A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorist threat. Fear sells. Fear has convinced the White House and Congress to pour hundreds of billions of dollars—more money than anyone knows what to do with—into counterterrorism and homeland security programs, often with little management or oversight, and often to the detriment of the Americans they are supposed to protect. Fear is hard to question. It is central to the financial well-being of countless federal bureaucrats, contractors, subcontractors, consultants, analysts, and pundits. Fear generates funds.
—James Risen
Why does threat inflation work? What is it about humans that allows them to be inordinately susceptible to arguments that so clearly exaggerate and mislead? The answer from two researchers offers disturbing evidence that being inundated with fear-based arguments practically rewires our brains.
Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister, political science professors, organized separate groups of college students. One watched a ninety-second presentation of government statements and media reports about terror threats. A second was shown a more positive segment describing peace and prosperity at home, modeled on President Ronald Reagan’s uplifting “It’s Morning Again in America” advertisements, used during his 1984 reelection campaign.
Unsurprisingly, those who viewed the doom and gloom report were far more concerned about future terrorist attacks and even showed higher levels of anxiety. But the ultimate impact went much deeper. The group also became less trusting, less tolerant, more inclined to endorse authoritarian policies, and less sympathetic toward minorities—even those having nothing to do with the terrorist acts shown in the video.1
Today, when it comes to foreign affairs, Americans are disproportionately bombarded by news reports, social media posts, and Hollywood movies focused on the scariest possible depictions of the world. Tales of fiendish terror plots, bloodthirsty jihadists, scheming rival nations, and potential, allegedly complex dangers are routine fare for American news consumers. These messages are coming not just from politicians but also from a vast network of individuals and institutions that peddle the latest threat du jour for often self-interested reasons.
Military leaders regularly inflate threats or warn of the armed forces becoming hollow and unable to maintain its competitive advantage vis-à-vis other countries in order to justify the Pentagon’s nearly $700 billion annual budget. “I’d love to see the budget go down,” secretary of defense James Mattis told Congress in April 2018, but with “the world that we’re looking at out there, I don’t think that’s going to be the case.” In reality, no military leader wants to see his or her budget decrease, which means that the threats facing America are always severe.2
Military contractors that are deeply reliant on defense spending and think tankers who increase attention paid to their issues by reporting them in alarmist terms—and ignoring positive global trends—lend a hand as well. The media endorses, and even cultivates, the notion that America faces serious threats because such stories sell newspapers, get more viewers, and lead to more clicks. “If it bleeds it leads” is true not only of local crime reporting but of international coverage too.
Activists, human rights groups, national lobbies, and cybersecurity firms play their part by presenting the issues they work on as potential threats so as to ensure they receive heightened media and policy-maker attention. As Stephen Walt, the noted international relations scholar at Harvard University, succinctly put it a few years ago, “Whether the issue is Cuba, Darfur, the Middle East, Armenia, arms control, trade, population, human rights, climate policy, or what have you, there is bound to be some group pressing Washington to focus more energy and attention on their particular pet issue.”3
This constellation of actors represents what we call the Threat-Industrial Complex (TIC). It bears direct similarities to the “military-industrial complex” and “its acquisition of unwarranted influence” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of in his farewell address in January 1961. Like the group that Eisenhower described then, the TIC is not clandestinely plotting behind closed doors in hidden mountain lairs. It is not a club that its members sign up for or pay yearly dues to. Neither is this far-flung group part of a secret or deliberate conspiracy to shape public perceptions—though it certainly has that effect.4
Rather, the TIC shares interests, objectives, and perhaps, above all, an inherent and self-interested pessimism about the global environment. These collective yet uncoordinated efforts have a tremendous influence on the way Americans think about security and their place in the world. From a position of perceived authority (behind a news desk, before a Senate committee, or bedecked in a uniform), members of the TIC disseminate a glass-half-empty perspective on the international environment that inflates foreign risks and overwhelmingly disregards positive—or even less threatening—characterizations of the world. The TIC’s breadth has created a virtual national consensus that the world is a dangerous place—and will always remain that way. This creates a strong “existence bias” that not only is rarely challenged by nonexperts but is passively absorbed by them and then subsequently parroted and amplified.5
There are few prominent researchers or foreign policy and national security specialists willing to push back on this narrative because the incentive structure almost always leans toward panic. After all, it is hard to get attention or funding for a prominent international issue if one’s position is “everything is fine.” Members of the TIC, like politicians, understand instinctually that black-and-white proclamations that play on hardwired, primal fears are going to be more potent than nuanced, caveated arguments.
