Rallying 'Round the Flag
Since al-Qaeda declared war on Washington five years ago, the federal city has responded the way it knows best
By David Von Drehle
Sunday, April 9, 2006; W10
Late one winter afternoon, not long before he stepped down as chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Terrance Gainer was discussing security in the age of catastrophic terrorism. Behind him, his office windows displayed a spectacular view: nearly 180 degrees of Washington skyline, anchored by a huge, incandescently white dome. To some people, the Capitol dome stands for power. To others, freedom. To the Americans who watched as the dome was built during the desperate years of the Civil War, its alabaster gleam represented the idea of the nation itself.
Gainer would see the dome and think: "Quite a target."
And the Mall, with its monuments, memorials, artifacts and treasures? "It's like a runway," Gainer observed. Macabre? Perhaps, but Gainer, like many others in Washington, was paid to think unpleasant thoughts, including one in which a terrorist steers a jet down the wide landing path of the Mall, descending over the Reflecting Pool, accelerating above the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Castle on his right, the National Gallery on his left, to slam spectacularly into the dome.
The White House, with its low profile and wooded surroundings, is a much trickier objective, Gainer noted.
This was all said matter-of-factly. It's just the world we live in today. See plane, think missile; see landmark, think fireball; feel breeze, think anthrax. And so I found myself nodding agreeably as Gainer continued in this apocalyptic vein, comparing the relative threats posed by deadly germs in the air vents, a dirty bomb, a suicide bomber in a room full of VIPs. He spoke smilingly about the inevitable panic, the gridlocked roads, the trapped humans frantic to escape. Is evacuation even a good idea in most cases? Gainer asked rhetorically. After all, a basement makes a sturdy bunker against even a violent blast. On the other hand, if the basement fills with highly flammable jet fuel . . .
"And what if a bomb the size of the Hiroshima bomb was set off around here?" Gainer asked finally, then answered his own question. "Well, we'd all be dead, so we wouldn't have to worry about a mass evacuation."
For a brief moment, I imagined a blinding flash outside Gainer's windows, and a rush of superheated wind, and the windows bursting as the walls imploded. But just as quickly, the vision retreated to the grim corner of the brain where most Washingtonians endeavor to keep it. In place of the horror there was, once more, a fine view of the coppery winter dusk. The dome. A construction crane. Lights winking on. Another construction crane. The Washington Monument. Another construction crane.
And another construction crane.
And another.
Construction cranes occupied nearly every point of the compass, in the foreground and in the background, looming nearby, tiny on the horizon. Bombs and missiles aren't the only things that go boom. Economies do, too.
Thus, the yin and yang of life in Washington were balanced there amid the homey confines of Chief Gainer's office. Visions of disaster alongside hard evidence of good times. The fact is, since the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, life has been fat here in the cross hairs (apart from the occasional night sweat). The Washington area has enjoyed the best economy in the nation during the past four years -- by a mile. What doesn't kill us makes us richer.
Perhaps, if you live here, you have found yourself wondering whether you should stay. Maybe the thought crossed your mind the day the folks from Human Resources distributed plastic escape hoods, mini-flashlights and whistles to blow should you find yourself pinned under rubble. Or maybe it was the day your spouse came home with an armload of duct tape and plastic sheeting for your "safe room." Maybe it was when the guys in the mailroom started walking around in surgical masks, or when you attended that dinner party where your neighbors explained their strategy for evacuating via bicycle or canoe. But you stayed, and seemingly everyone else did, too. And many thousands more poured into the region, filling the subdivisions and condo blocks and office towers rising from Dulles to downtown, Leesburg to Largo, Dale City to Hyattsville.
Meanwhile, this thriving metropolis has been forested with strange, man-made flora: the hardened posts, known as bollards, cemented into the ground at strategic points to thwart car bombs; the slender poles blossoming with surveillance cameras; the stumpy boxes that give no outward sign of the radiation detectors inside. Above it all, like a forest canopy, rise the busy booms (that word again!) of the construction cranes. The stubby bollard and the towering crane, one representing fear, the other prosperity -- incongruous, yes, but also ubiquitous. They are the symbols of our time.
