WHY NATIONAL SECURITY DRIVES OUR FUTURE

Ambassador R. James Woolsey

Let me say a few words about three aspects of national security. First of all, you can color me “neocon,” or close enough for government work. I was founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for president in 1967, 1968. I thus essentially headed up the antiwar campaign at Yale that year. And we were, by the way, the most conservative organized political group on the Yale campus. Everybody else was burning something—burning bras or burning draft cards or burning something. We organized a lot of the campaign in New Hampshire, and we had a bit of an impact on what happened in American politics as a result.

In the 1970s, I ended up working as general counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee for a marvelous man, the late Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who was chairman. The number two ranking Democrat was Scoop Jackson. Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, and I all worked together for these marvelous men. Part of what was going on there, and went on for some years before and after, was holding the Democratic Party up to a high standard with respect to protecting the country. For example, Richard especially had a good deal to do with Scoop’s Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which barred the extension of the most favored nation treatment to the Soviet Union until it liberalized the release of Jews to emigrate. We had something to do with countering some of the more accommodating aspects of détente, for example. That Scoop Jackson part of the Democratic Party is almost all gone.

That history, I would say, of working hard on making the United States sound militarily, having more defense capability than that which is barely enough, standing up to dictators when they need to be stood up to, and accepting America’s leadership role among the democracies of the world is something that I think is extremely important for conservatives to espouse. They should not slip into the stance that some did, for example, in the 1930s in the America First movement, which was responsible for a more isolationist point of view, and which made it far more difficult for Roosevelt to stand up to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan before Pearl Harbor.

There are three basic threats to national security. First of all, this country needs well-trained, substantial military forces in order to be able to deter those who would exercise power against the weak. I’m thinking particularly about Iran in the Middle East, and I’m thinking about China with respect to East Asia. There is no doubt that the Chinese, without our being part of the picture, would be exerting control over major parts of coastal Asia, major countries in Asia, and would do so rather quickly and thoroughly. There is no doubt that without the United States taking some decisive stances and actions as well, Iran will survive its current difficulties and Iran will, before too long, have a nuclear weapon. And a nuclear weapon in Iran means that since Shiite Iran will have a weapon, Sunni Egypt, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Sunni Turkey will have nuclear weapons before long. Because once you have a nuclear reactor for creating electricity, you can get into the fuel cycle, the enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of plutonium, and thereby move toward having a nuclear weapon, the way the Pakistanis have, the way the North Koreans have, and the way the Iranians will. Unless we do something.

We simply have to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. It’s unlikely that this administration would use force. I don’t think Israel can do the job; its air force is too small and it doesn’t have the tankers. You’d need a bombing campaign to deal with this issue effectively, and there’s only one air force and navy in the world that can do that: ours.

I therefore pray that the sanctions and the weakness of Syria will help stop Iran. Why did the United States crack down on Mubarak, who was our ally for many years, within the first two weeks of the Arab Spring, and leave Assad and Syria alone, not even bringing the kind of pressure to bear on them that it did on Libya? Syria’s stability and the rule by the Assad family are at the heart of Iran’s reach into the Sunni world. Nothing worse could happen to the Iranian rulers, except a revolution inside Iran, than for Assad to fall. We have not exercised a single iota of strategic sense in dealing with those three countries: Egypt, Syria, and Libya.

The problem here is that whereas we survived forty-five years of a Cold War, with us and the Soviets having nuclear weapons, only one time did we come close to a nuclear exchange: during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We did have essentially an effective deterrent and containment and a nuclear standoff with the Soviets. Since their lousy economy could not keep them going, after some forty-five years it effectively collapsed. And we won World War III, in a sense, the Cold War, without having fired a shot between the United States and the Soviet Union. Certainly we had Vietnam and we had Korea, but we won the Cold War without any kind of a U.S.–Soviet military exchange, let alone a nuclear exchange.

It would be wonderful if we could deal with the rest of our problems in the world as effectively as we did the Soviet threat. But by the early/mid-1960s, I would say, the Soviet ideology was dead. There were true, committed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries back in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s in the United States, but I’d say that probably by the 1960s, there were more true, committed revolutionaries in the bookstores of the Upper West Side of Manhattan than there were in the Kremlin. I negotiated with those guys four times, and they didn’t want to die for the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” They wanted to remodel their dachas, their summer homes. We outlasted them because they had an empty set of values and an empty economy. Would that we could do the same as time rolls on. But we have a rather different set of problems now, and a different type of enemy.