This constant scare-mongering has a profound impact on U.S. national security and foreign policy. People who are scared of overseas threats, who see dangers lurking in the shadows, and who are bombarded with news stories about the latest terrorist attack will be more likely to endorse higher defense spending and back dubious foreign military adventures. They will be more inclined to look positively on expanding intelligence capabilities, even if it means putting their own civil liberties at risk. They will be more willing to support political leaders who tell them they can keep Americans safe against the myriad of threats “out there” and, as our aforementioned researchers found out, even give their backing to undemocratic policies. As a result, alternative domestic and foreign policy choices are given far less consideration, and the ones that are overwhelmingly supported by—and coincidentally consistent with—the TIC’s professional and financial interests are lavished with attention, often to the detriment of U.S. national security interests, both at home and abroad. Quite simply, threat exaggeration and inflation might be bad for America, but it is good for business—and, in turn, good for the Threat-Industrial Complex.
“Saves Lives”
In June 2013, Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), was having a rough month. His agency, which few Americans had even heard of, was rocked by the biggest and arguably the worst leak of classified material in American history.
On June 6, the Guardian newspaper published its first blockbuster story from a trove of leaked documents that detailed the agency’s vast surveillance capabilities.6 Soon after, the Washington Post followed suit with more details about the NSA’s most highly classified programs.7 The material stolen by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata from phone calls made by American citizens and the interception of web-based communications of suspected terrorists, which inadvertently included Americans. Over the next few weeks, a steady stream of stories emerged detailing the broad scope of the NSA’s spying programs. The revelations showed that the NSA’s targets ranged from jihadist terrorist groups and U.S. rivals, such as China and Russia, to close allies like German chancellor Angela Merkel, the office of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, and even the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The Snowden leaks also brought attention to the fact that the NSA had actively worked to undermine global encryption standards—increasing the vulnerability of Americans’ phones, laptops, and any internet-connected device—in order to make it easier for the agency to conduct cyberhacking and collect information.
For the NSA and Alexander, the leaks were more than just a black eye. They raised serious questions as to whether the post-9/11 buildup of the nation’s intelligence capabilities—and the approximate doubling of the intelligence community’s budget since 2000—had gone too far.
For most of the NSA’s first fifty years, it had been tasked largely with collecting and interpreting signals intelligence, primarily from computers and phones for the defense and intelligence communities. This provided policy makers with intercepted communications that gave them an advantage in negotiating international agreements or dealing with foreign leaders.8 The NSA’s work is largely done in the shadows: tapping transoceanic cables, planting listening devices, or using Navy radars to eavesdrop on rival government and military leaders. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the NSA—like every other member of the intelligence community—was recruited for the fight against terrorism. Yet that still represented just a third of what the NSA did on a daily basis. That hardly stopped Alexander, though, from trotting out a familiar playbook in justifying the extraordinary capabilities and legal rationales that the Snowden leaks revealed.
“I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent,” read the first line of talking points prepared for NSA officials in the wake of the Snowden leaks.9 This twenty-five-page guidance sounded quite familiar to what Americans had consistently heard from senior intelligence and military officials over the previous decade: noun + verb + 9/11.
In prepared congressional testimony that October, Alexander continued along this path: “First, how did we get here? How did we end up here? 9/11—2,996 people were killed in 9/11. We all distinctly remember that. What I remember the most was those firemen running up the stairs to save people, to there themselves lose their lives. We had this great picture that was created afterward of a fireman handing a flag off to the military, and I’d say the intelligence community, and the military and the intelligence community said: ‘We’ve got it from here.’ ” Evoking the horrors that Americans saw at Ground Zero became the agency’s go-to public relations strategy—even though most of the leaks had exposed surveillance efforts that had little to do with terrorism. But Alexander’s defense of the NSA’s most controversial activities went beyond just evoking the worst terrorist attack in American history. He also claimed that, as a result of these programs, fifty-four new attacks had been prevented.10
Members of Congress took Alexander’s talking point and ran with it. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a key ally of the agency, proclaimed on the House floor that the “fifty-four times [NSA programs] stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks” had saved “real lives” (as opposed to phony ones).11 Rep. Joe Heck of Nevada claimed that “fifty-four terrorist plots against the US (and counting)” had been stopped by the NSA. Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio took a similar tack, arguing that “the programs in question” had foiled fifty-four attacks, many “targeting Americans on American soil.”12
The problem with this notable assertion is that it did not stand up to scrutiny. Only thirteen of the fifty-four cases had any connection to terrorism in the United States, and most were not actual plots or attacks but rather potential evidence of material support for terror groups. The New America Foundation later determined that just seventeen of the cases cited could be credited to any NSA surveillance program and had resulted in just one conviction—a San Diego cab driver who transferred $8,500 to al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization in Somalia.13
To be sure, NSA surveillance capabilities serve as important and often cost-effective intelligence-gathering tools and a deterrent against potential plots. If terrorists are constantly worried that their communications are being monitored, it makes it that much more challenging to plan and execute a complex and highly lethal attack. But the language of the NSA and its defenders suggested that those programs, which danced on the knife’s edge of constitutionality, were essential to stopping those who were intent on striking America again. That was not the case.14
Nonetheless, Alexander’s public relations offensive had done its job. Congress eventually reined in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, but the agency avoided major reforms. There would be little discussion of whether the NSA’s expanded surveillance mission—and ever-growing list of sophisticated hacking and eavesdropping capabilities—was truly in the country’s best interests. Many members of Congress were simply unwilling to put restrictions on an organization that had come to be seen as a key bulwark in the fight against terrorism.