THE FIRST REACTIONS TO 9/11 included panic, disbelief, outrage, shock, sorrow, fury and a righteous patriotism. There was a lot of speculation about crowds at the military recruiting stations and a general wave of bear-any-burden determination. It was a blood, sweat, toil and tears sort of moment. President Bush, congressional leaders and Pentagon brass gathered at the National Cathedral a few days after the attacks to pray for God's assistance in the smiting of our enemies. As they stood to leave, the pipe organ roared out "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- which, you may remember, is not exactly a pastoral. Some fateful lightning was about to be loosed from our terrible, swift sword.
And indeed there has been lightning in distant places around the world. Closer to home, however, the response has been less martial than monetary. Military recruitment is down, not up. Rather than meet any hardship, we have loosed the fateful charge cards of America's fat wallet.
Which makes a certain brand of sense: A basic doctrine of war says to mass your strength against your enemy's weakness, and the United States has no more tangible, flexible strength than its economy. It's no coincidence that, among the five living former secretaries of defense since 1977, four have become financiers (the other is vice president). Our money and our muscle are strategically meshed. Experts can argue about the long-term vitality of America's money muscle, given our outsourced jobs, sagging industrial base, looming old-age crisis and national debt. But for the time being, U.S. cash flow remains awesome. The federal government is the world's largest consumer of goods and services. The United States produces more buying power each year than the 25 European Union nations combined, though Europe has 160 million more people. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, we produce more than 20 percent of the world's dough. Faced with a crisis, our leaders did what they know best. They started shoveling money.
It's impossible to say precisely how much the U.S. government has spent in response to 9/11. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- better known as the 9/11 Commission -- noted in 2004 that the country's defense and security spending was escalating more steeply than at any time in the past 50 years. This money is contained in thousands of budget items, some of which are misleading, others of which are classified. We can see the tips of some icebergs, though. According to the Congressional Budget Office, funding specifically for homeland security, one small part of the overall security spending spree, more than doubled in the first two years after the attacks, from $20 billion to more than $40 billion. Some federal spending is an obvious response to Osama bin Laden, such as the billions to fortify federal office buildings and update government computer networks. Some comes under less obvious headings, such as the billions in new spending at military hospitals to treat and rehabilitate the wounded soldiers of the Iraq war. Some money remains inside government agencies, such as the billions in new spending at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, funding research into anthrax, smallpox and other germ terrorism. Some of it pours into private companies, especially private companies with big Washington area offices. All told, it's safe to say that hundreds of billions have gushed forth in a torrent of money that has washed across the globe, puddling in pockets from Kandahar to Kansas City. And the great lakes of cash have collected right here in the government's back yard.
"What you see in all the new construction, all the new jobs and so forth, is the benefit the Washington area receives from having a very rich uncle -- you know, Uncle Sam," says Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. "Every quarter, and especially on April 15, we receive an enormous transfer of wealth from the rest of the country."
Fuller is a slim, graying fellow who has built a small empire on his diligent collection and smooth explication of Washington area economic data. He has numbers for everything, usually right at his fingertips, from the size of the federal workforce under Lyndon Johnson to the current growth rate of the dry-cleaning sector. Merchants, developers, politicians and journalists look to Fuller and his PowerPoint slides for illumination of the world outside their windows. Suppose you want to know why the unemployment rate in Northern Virginia has been the lowest in the country for much of the past four years. Fuller has a slide to explain it.
"Government procurement," he summarizes.