All of that took a substantial military establishment. The world today must know that we can stand up to whoever would come against us and deal with them effectively. We have to have more than that which is barely enough. There is room for reasonable disagreement over whether we need eleven aircraft carriers or ten or twelve, but there is, I think, not room for reasonable disagreement about the need to be able to protect the country, in very substantial measure, with military forces not much smaller than what we have now.

The second and third areas of security that I think it’s particularly important for us to focus on both relate to energy. Unless we fritter it away, we will be able to deal effectively with most conventional military enemies, as we did with Iraq and as we did in the actions of the Clinton administration against the Serbs brutalizing Bosnia and Kosovo. Energy is different.

First of all, we have two basic large energy systems in the United States: electricity and transportation. Electricity is supplied for us by natural gas, coal, nuclear power, hydropower, and some renewables. Essentially, all of it is domestic. We don’t have a foreign supply problem with respect to electricity.

One of the most deceptive things that are said in the current political campaign is that we have a problem because we have foreign supply of our oil; therefore, we need to build more solar and wind turbines, etc. Build more solar and wind turbines if you want; they’re clean ways to generate electricity, and have advantages and disadvantages. But they don’t have anything to do with our oil dependence. In the early 1970s we made over 20 percent of our electricity from burning oil. So then, back at the time of the Yom Kippur War, if you built a wind farm or a nuclear power plant, you were, in fact, reducing the country’s demand for foreign oil. Today, less than 1 percent of our electricity comes from burning oil, most of it in Hawaii. Today, if you say, as the administration does perpetually, that you are helping solve our foreign oil dependence problem by building solar or wind turbines or really anything else to produce electricity, you are in fact dealing with less than 1 percent of the problem. That is something of a record in modern political rhetoric. Most political rhetoric is either 60/40 right or wrong, or 70/30, or 80/20, or 90/10. Very few political statements consistently made are 99-plus percent wrong, as this one is.

The problem with the electric grid is not that we have foreign supply issues. The problem with the electric grid is that it is, although extraordinarily capable and a wonder of its time in a way, extraordinarily fragile in some key ways. First of all, when we went through the Y2K issue, the Internet was just coming into heavy use. And the people who were fixing our grid and all of our other operations of computers and everything else in the country so they wouldn’t crash when the calendar turned to 2000 decided that as long as they were changing things, maybe what they’d do would be to create a situation whereby they would put the control systems for the electric grid on the Internet. That way was cheap; it was also easy. The Internet was getting upgraded, why not? What a good idea!

But there’s a problem. The problem is hacking. The problem is cyber excellence on the part of the Chinese and the Russians. The problem is that if you are modernizing the Web and the electric grid in such a way that you have a “smart grid,” and you can turn down your air-conditioning at your home from your cell phone, you may be making it possible for a teenager in Shanghai to turn down your air-conditioning from his cell phone, or more, something worse than just turning down your air-conditioning in a way you don’t want.

The fact that the SCADA systems (the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems) of the electric grid operate in many cases over the Web has created a remarkable set of vulnerabilities to terrorists, and not only to those who are merely seeking to cause mischief, or those who would steal money from the utilities. A great deal hangs on our ability to do something relatively quickly to make it possible for us to manage our electric grid, other than the way it’s being managed now.

Now why is this important? The United States has eighteen critical infrastructure systems: water, sewage, food delivery, etc. All seventeen of the others depend on electricity. If the electric grid goes down for a few days, as it did in the Northeast and part of the United States and eastern Canada back in ’03, we can pretty much deal with it. You’ve got usually a few gallons of fuel for a generator, or you go stay with somebody who was more farsighted than you were and has a few gallons of fuel for a generator. It usually works itself out. But intentional interference could take the grid down for much longer than that, many days to weeks to months.

So we have, in the first place, a very serious problem: if the grid goes down, pretty soon, these other systems go down, too. And we are not back in the 1970s, pre-Internet. We are back in the 1870s, pre-electricity, and I doubt if any of us has enough plow horses or water pump handles to deal with the situation. Chalk that up as one very serious problem connected with our electricity grid.

There’s another. The transformers that we have—which step up voltage so you can have very long-distance sending of electricity, and then step down the voltage so it can be sent to your home and used—are very hard to find. They’re absolutely vital to the system. They cost a great deal. They’re extremely heavy, very difficult to move. There are two places where they’re built, South Korea and northern Europe (northern Germany, last time I looked). And you need to go stand in line to have them built, because they are designed in such a way that they fit into a specific slot for a specific transformer. They’re not generic; they’re not modular. The utilities just put them behind cyclone fences, a hundred or two hundred feet away from the highway. If you want to know what the transformers are and what you would shoot with a .45 pistol to take them out, they are the things that the signs point to that say “Danger! Do not touch.” In case a terrorist speaks only three or four words of English, like “Danger, do not touch,” he’s in business.