For the NSA, the rhetorical focus on counterterrorism became more pronounced. In 2016, three years after the Snowden leaks and Alexander’s terrible month, the agency made a slight, but revealing, modification to its public website. Where the NSA once emphasized its long-standing missions to “protect U.S. national security systems and to produce foreign signals intelligence information,” the newly created “What We Do” page listed as its very first bullet point “Saves lives.”15
Selling the Military’s Message
As President Eisenhower prepared to deliver his farewell speech to the American people in the twilight of his presidency, he agonized for months over just the right words to capture his growing concerns over what he would term the military-industrial complex. One passage contained a prescient warning about the incestuous relationship between the military and its industrial partners: “flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in [the] war-based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” These words, which were left out of the final version of the speech, proved prophetic.16
Eisenhower’s decision to omit this passage may have had something to do with the fact that it described a problem that, at the time, was in its infancy. In 1961, few prominent retired military officials were entering the budding defense industry. The former five-star general and head of the Veterans Administration Gen. Omar Bradley ran a watch company. Both Gen. George Marshall and Adm. Chester Nimitz turned down lucrative business opportunities to be, respectively, Red Cross president and a roving goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. Eisenhower himself retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to paint, play golf, and raise Angus cattle. Many other former combatants took the path for old soldiers described most famously by Gen. Douglas MacArthur: they faded away.17
Today, it is a very different story. Retired military officials increasingly travel through a revolving door, from the billet to the corporate boardroom. They earn high-six-figure salaries for not just their advice but also their ability to influence their former colleagues on behalf of defense and homeland security corporations. One 2010 analysis of 750 retiring three- and four-star officers found that while, from 1994 to 1998, fewer than 50 percent had gone to work as defense consultants or executives, between 2004 through 2008, the number had jumped to eight out of ten.18 Of course, this revolving door also features civilians: more than half of Obama’s top Pentagon nominees came straight from the defense industry, and after his second term, more than half left to take up jobs within that same industry. President Trump’s initial top civilian Pentagon appointees were even more immersed, with 82 percent of them coming from defense-contractor positions.19
The incestuous relationship between retired military officers and defense contractors should come as little surprise—after all, commitments for defense contracts in 2017 alone totaled $320 billion.20 Indeed, there is more spending on contracts for the defense industry than for all other federal government agencies—combined.21
This total involves more than just the Pentagon’s next big weapons system. Health care for service members and their families, much of which is outsourced to the private sector, makes up a significant chunk of the Pentagon’s budget. Then there is the role of contractors in military operations. Over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been common for half or more of the total military presence in each country to be private contractors. From 2007 to 2016, the Pentagon spent $249 billion on these private-sector actors in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation.22
These hired guns—whose ultimate loyalty is as much to a paycheck as a flag—became the lifeblood of U.S. overseas operations, assisting on everything from security and logistical support to laundry, food services, and transportation. Without this vast army of paid workers, the United States would have likely found it impossible to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Contractors often provide an invaluable service and at a price cheaper than using enlisted soldiers. In today’s all-volunteer army, it makes little sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training, equipping, and providing a lifetime of benefits for soldiers who wash clothes, stock mess halls, or drive trucks. But relying on contractors creates a vested interest on their behalf to ensure that these jobs do not disappear.