Fuller continues. "In Fairfax County, federal procurement amounted to $16 billion last year alone." That is the richest windfall in America, by far -- roughly 10 times as much, per capita, as the government doled out for goods and services in Los Angeles, for example. "Procurement" does not describe all government spending, just the goods the government buys and the outside work it commissions. So that $16 billion, while huge, doesn't include the salaries of government workers, who are legion in Fairfax and throughout the Washington region. Nor does it include the rent the government pays for office space, even though the feds and their contractors are this area's biggest tenants, by far. Since 9/11, the Washington region has boasted the strongest commercial real estate market in America, with low vacancy rates producing rents second only to New York City.
All these spending streams flow into the region, but procurement spending "is something far more potent," Fuller says. "We've found that procurement dollars have twice as much impact in the economy as government payroll dollars. The money churns more through the economy. There's a bigger bang for the buck."
That bang is reflected in the huge new houses with the two-story foyers, in the fancy late-model cars, in the oversubscribed private schools, and, most of all, in the chain of construction cranes sited in the past few years from the Pentagon to past Dulles International Airport. In terms perfectly chosen for the prosperous citizens of Northern Virginia, Fuller compares this stretch to a high-class galleria, with the Defense Department and the airport as the anchor stores. "The Pentagon is like Neiman Marcus," he says, "and Dulles is like Nordstrom." Between them lies a long line of upscale boutiques doing record business -- weapons contractors, management consultants, data processing giants, communications providers, information technology firms. Big names, such as Accenture, BearingPoint, Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics, Titan, Oracle, Raytheon and SAIC. Countless smaller contractors as well. These companies are selling everything from missiles to disaster-modeling software to computer integration at the Department of Homeland Security.
Northern Virginia has prospered the most, but don't cry for Maryland or the District. According to another of Fuller's slides, federal procurement spending has been frenzied there, too. From 2003 to 2004, to focus on a single year, federal contracting increased 16 percent in the District and 19 percent in the Maryland suburbs.
If you spend it, they will come: Since al-Qaeda hit the Pentagon, more people have moved to greater Washington than to any other non-Sunbelt region. Call it denial, call it playing the odds; having weighed the certainty of good jobs versus the threat of future catastrophe, people have voted with their moving vans. The threat is real. Last year, Rand Corp., the granddaddy of national security think tanks, proposed a complex formula for estimating the risk of major terrorist attacks in U.S. cities. The cities with the most dense urban cores, New York and Chicago, ranked first and second because of the prospect of many deaths in a relatively small area. Washington, despite much lower density, was third, because of its obvious strategic importance.
That's enough risk to inspire the bollards and cameras and radiation detectors, but not enough to persuade people to leave. If you want perfect safety, you could buy a government-surplus missile silo in sparsely populated Kansas or Wyoming. They come on the market from time to time. Once you seal the hatch on an Atlas E silo, encased in 18 inches of steel-reinforced concrete beneath at least six feet of prairie sod, you can ride out a nuke more than 50 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. But the silo market is slumping, while two-bedroom condos in Kalorama, within walking distance of prime al-Qaeda targets, are going for $750,000 and up.
Government procurement was rising even before the attacks, because presidents going back to Ronald Reagan have shared a belief that contracting with private companies for services is better than hiring more government employees to do the work. Everything about the United States has grown significantly since the 1980s--the population, the economy, the federal budget--except for the size of the federal workforce. Still, Fuller has a pretty good handle on how much the war on terror has supercharged the spending.
"We've calculated that, without 9/11, procurement spending in the region would have grown $5.5 billion over the last four years," he explains. "But 9/11 happened, and the actual growth was $18.5 billion." The difference between those two numbers -- $13 billion -- is another way of glimpsing the prosperity that has followed after the fireballs. "Each billion in additional procurement spending generates approximately 7,000 new jobs," Fuller adds.
What kinds of jobs? Fuller has still more PowerPoint slides. Washington leads the nation in total job production over the past five years, thanks to the post-9/11 rush, with other thriving cities far, far behind. This region has created some 200,000 new jobs in that period.
