as there is in Spain or England, nor is there evidence of sleeper cells in the United States. A successful terrorist plot in the United States would probably require terrorists to fly overseas and enter an alien state. That entails reliable men with names off the watch-lists that airline security run, or hard-to-find forged documents, and border agents who are not suspicious. If the plot requires several people, as most do, a core part of the group must accomplish these tasks. Then they need to execute the plot, probably buying weapons material, without raising suspicion.

All of these steps are doable, especially for a professional terrorist organization, as Al Qaeda proved. But conventional analysis of terrorism ignores the second reason terrorism is not so easy: today's terrorist organizations are not as capable as Al Qaeda once was, especially when it comes to operating overseas. One possible exception, Lebanon's Hezbollah, is no longer in the business of attacking the United States. The war in Afghanistan and a worldwide policing effort against Al Qaeda shattered the main terror network that menaced the United States. In its place are disaggregated set of extremist Sunni groups who share little more than Al Qaeda's ideology, and pockets of unaffiliated fellow travelers. This network is linked by personalities, websites, and in some cases financing, but they do not cooperate much, and lack the training and experience the core of Al Qaeda had. These groups will struggle to train operatives, get false documents, and coordinate men and material abroad.

Major terror attacks have recently struck London, Madrid, Jakarta, Bali, Riyadh, Sharm-el-Sheik, Istanbul, Casablanca, Manila, and especially Iraq. But while some of these attacks, including the London subway bombing, may involve men with links to foreign groups, the impetus of the attacks came from local groups, which bodes well for a nation like ours.