Not surprisingly, as the defense budget steadily increased after 9/11—and U.S. overseas military operations dramatically expanded—the lobbying efforts by defense contractors on Capitol Hill ramped up as well. Since 2006, annual spending for defense lobbying has topped more than $115 million.23 Evidence of this is not difficult to find in Washington, DC. There are the daily briefings that retired generals, employed by defense contractors, give for congressional staffers and journalists. There is the large financial support for defense-friendly research programs at DC-based think tanks; and then there are the wall-to-wall ads that blanket Washington’s pristine metro system—in particular the one located at the Pentagon station. Thousands of officers and civilian Department of Defense employees see those metro ads during their commute every day. In comparison, when Eisenhower saw defense-company advertising in journals, he would disgustedly throw them in the Oval Office fireplace.24
Sometimes, however, the revolving door goes in the other direction. In 2002, the Defense Department’s public relations office came up with a unique strategy for overcoming public resistance to the war with Iraq: bypassing journalists and targeting authoritative “key influentials” who routinely appeared on television news. The “Retired Military Analysts” program ran six years, and seventy-four retired military officers participated. Provided free trips to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq, the members of this august group were given special briefings with secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials, as well as with senior policy makers in the White House, Justice Department, and State Department. In total, there were 147 organized events; at least two included classified information. But the benefit of all-expense-paid trips to American war zones did come with a catch: the officers also received detailed talking points that they were expected to use in their upcoming media appearances.25
Not coincidentally, this messaging was overwhelmingly supportive of the Iraq War, the use of Guantanamo Bay as an indefinite detention facility, and the utilization of enhanced interrogation techniques or, as it is more correctly described, torture. The best tool for convincing Americans that prolonged military conflicts and potential violations of international law were justified was the same weapon used by Alexander in 2013: fear that not acting would imperil America’s security.26 When one prominent member of the group, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, then an NBC News commentator, became a public critic of the war effort, he stopped being invited to Rumsfeld’s private gatherings and overseas trips.27 The Pentagon had effectively—and secretly—outsourced its public relations efforts to former military officials who traded their independence for access. As one of the participants, retired Col. Kenneth Allard, put it, the program was “psy-ops on steroids.” Another said it was the Pentagon saying, “We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.”28
But there was another important reason that so many retired officers were willing to participate: a majority of them simultaneously worked for or lobbied on behalf of defense firms. Access to Pentagon officials helped them provide their clients and employers with privileged insights about what senior Pentagon officials were thinking, including what sorts of weapons systems and logistic services they might be interested in purchasing.29 A review of the videos and transcripts of appearances by the participating retired officers between 2002 and 2008 shows that there is never any mention by the news networks on which they appeared of their links to the private sector.30 These former senior military officials provided a viewpoint informed by Pentagon messaging efforts. Moreover, they had a financial interest in promoting such views and the audience they were seeking to influence was left in the dark about their inherent conflicts of interest. More than four decades after the fact, Eisenhower’s fears that retired officers would guide the “war-based industrial complex” was realized—and then some.
Think Tanks on the Take
Huntington Ingalls Industries, the nation’s largest military shipbuilding company, with revenues close to $7 billion a year, had a major problem in the fall of 2011: enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for new military spending was waning.
The previous summer, Congress had passed a deficit-reduction measure that—for the first time since the beginning of the war on terrorism—dramatically cut the Pentagon’s budget. With the military forced to take a haircut, plans for modernizing the Navy and building the next generation of America’s seafaring fighters were in peril. Belt tightening in Washington risked dampening the prospects for building more nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, which had $11 billion price tags and one private-sector builder: Huntington Ingalls Industries. Huntington began to appreciably increase its political contributions, going from $578,000 in 2010 to close to $1 million by 2012.31
But convincing lawmakers about the specific importance of aircraft carriers to U.S. national security would take more than campaign contributions. The company needed to make a strong case for expanding the size of the U.S. Navy—and that meant finding a threat. Huntington Ingalls did what has become an increasingly prominent element of lobbying in Washington, DC: it hooked up with a foreign policy think tank.
For decades, Washington-based think tanks represented a repository of careful deliberation and new research and thinking on major policy issues. The organizations were generally nonprofits, and many had been started by philanthropists (such as the Brookings Institution, Century Foundation, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Their focus had long been on influencing and shaping important domestic and international policy issues. But as new think tanks emerged and as the battle for a diminishing supply of outside funding dollars to sustain their missions took form, the influence of the Threat-Industrial Complex became increasingly hard to ignore.
A series of reports by the New York Times in 2016 charted the increasingly incestuous ties between the think tank world and the private sector.32 According to the Times, “an examination of 75 think tanks found an array of researchers who had simultaneously worked as registered lobbyists, members of corporate boards or outside consultants in litigation and regulatory disputes.” The paper found “dozens of examples of scholars conducting research at think tanks while corporations were paying them to help shape government policy.” Some think tanks conferred “ ‘nonresident scholar’ status on lobbyists, former government officials, and others who earn their primary living working for private clients” and placed “few restrictions on such outside work.”33
For a deep-pocketed company like Huntington Ingalls, DC-based think tanks offered an enormous opportunity to validate and promote its pro-shipbuilding message to the nation’s defense officials and congressional appropriators. The Hudson Institute, a self-described “pro-sea power” think tank, took $100,000 from Huntington for its newly created Center for American Seapower. More money flowed to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).34 Both soon issued reports calling for new nuclear-powered carriers because of an allegedly growing maritime threat from China.