And yet, the Washington area actually trails the rest of the country in the growth of most job categories. Even with all the construction cranes and federal office renovations, we're a bit behind the average in construction jobs. We're way behind in retail, in financial services, in education and health-care jobs. Our new jobs are concentrated in just two categories, Fuller says. First, "professional services" -- meaning highly paid technical, scientific, managerial, consulting and computer-design jobs. And the second category, more mysterious: "other services."
"Those are the people who baby-sit, cut lawns, do dry cleaning and clean the homes of the professional services people," Fuller explains.
The war on terror has given Washington an E-Z Pass for the turnpike to the future. These are precisely the sort of jobs that experts believe will hold the key to tomorrow's economy. The region has roughly 2 percent of the total American workforce, but more than 10 percent of the computer systems designers, 8 percent of the consultants and the scientific researchers, 6 percent of the professors and the technologists and the Internet operators. "This is the new economy," Fuller sums up. So we should be very well positioned to prosper indefinitely, provided we don't get incinerated.
MONEY IS HOW GOVERNMENT SAYS, "I CARE." Frowny politicians can hug disaster victims amid scenes of devastation, and that's fine for a day or two. Then people want the bottom line: What's the appropriation? When President Bush went to flooded New Orleans in September to talk about Hurricane Katrina, the key quote was, "I have asked for, and the Congress has provided, more than $60 billion."
The collapse of the twin towers on live television, and the direct hit on the Pentagon, focused governmental concern -- meaning spending -- to an intensity not seen in generations, going back to Pearl Harbor. But something had changed in the intervening decades. After Pearl Harbor, it was easy to see exactly where the money was going. Millions of young men and women joined the government as soldiers, seamen, airmen and clerks. Tanks, airplanes, destroyers and aircraft carriers rolled out of factories and shipyards on round-the-clock shifts. The work never stopped. Bombs, bullets, guns, uniforms, packs, tents, Jeeps, mess kits -- all highly tangible and easily understood. Even the most highly classified supersecret expenditure went searingly public less than four years after Pearl Harbor, when Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb.
Today, the output is more elusive. Where is the money going? You can read about a spending bill. You can visit one of the publications or Web sites devoted to tracking the parade of new, rich, inscrutable-sounding government contracts awarded each day. A sampling from a January issue of Washington Technology magazine:
ManTech International Corp., Fairfax, Va., won a $300 million, two-year subcontract from VSE Corp., Alexandria, Va., to provide the Army with support services in Afghanistan and Iraq . . .
Multimax Inc., Largo, Md., won two five-year contracts worth a total of $75.7 million from the Air Force for communications support, testing and IT security services to Air Force organizations at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan for $32.8 million; and Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., for $42.9 million . . . .
Science Applications International Corp. . . . won two contracts worth a total of $68.4 million over three years from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help implement and support the agency's BioSense national syndromic surveillance program. . .
Or you can tour the bollards and cranes.
But it's all amorphous, compared with the sheds full of government workers thrown up on the Mall in the 1940s.
Hoping for a peek at the new wartime economy, I visited last year's Government Security Expo & Conference, or GOVSEC, at the Washington Convention Center. Launched in 2002, GOVSEC is an annual event "for those responsible for protecting government's physical, information and cyber security at the federal, state and local levels." The 2005 conference attracted 6,000 people, many of whom obviously had influence over government spending, because more than 500 companies -- from small inventors to charter members of the military-industrial complex -- waited eagerly to meet them in the exhibition hall.
Booths covering acres of floor space displayed products ranging from flashlights to speedboats. Some of the merchandise was brutally prosaic: jacks for lifting rubble, protective suits for cleaning up toxic debris, civil defense sirens, gas masks, stretchers, shatter-resistant windows. Some of the gear was old technology repackaged for new sales: traffic cones as evacuation markers; police vans souped up into mobile crisis command centers.