So the danger and the risk of not having a way in which we can protect our electric grid either from individuals or from terrorist groups subordinate to rogue countries, or from countries themselves, are a very serious problem.

The third problem is electromagnetic pulse. A nuclear detonation sends a series of pulses. Even a simple nuclear weapon, if detonated, say, a couple of hundred kilometers up, can send out an electromagnetic pulse that, based on a recent major congressional study, would seem to be able to take down huge sections of the electric grid. Now, don’t we have ballistic missile defense? Couldn’t we stop something like that? It doesn’t have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile from someplace like China. It could be a small SCUD missile, which forty countries have, based on a fishing boat out of Iran. All you have to do is launch it—you detonate it as it’s going up. We have no ballistic missile defense that deals with something in the ascent phase; it’s only when it’s in midcourse, or coming down, when it’s terminal. So if Iran or somebody Iran is working with decides to disable a huge share of the American electric grid, that is, I’m afraid, open to them. And the changes that have recently been made in our ballistic missile defense, in order to accommodate the Russians, go the wrong way, rather than in a helpful way, in terms of dealing with a problem like this.

These three aspects of vulnerability of our infrastructure—there are others, but these are three rather salient ones—suggest to me that it is extremely important to focus on the future. Conservatives, in order to be able to deal with the worst that can happen to the United States, and have the confidence of the population that they’ll be able to deal with that, need to learn about these issues, take them seriously, and not brush them off, because we are, unfortunately, far easier to reach by, say, someone using an Iranian fishing boat, than by most weapons systems anyone has had remotely in mind, even in recent decades.

There’s a second aspect of energy that is also a huge problem, and I’ll close with this. We borrow about a billion dollars a day in order to import oil. Even when we pump more, that just means the price still stays up, because the added supply doesn’t take the price down. OPEC reduces what it’s pumping in order to keep the price up around a hundred dollars a barrel. OPEC controls nearly 80 percent of the world’s reserves of conventional petroleum. We control two. OPEC lifts oil for five to ten dollars a barrel throughout the organization. The eight OPEC states of the Middle East lift oil for about five dollars a barrel. When you lift oil for five dollars a barrel and sell it for a hundred and five, as they do, you’re doing reasonably well. It doesn’t matter that we buy most of our foreign oil from Canada. There’s one worldwide market. If we buy more from Canada and less from Saudi Arabia, somebody else buys more from Saudi Arabia and less from Canada. It’s a giant pool. There are temporary offsets such as needing the right kind of refinery for the right degree of sulfur in the oil, but they’re not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that we don’t solve the problem by either buying oil from countries that are nearer to us, like Canada, or even buying it from ourselves. Buying it from ourselves is a good idea. Drilling for more oil in order to produce more helps with our balance of payments. Instead of borrowing a billion dollars a day, if we get really successful, we might borrow only nine hundred million dollars a day, or really, really successful, borrow eight hundred million dollars a day. But OPEC is still in the driver’s seat. So “Drill, baby, drill!” is positive for our balance of payments, but it certainly doesn’t solve the problem.

The same thing is true of getting more oil production from a country that’s either nearer us or more friendly. As I said, it doesn’t make that much difference. The same thing is true of improving the mileage of our cars. You improve it to a new standard, fifty miles per gallon instead of thirty miles per gallon. Good, that helps; that’s a onetime drop in demand, and what happens is that OPEC simply pulls its supply down in order to keep the price up. OPEC pumps thirty million barrels of oil a day. On the eve of the Yom Kippur War in ’73, when this current situation began, OPEC pumped about thirty million barrels a day; it’s about a third of what the world needs. In between those years, ’73 and today, it has pumped less in order to try to keep the price up. Sometimes it’s been successful, sometimes not. But if you own nearly 80 percent of something in the world, and you sell only a third of what the world consumes every year, and if you pumped thirty million barrels a day back in the early 1970s, and now, forty years later, when the world’s economy has doubled and petroleum use has basically doubled, you still are pumping only thirty million barrels a day, there is only one term that fits you, a conspiracy in restraint of trade, otherwise known as a cartel.

That situation means that it as long as we stay enslaved to oil, we will stay, in a very real way, in a situation where we are operating at the behest of OPEC. And I cannot think of a more substantial challenge to our national security than that. OPEC is twelve countries, two in Latin America, two in sub-Saharan Africa, eight in the Middle East. And Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many of the other members of OPEC do not have our best interests at heart.