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed powerful forces capable of challenging the U.S. ability to project power, deter and defeat aggression, and operate effectively in the various warfighting domains,” read the Hudson Institute paper, titled Sharpening the Spear: The Carrier, the Joint Force, and High-End Conflict. Without expanded U.S. naval capabilities, America’s “ability to advance its interests and sustain its global leadership” would be imperiled. The report’s conclusion was clear: that this “emerging threat environment increases the need for aircraft carriers, and that none of the alternatives to the CVN [nuclear-powered aircraft carriers] offer an equal or better capability and capacity across the range of military options from peacetime presence through major power war.”35
The release of the report, which omitted Huntington Ingalls’ financial contribution, took place at the Rayburn House Office Building and featured remarks by Rep. Randy Forbes, then chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee responsible for the Navy and whose home district is a major locus of naval operations on the Eastern Seaboard. Subsequent letters to the editor, op-eds, and a social media campaign helped amplify Hudson’s conclusions.36
A month later, CSBA took up the baton and issued its own report, alarmingly titled Deploying beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point. Funding came from the Navy League of the United States, an organization whose corporate donors included Huntington Ingalls (this contribution also went unmentioned in the report).37
Not surprisingly, CSBA drew similar conclusions to that of the Hudson Institute. “Given the growing size of China’s submarine fleet and the proliferation of Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) technology in the region,” a reduced U.S. presence could decrease the Navy’s capacity “to contain Chinese undersea and airborne power projection.”38
CSBA warned that a “Looming Presence Crisis” in U.S. naval capabilities could have larger global implications. The Department of Defense could be forced to “accept declining overseas presence” at a time when “it may want to increase presence around Europe and Africa to counter instability around the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean; Russian hybrid attacks and aggression; and continued violence by the Islamic State.”39
While the primary role of the Navy in combating the Islamic State is unclear, the paper concluded, “U.S. seapower today plays a role in responding to contingencies, assuring U.S. allies of our continued commitment to their security, and deterring potential adversaries from undermining the global order. U.S. naval forces can often create a positive impact merely by showing up and providing foreign statesmen with a visible reminder of America’s maritime superiority.”40 From this perspective, a big Navy was essential in deterring not just specific threats but also amorphous ones, because all potential challengers to American hegemony would be dissuaded from even considering taking on the United States after receiving a visual “reminder” of America’s vast naval reach.
Other defense contractors took a more direct approach to shaping and influencing national security debates. The prominent think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hired Roger Zakheim, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Bush administration and general counsel to the House Armed Services Committee, as a “visiting fellow” and expert on military affairs. Left unstated by the think tank was that in his spare time Zakheim was a lobbyist for Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, two major Pentagon contractors.41
In August 2016, Zakheim coauthored an article for the National Review, which referenced his fellowship at AEI, warning against the “myth of readiness” in the U.S. military. Instead, according to Zakheim, the United States was dangerously unprepared for future potential conflicts. The “real readiness crisis,” the article stated, “is not measured in the fight against ISIS, or in Afghanistan, but in the capacity and capability needed in a more demanding contingency.”42
“Readiness shortfalls induce a kind of wasting disease that becomes a crisis in a surprising situation like the one that marked the beginning of the Korean War, when the Army’s ‘Task Force Smith’ was overrun by North Korean tanks.”43 The reference to armored vehicles was not coincidental: one of BAE Systems’ key objectives was to increase congressional spending on ground-combat vehicles that the company builds.
The piece also expressed concern that “current U.S. systems” and in particular fighter jets like the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 “no longer provide the technological edge they did when introduced.” These aircraft “cannot penetrate modern air defenses of the sort fielded by the Russians, the Chinese, and, in short order, the Iranians, without extensive and expensive support from a variety of electronic warfare aircraft.”44 Not surprisingly, Zakheim’s other client, Northrop Grumman, is a key provider of fighter jets to the U.S. military. With the veneer of a respectable, self-described “nonpartisan public policy” research institution, Zakheim was in effect promoting the interests of his lobbying clients.
Despite the routine denunciations of “expertise,” in Washington, DC, think tanks and the experts who inhabit them still enjoy a prominent perch. They provide advice to government officials behind closed doors, offer insights in congressional testimony, and publish articles and op-eds in major outlets chock full of policy recommendations. Yet their funders or other financial connections are rarely mentioned, and it is that money that often drives their analysis and the frequently alarmist conclusions they reach. For deep-pocketed funders, an investment in think tank “research” can reap sizable dividends that do more to further their financial security than to further actual national security.