Other offerings were snazzy and high-tech; for example, a computer software package called VIS2TA. It was sold by Northrop Grumman, a Los Angeles company that happens to have four offices in Northern Virginia and yet another in Maryland. During World War II, the companies that now make up Northrop Grumman built airplanes and ships. Now they're raking in money writing software. VIS2TA was designed to reduce reams of emergency information into a single database. Suppose a bomb exploded in a VIS2TA town. The computer would quickly produce a city map showing every building in the vicinity of the blast. Click on a building, and up would pop a detailed floor plan and evacuation route. Every hospital, firehouse and police station would feed information into the map, updated as the crisis unfolded. Another layer of data would reveal the weather conditions and project the fallout based on prevailing winds.
But no one would buy just the software package. The same officials who would want VIS2TA would want a powerful new computer network to run it. They would want to house the network in a custom-built command center, like the one Gainer showed me last year inside Capitol Police headquarters. There, inside a secure room, I counted at least 10 big flat-panel displays and dozens of smaller screens showing views from surveillance cameras planted throughout Capitol Hill. There were also scores of phones and computer consoles. One display tracked the direction of the wind, and another reported the locations of key members of Congress. Yet another displayed the paths of nearby aircraft.
What chief would not like to have a space-age setup like this, whether or not he has Gainer's obvious reasons for needing it? And, of course, the command post must be connected to a mobile headquarters, which must be linked to rescue unit crews wearing new hazmat suits and carrying pricey hand-held radios. Multiply all those chiefs times all that gear, connect them through lobbyists and members of Congress to the pipeline of federal money, and you can begin to picture one tributary of the great Doom Boom. One of many.
Strolling up one aisle of GOVSEC and down the next, I was chilled at first by the horrible assumptions underpinning the bazaar. Portable anthrax tests. Bomb-defusing tents. Personal climate systems, for hunting terrorists in extreme heat or cold. Holographic weapons sights. Everything trailed a stink of death and dismemberment. But soon enough an almost giddy feeling of gee whiz replaced the horror: Wow, can they really do that? Have they actually perfected a voice-analyzing "truth verification system"? Is it true that sensors can identify people based on their unique pattern of blood vessels beneath the skin? Can a lightweight barrier really be strong enough to stop a speeding truck? And look at all this James Bond stuff: a cellphone that performs video surveillance; another cellphone that eavesdrops on the conversations of callers nearby.
Not every company hawking a product was based locally, of course. One of the most intriguing devices on display was produced by American Science and Engineering (AS&E), of Billerica, Mass. The company's ZBVs -- "Z Backscatter Vans" -- appeared to be ordinary white delivery trucks, but inside they were packed with supersensitive scanning machines. According to the company sales pitch, one driver in a ZBV can thoroughly search more than 100 cars, trucks, shipping containers, Dumpsters, boxcars -- you name it -- every hour, just by driving slowly past. From the sidewalk, it looks like Mr. Repairman needs a parking space, but, in fact, the van is emitting "backscatter X-rays," whatever those are, in a search for bombs, hidden passengers, illegal drug stashes and so on. Another machine, at the same time, is probing the air for radioactive telltales of nukes and dirty bombs. A ZBV can look through the walls of some buildings and the clothes of passersby. It can park at the curb and scan traffic, or it can race along at highway speeds, scanning the cars alongside. And if you paint FTD on the side, everyone will think it's roses.
AS&E makes these vans in Billerica, but Washington is the place to turn sneaky vans into profits. This is where America keeps its checkbook. This is where the grants are bestowed for purchasing bomb-finders and nuke-sniffers. This is where the money comes from for research and development on the next generation of scanning technologies. This is where a company's executives can have lunch with their lobbyists, should they wish to seek counsel on the best way to dip their corporate pail into the government's cataract of cash.