What can we do about some of this? With respect to the electricity grid, someone needs to be in charge. It’s not clear who’s in charge today of security for the grid. I know that sounds strange, but there are fifty institutions that run the electricity grid in the United States in the fifty states: the public utility commissions. The Department of Energy doesn’t run the grid; it has a small office of a few people who watch things. The Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, FERC, doesn’t run the grid; it sets rates for transmission over long distances. The institution that comes closest, I suppose, is something called NERC, for the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation—it’s really the trade association of 3,500 utilities, and with respect to important security issues it does, if you’ll pardon my bluntness and directness, zip.

So if you want something done with respect to security on the electric grid, we have to find a way to put someone in charge. We need to find a way to do it that is consistent with our history and the local focus of electricity, and the need for us to take account of consumers’ needs and the rest.

The largest change that came about when our Constitution was drafted was that Madison and his colleagues were using as a model, in many ways, the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic had one tragic flaw, which was a lack of clarity about who was going to control the military, and that’s what brought it, effectively, to its end. In our Constitution, we’ve got that straight: the president is the commander in chief; Congress has the power of the purse. But the problem is that under the current situation, we are coming close to being nearly at war with terrorists and Iranian hackers and the rest, and instead of a commander in chief the way our Constitution sets it up, we’ve got a trade association of 3,500 utilities sort of, kind of, a little bit responsible, sort of, for the security of the grid, and kind of, occasionally, maybe talking about doing something.

With respect to oil, if we want to get out from under the thumb of OPEC, we have to break oil’s monopoly over transportation, and we have to break OPEC’s cartel. I’m afraid there is no other way to do it, and we won’t do it by any of the remedies that have been talked about much so far. We have to make it possible for American consumers to do something different from what they do now. Today, they drive with oil products in their cars. We’re not addicted to oil, but our cars are. You can’t put anything in there except oil products. And so if the price goes up because OPEC wants it to go up, it goes up. We need to come up with a way to do something as sound as what the Brazilians have done. They have made it possible to drive into a filling station and choose between fuels—for them it’s gasoline and ethanol because ethanol is very cheap for them to produce on sugarcane—then, when gasoline goes very high, they just buy more ethanol and they’re in control, the Brazilian consumers. We are not. We are way behind the Brazilians in our ability to control our own market for fuel. We could take advantage of the fact that natural gas now, as a result of hydrofracturing, is approximately one-fifth the cost per unit of energy of oil. We could use natural gas, including mainly domestic, American natural gas, in ways that it hasn’t been used before, because when gas and oil cost about the same per unit of energy, it didn’t make much sense to change from oil to natural gas. But natural gas can be used to produce fluids to drive on. Either you can compress or liquefy natural gas for large vehicles, trucks and buses, or you can turn the natural gas into methanol (“wood alcohol”) to fuel the family car. Some companies are starting to experiment with turning natural gas into gasoline.

The point is to be able to move away from petroleum as a feedstock for the fuel that you drive on. If you can do that, and I think the technology is possible, then before too many years are up, we may be able to appear to the world as smart and clever as the Brazilians. That would be good.

Let me close with just one thought. A few years ago my sometime writing colleague, Anne Korin, came up with a wonderful illustration of what we need to do, and she and her colleague, Gal Luft, at their think tank wrote a book called Turning Oil into Salt. Salt, for thousands of years, was a strategic commodity. It was the only way to preserve food until the mid-nineteenth century, when canning came in, and even then, it was the only way for years to preserve meat. Salt was a very big deal. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. The word salary comes from salt. If your country had a salt mine and a neighboring country did not, you were in the driver’s seat. Countries were going to war over salt mines in Latin America up until the 1890s. But in the 1890s something very important happened: a technological change. The electric grids started to come into operation in major cities in the world. And right away, people realized you could use electricity for little things called refrigerators and freezers, and they also realized that meat that had been frozen and thawed was cheaper than meat soaked in an expensive salt brine, priced by a monopoly; not only was it cheaper, but the meat tasted a lot better. So it was better and cheaper to freeze meat than to soak it in salt brine. Within a very few years, essentially salt was destroyed as a strategic commodity. It wasn’t destroyed, period. We still use it on sidewalks in February, on corn on the cob. Salt has its uses. But when you went in to lunch today, I doubt that any of you looked at the saltshaker on the table and said, “I wonder where that comes from. I wonder if we’re salt-independent.” Nah, salt’s boring, unless you’re investing in Morton’s. I would suggest what we need to do is just to make oil equally boring.