Clicks, Chyrons, and Fearbola
On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, ABC News broadcast a special report looking back on the horrific day, titled “Why Aren’t We Safer?” According to the network’s nightly news anchor, Charles Gibson, the changes wrought by September 11 had fundamentally transformed even the most routine daily activities. “Now,” said Gibson, “putting your child on a school bus or driving across a bridge or just going to the mall—each of these things is a small act of courage. And peril is a part of everyday life.”45 Apparently no one had bothered to tell Gibson that there had not been a successful foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the previous five years.
But such alarmist declarations have become the norm since September 2001. This reflects a long-standing bias in news reporting on foreign affairs and national security toward highlighting threats and a lack of interest or imagination in covering stories on dangers being reduced. Members of the industry acknowledge openly that they overwhelmingly prioritize negativity over progress. For example, in the summer of 2016, New York magazine surveyed several prominent journalists to gauge the media’s perception of itself. The magazine’s own Jonathan Chait, reflecting on the aversion to reporting good news, admitted that “the opposite of a bad story isn’t a good story, it’s a nonstory.”46 The journalist Jesse Singal chalks up the phenomenon to evolution: “There’s a reason that whatever the world’s actual trajectory, there will always be disproportionate coverage of threats to health and wellbeing. We are wired to be finely attuned to negativity. Throughout our evolutionary history, it’s been beneficial to sense danger quickly. . . . We will always be more likely to share the story online about the earthquake that killed a few hundred people in a distant corner of the world than the one about a small decrease in infant mortality somewhere that reflects a much larger quantity of saved lives.”47 Such overt acknowledgments of threat inflation matter, because even as newspaper subscriptions and broadcast television viewership has declined, most Americans still receive news about the world from mainstream outlets, few of which still invest in foreign news reporting. Newspapers have dramatically cut their overseas bureaus, with only a few elite outlets maintaining offices abroad, but foreign bureaus for cable news stations are also declining.48 As a result, international stories also account for less and less airtime. For example, in 2013, foreign coverage was just 7 percent of all stories on MSNBC.49 Limited foreign coverage makes it nearly impossible to offer the context and history needed for positive stories, and so what ends up dominating coverage are one-off tragedies such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and, of course, terrorist attacks—but not all terrorist attacks, mainly just those that occur in western Europe.
The amplification of foreign threats dominates in other, more pernicious ways as well. Consider the questions that news anchors used during the presidential debates in the last presidential election. In total, there were twenty-eight primary debates held between August 2015 and April 2016 and three presidential debates in the fall of 2016. When foreign policy was discussed, it was almost exclusively in terms of international threats. The continent of Africa—where the United States operates fifty-one embassies, spends billions of dollars annually on aid and development, contributes significantly to UN missions, and has focused military attention by launching an entirely new combatant command—was mentioned only in reference to terrorism emanating from its northern states. Climate change went largely unmentioned, as did U.S.-China relations, global development, and foreign aid.
The self-proclaimed Islamic State, on the other hand, received more than five hundred mentions—and that was just in the Democratic and Republican primary debates.50 The first GOP debate after the San Bernardino terrorist attack in December 2015, perpetrated by a husband and wife sympathetic to the Islamic State, dealt exclusively with the issue of foreign terrorism. There was no mention of domestic terrorism—or even gun violence, which, at that point, had killed more Americans than violent jihadist attacks had since 9/11. To watch these debates, one might conclude that the only region in the world that matters to American foreign policy is the Middle East.51
While many news executives would argue that they are simply responding to the foreign policy issues of greatest concern to the American people, the reality is that the same news organizations—with their coverage decisions—are doing more than reflecting the concerns of voters; they are creating them.
One of the most vivid examples of this phenomenon came in the summer of 2014, when a nurse in Texas fell ill from the Ebola virus, transmitted from a Liberian national who had contracted the deadly disease while in West Africa. Quickly, “Fearbola” swept across the country, aided by astonishingly hyperbolic and inaccurate media reporting.
The CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield wildly speculated, “All ISIS would need to do is send a few of its suicide killers into an Ebola affected zone and then get them onto mass transit.” The Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros warned that travelers arriving to the United States from the region “could get off a flight and seek treatment from a witch doctor who practices Santeria.”52 Newsweek, however, captured the brass ring with an article titled “Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Backdoor to America.”53 In October of that year, 45 percent of newly panicked Americans expressed concern that they or a member of their family would contract the virus.54
In reality, there were just four cases of Ebola in the United States, and only one resulted in death.55 Yet media coverage contributed to a national hysteria about the disease. A Texas community college sent rejection letters to applicants from Nigeria because that country had a handful of isolated cases of the virus. An elementary school teacher from Maine was forced into twenty-one days of quarantine because she stayed at a hotel located ten miles from the Dallas hospital where the aforementioned Liberian had died. In Mississippi, parents of middle schoolers kept their kids out of class when they found out the principal had recently traveled to Zambia for a funeral. Zambia is approximately two thousand miles from West Africa, about as far as Mississippi is from Peru. Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who treated Ebola patients in West Africa, was unlawfully held in a tent located within an unheated parking garage at a hospital in Newark, New Jersey.56 In each case, decision-makers claimed to be acting out of an abundance of caution, but in reality, they were acting out of an abundance of misplaced fear.