And so the convention center was a hive of government employees and the smiling salespeople waiting to meet them. Above the bustle, banners announced the presence of mega-companies such as Philips, Raytheon, Glock, Mitsubishi, CompuDyne and many more. Everyone had converged on Washington to think about explosions, fires, piles of rubble, chaos, deadly germs, radiation. And then to translate those thoughts into the more soothing contemplation of moneymaking. And, of course, to enjoy the shops and restaurants.
IS IT BAD TO PROSPER IN A CRISIS, to thrive on adversity? The moral factors are not clear. Doctors do well in an epidemic, and everyone says thank you. On the other hand, a lawyer who passes out cards in the emergency room after a school bus crash is slime. So what about Washington? Are we more like the healers or the ambulance-chasers?
However you answer that one, the link between bad news and good times is central to this city's history. The Civil War worked wonders for the development of Washington. In 1860, on the eve of the catastrophe, Washington had just two paved streets, no standing police force and an open sewer behind the White House. A Union private, arriving from New York shortly after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, was disappointed to find the capital "little better than a country town." Within a few months, however, 100,000 soldiers had followed him to Washington, and the transformation had begun.
That boom surely felt a bit like our own, at least in the beginning: tense, anxious, rife with intrigue and rumors of an impending attack. And yet, the hotels were packed, the saloons bustling, the theaters sold out. Inventors streamed to the capital carrying prototypes for repeating rifles, machine guns, artillery and bombs. The big hotel run by the Willard brothers at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue became "a 'seething cauldron' of commercial intrigues," in the words of writer Ernest B. Furgurson, "jammed with cigar-smoking salesmen and lobbyists touting materials of war." In his history of Civil War Washington, Freedom Rising, Furgurson described a frenzied scramble for the barrels of money that Lincoln poured into saving the Union -- fantastic sums for the time, more than $1 million a day.
James "Big Jim" Fisk, for instance, was a failing salesman for the Boston retailer Jordan, Marsh. He heard Lincoln's call for volunteers and, rather than joining a regiment, "remembered the thousands of unsold blankets he had once seen moldering in the store's attic," Furgurson recounted. "Confident that the army would be needing blankets, he came to Washington and set up at Willard's. Stocking the best suite in the house with food, liquor and lighthearted ladies, he became a generous, cork-popping host" to squads of freshly minted government purchasing clerks. Fisk "soon disposed of the moldy blankets for such an absurd profit that the firm was delighted for him to stay on."
"You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask," Fisk confided. He wasn't the only person who noticed. One-third of all military contract spending went to overcharges in the early months of the Civil War, a congressional investigation later concluded.
As the war continued, Washington grew into the nerve center for the largest armies the continent had ever seen. Thousands of clerks collected hundreds of millions in new taxes, and spent the money on countless tons of weaponry, food and supplies. True, these Washingtonians weren't dying at places like Antietam and Chickamauga, and not every dollar they spent was spent wisely, honestly or well. But money was the tide that bore the North to its victory, so their frenzy was not in vain.
Some of those clerks stayed in Washington after the crisis was over -- the population of the city grew by 80 percent from 1860 to 1870. Thus, a pattern was begun: What Washington gains in bad times, it never gives up. We see the pattern repeat 70 years later, during the back-to-back disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Again, Uncle Sam opened wide the money tap. As before, clerks and contractors flocked to the capital for jobs or a piece of the action. The population rose by nearly two-thirds from 1930 to 1950, to more than 800,000 people in the District, with more in the newly sprouting suburbs. The size of the federal workforce in Washington nearly doubled in the five years from 1940 to 1945, from 139,000 to 265,000.
David Brinkley noted in his book about World War II, Washington Goes to War, that many economists predicted a gloomy future for the Washington region once peace returned and the bureaucrats went home. But "they did not understand the basic nature of government," Brinkley explained. "They did not see that with the wartime innovation of the withholding tax, previously unimaginable amounts of money were being extracted from the American people with relatively few complaints. Federal tax collections in 1940 had totaled $5 billion. In 1945, $49 billion. And it was all spent."
It is almost always all spent. The great lesson of Washington, according to veteran lobbyist Ed Rogers, who has watched budgets be made by both Democrats and Republicans, is that "whoever wants to spend the most, wins."
Instead of a postwar recession, the boom continued in peacetime -- a fact, Brinkley noted, that stamped many government leaders as disciples of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In simplest terms, Keynes advised governments to increase spending during economic downturns as a way to stimulate growth. Sure enough, Washington's unbridled spending on the war had cured the national depression. A generation would go by before Washington saw the rise of a competing school of thought. Economist Robert Mundell's "supply-side" economics contended that, instead of borrowing and spending to spur the economy, government should cut taxes and let the private sector allocate the cash.
Today's Doom Boom might be seen as an experiment in combining the two--substantial tax cuts and massive spending. The supply-siders in the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have dramatically cut taxes while simultaneously saturating the capital with new spending. Two stimulants instead of one. Like sugar-coated chocolate, like diet pills washed down with coffee, this combination has been so economically potent that the whole region is practically vibrating. Most economists are forecasting yet another year of brisk growth in the Washington area, with tens of thousands of new jobs added, new office buildings filling with new tenants, and home prices stabilizing at or near record highs.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported record revenue for the lobbying industry. There's a $68 steak on the menu at Charlie Palmer's on the Hill. And, as I write this sentence, there is a construction crane going up outside my downtown Washington window.
Can this be what bin Laden had in mind?
ANYONE WHO HOPES TO DEFEAT the United States must have a strategy for neutralizing our money. In 1941, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, prepared the surprise attack on the American Navy at Pearl Harbor. Having completed two tours at the Japanese Embassy in Washington as naval attache, Yamamoto had no illusions about American money muscle. Therefore his strategy was to cripple the U.S. fleet just long enough for Japan to seize control of Southeast Asia, which was rich in the natural resources, such as oil and rubber, that Japan needed for its dreams of empire. The best Japan could hope for, Yamamoto told his superiors, was to set the United States back 18 months -- and then seek a treaty. Beyond that, American industry was too strong to be defeated.
As it turned out, the United States needed just six months, not 18, to snap the spine of Yamamoto's navy, but the admiral was correct on the larger point. By 1943, a year and a half after Pearl Harbor, American factories had increased their production of tanks a hundredfold, and were turning out more tanks in a year than Germany produced during the entire war. Construction of warships was up more than tenfold: In 1943, the United States built 15 aircraft carriers -- nearly as many as Japan produced in its entire history. America built nearly 86,000 airplanes in 1943, roughly equal to Japan's output for the whole war. As military historian Alan Gropman of the National Defense University has documented, all this happened despite bureaucratic bungles and nagging inefficiencies from the top of the production chain to the bottom. Still, 18 months after Pearl Harbor -- as the U.S. economy approached its peak wartime effort -- this country was "manufacturing munitions almost equal to the combined total of both its friends and adversaries," Gropman wrote.
And the U.S. economy has only grown mightier since then.
However, bin Laden and company have a very different strategy than Japan did, a "policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," as bin Laden put it in a videotaped address to the American people just before the 2004 presidential election. It is a sort of judo, a leveraging of weakness into strength, known as asymmetric warfare, in which small investments by al-Qaeda defeat huge investments by the United States. Asymmetrically speaking, the cost of destroying the tallest buildings in Manhattan, in 2001, was little more than a plane ticket and a box cutter, given ideologues willing to do it. So it didn't matter that, according to intelligence estimates, the U.S. military was outspending al-Qaeda by more than 10,000 to 1.
Since then, the United States has increased spending on security by more than two-thirds, but our foes are still working that same judo, blowing up commuter trains and military convoys with surplus explosives and junk from around the house: backpacks, trash bags, cellphones, toy cars. The United States has hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of surveillance equipment on the ground, in the air and orbiting in space, but none of those gadgets can find bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The only time we see or hear from them is when they smuggle another cheap audio or videotape to al-Jazeera television. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld summed up in a 2003 memo to his staff: "The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' cost of millions."