The real story of Ebola was not the threat to Americans but rather the U.S.-led multilateral response to the crisis in West Africa. With three thousand troops and at a total cost of $2.5 billion—only 25 percent of which went to the Pentagon—the United States, in concert with other states, helped to slow the virus’s exponential growth in the region. By the time the last U.S. troops departed in March 2015, the World Health Organization reported less than one hundred new cases a week in West Africa, from a high of fifteen hundred a week at the height of the epidemic.57 On December 23, 2016, the World Health Organization announced that an experimental vaccine had been shown to be highly effective in treating the disease, but by that point, the news media had moved on to other stories. News headlines on the same day of the WHO announcement focused on the story of a Tunisian national who had been shot by police after driving a truck into a Berlin Christmas market.58
The TIC’s Unusual Suspects
Military leaders, defense contractors, think tankers, and pundits are, not surprisingly, the first groups that come to mind in any discussion of Washington’s habitual practice of inflating threats and exaggerating dangers. But there are plenty of other, less obvious groups that do their part to scare Americans. This includes everyone from Hollywood celebrities and human rights activists to cybersecurity firms and your local Cineplex. All, in their own way, contribute to the perception of an international environment seething with potential dangers.
In 2015, as the Iran nuclear deal was being debated in Washington, lobbying groups supportive of Israel—particularly those close to the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu—prepared to mobilize. For the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and others, the goal was clear and legitimate: to protect Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran. How these groups, which were opposed to the deal, framed their message will come as little surprise.
AIPAC created Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, which ran commercials in twenty-three states claiming that the agreement with Iran would increase the likelihood of both nuclear proliferation and a terrorist group getting nuclear weapons.59 The implication is not hard to discern: not only would Israel’s security be at a risk from a nuclear-armed and Muslim-majority Middle Eastern country, but so too would the United States and its allies.
Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League took exactly this line of argument, claiming, “Iran having a nuclear weapons capability can potentially directly threaten the United States and its inhabitants.”60 In reality, the United States has a massive nuclear deterrent capability, not to mention its overwhelming conventional and cyber military advantage in the region itself.
AIPAC is not the only national lobby that presents threats to the country it represents as ones that also pose dangers to the United States and its allies. Pro-Indian, pro-Taiwanese, pro-Armenian, and pro-Cuban groups have adopted similar tactics, as do lobbying firms hired by foreign governments. As of March 2018, there were 426 such firms or nonprofit groups, which were represented by nearly twenty-five hundred U.S. citizens and foreign individuals who are registered with the Department of Justice to be representatives of foreign principals.61 Many focus on benign matters—particularly tourism and trade—but some seek greater U.S. security assistance and foreign aid. In some cases, the goal is deeper military intervention, such as the armed opposition in the Syrian civil war, which has hired U.S. public relations firms to make its case to American political leaders.62 Most famously, during the first Gulf War, the Kuwait government enlisted Hill & Knowlton to spread stories—that turned out to be untrue—of Iraqi soldiers killing hundreds of babies in the nation’s hospitals, in order to strengthen the humanitarian case for militarily liberating Kuwait.63
While these groups may often have altruistic motives, the objective of many members of the TIC is financial. Take, for example, cybersecurity firms, which have a disproportionate influence on how Americans perceive digital vulnerabilities and the fear of potential attacks. In 2013, allegations surfaced of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army hacking into U.S. government and corporate websites. These charges were raised by the cyber firm Mandiant and reported in the New York Times. In 2016, allegations of Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee servers was discovered by the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. Over the years, there have been countless similar stories about cyber vulnerabilities and the potential havoc that a digital breach could wreak on America.64 While the threat of hacking is real (if overstated), so too is the potential money to be made by firms selling services and software to protect against it.
As a result, media discussions about digital security overwhelmingly reflect this self-interested and glass-half-empty viewpoint. So the next time you read about an alleged hacking of a corporate or government server and see a cybersecurity firm quoted, scan for any disclaimer about that firm’s financial motivations to uncover the hack. You will rarely find one.