Exactly, bin Laden said in the videotape. It worked during the 1980s in Afghanistan. Using "guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition" jihadists "bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," the al-Qaeda leader said.
Can they do the same to the United States?
You may not be surprised to learn that experts disagree about how much damage our budget deficits are doing to the country. Over time, large deficits soak up capital that could go to more useful investments, and America potentially becomes vulnerable to the demands of overseas lenders. But that doesn't mean that, as bin Laden seemed to suggest, the United States is as fragile as the old Soviet Union was. As the Bush administration points out, the U.S. economy has survived more intense spending binges than this one. "Spending as a percentage of the economy is lower than it was under four of the last five presidents," White House strategist Peter Wehner argued in a recent memo, "and the high-water mark for the budget deficit as a percentage of the [economy] . . . is significantly less than was the case in the 1980s."
So the immediate problem may not be bankruptcy. It might be frustration, if Americans conclude that the massive expenditures since 9/11 aren't buying results. While the federal government has been flexing the money muscle of the United States -- hyperstimulating the Washington economy -- the enemy has drawn strength from the economic and political weakness of the Arab world. There's that judo, again. Our strong economy is cranking out software and sensors, bollards and cranes, but weak Muslim economies are cranking out extremists just as fast or faster. "The combined gross domestic product of the 22 countries in the Arab League is less than the GDP of Spain," the 9/11 Commission noted in its 2004 report. "Forty percent of adult Arabs are illiterate, two-thirds of them women. One-third of the broader Middle East lives on less than two dollars a day. Less than 2 percent of the population has access to the Internet."
The Joint Chiefs of Staff recently completed a broad review of American strategy in the war on terror. In the fifth year of Washington's Doom Boom, the generals concluded that we need to be building up Muslim countries with at least as much enthusiasm as we have shown for building up the corridor between Dulles and the Pentagon. If the United States could figure out how to transplant a bit of the energy and prosperity of the Doom Boom to the failing countries of the Middle East, it would do us more good in the long run than bollards in every driveway and scanners on every roof.
This will take a long time, the Joint Chiefs acknowledged, but America will not win this war until ordinary Muslims can safely bet on a moderate future. "The conditions that extremist networks exploit to operate and survive have developed over long periods," the new strategy declared. And so "the effort to alter those conditions will require a long-term, sustained approach," as well.
Leaders from across the political spectrum talk about a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, but, as scholars Derek Chollet and James M. Goldgeier explained in a recent essay, the task may be even more complicated than the successful rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe, if only because building a modern country is more complicated than rebuilding it. They quoted former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt explaining the difference. "Europe possessed a long-standing entrepreneurial heritage, a base of business acumen, a high level of general education and technological knowledge as well as engineering capabilities," Schmidt said. "No Marshall Plan can succeed where such prerequisites do not exist."
Let's hope the government is spending a lot of money on smart people to solve this problem.
If so, maybe someday these smart, prosperous people can live in posh apartments and walk to work in new offices and shop in upscale stores -- all built on the site of the old Washington Convention Center, demolished in 2004. Not long ago, I visited the site at 10th and Eye streets NW. Thanks to the Doom Boom, it is one of the most valuable undeveloped pieces of real estate in America, prime downtown acreage in a thriving city, close to subways and hotels and theaters. My purpose in wandering over was to picture the latent possibilities of such emptiness in this time of extraordinary growth. I tried to think of the space as seeded with future wealth and luxury, requiring nothing but the current government money rain to bring it bloom.
Instead, I found myself thinking: Here's what it looks like after a Washington landmark is destroyed. A huge, fenced scar. An aid to the imagination, should you need one. A glimpse of how failure might look in the battle with bin Ladenism.
David Von Drehle is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline
Originally Posted by Zarathustra