Then there are former national security officials who transition to private security firms. For example, soon after Richard Clarke stepped down from his role as special adviser to the president on cybersecurity, he sought to turn his government expertise into a money-making opportunity. He quickly became chairman of the Good Harbor consulting group, which specializes as a “trusted advisor on cyber security risk management.”65
Clarke routinely serves as a source for journalists reporting on cyber-related issues, and not surprisingly, he tends to see dangers lurking around every corner. In 2010, he coauthored a book titled Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It.66 The title might seem alarmist, but it is hard to run a company that focuses on minimizing cyber risk if cyber risk does not exist. When promoting the book, Clarke regularly claimed that an effective cyberattack could cause a national catastrophe. It “could disable trains all over the country,” he said. “It could blow up pipelines. It could cause blackouts and damage electrical power grids so that the blackouts would go on for a long time. It could wipe out and confuse financial records. . . . It could do things like disrupt traffic in urban areas by knocking out control computers. It could, in nefarious ways, do things like wipe out medical records.”67 No such attack had ever occurred at the time Clarke made the statement—and in the seven years since, there has been no such occurrence remotely similar to the apocalyptic scenario he described.
Clarke was not alone in cashing in after he left government. Keith Alexander, the former NSA director, went from threat-mongering about terrorism in the public sector to threat-mongering about cyber in the private sector. Within two months of his retirement from the NSA, he formed IronNet Cybersecurity, which offers advice to financial corporations for as much as $1 million a month.68 Upon starting the company, he testified before Congress, “I believe that those that want to do us harm can do that in one swipe. . . . If that happens, the cost to our nation could be measured in the trillions.” He later told a technology reporter, “cyber and terrorism are interrelated.”69 For Alexander, it was the perfect merging of his former job as head of the NSA with his current consulting business.
Such doomsaying is repeated and promoted by media outlets at the expense of scholars like Thomas Rid, who detailed in his book Cyber War Will Not Take Place that many of the direr warnings about cyberhacking are wholly implausible. Or there is the security researcher Chris Thomas, who with his database, Cyber Squirrel 1, provides a helpful corrective to digital-threat inflation. Thomas compiles news stories of disruptive attacks against critical infrastructure systems, primarily those within the United States. As of June 2018, there were 2,436 documented attacks but thankfully just three by humans—two power outages in the Ukraine and the U.S.-led Stuxnet attack of Iran’s nuclear program.70 That is far fewer than the disruptions caused by squirrels (1,182) and even jellyfish (13), which in 2013 actually shut down a nuclear reactor in Sweden.
In Hollywood, filmmakers play a role in exaggerating and inflating dangers to the American people. Whereas in the post-Watergate era, American moviemakers took a more skeptical view of the U.S. military and U.S. foreign policy, the years after 9/11 saw a shift in the other direction: moviemakers promoted threats, often in concert with the agencies that Hollywood once demonized. The first and perhaps most insidious example is the Fox show 24, which premiered in November 2001—just two months after 9/11. The show depicted an immediate and existential terrorist threat facing the United States, capable of causing catastrophic harm if not stopped within twenty-four hours. Most controversially, it showed—and normalized—the use of torture by its lead character, Jack Bauer, in literally ticking-time-bomb situations. In all, 24 portrayed acts of torture sixty-seven times during its first five seasons, and torture depictions on prime-time network television grew by more than 500 percent from 2000 to 2003.71
In a bizarre and disturbing example of life imitating art, during a 2007 Republican primary debate, Rep. Tom Tancredo said, “You say that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we’re wondering about whether waterboarding would be a bad thing to do? I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.”72 But it was not just political rhetoric. Concern over the fact that soldiers in Iraq were emulating interrogation tactics depicted in 24 led the dean of the Military Academy at West Point and three veteran interrogators to fly to Los Angeles and personally urge the producers of 24 to stop “promot[ing] unethical and illegal behavior” on the show.73
In 2012, Zero Dark Thirty won the Oscar for best picture and best original screenplay. The movie, which featured direct input from CIA officials, took a page from the 24 playbook by highlighting the use of torture techniques and openly implying that such tactics played a crucial role in helping the CIA locate and kill Osama bin Laden. This, however, was not true. In fact, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. John McCain, then the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, rebuked the movie’s producers and called the film “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of [O]sama bin Laden.”74
The involvement of the CIA in Zero Dark Thirty is not unusual. The agency has long maintained an Entertainment Industry Liaison office and has collaborated on such films as The Sum of All Fears, which featured a wildly improbable depiction of nuclear terrorism; The Recruit, which is essentially a two-hour recruitment advertisement for the CIA; and television shows such as Alias and a CBS series that ran from 2001 to 2003, The Agency.75 The series producer of The Agency, Michael Frost Beckner, noted that CIA advisers suggested integrating agency drone strikes in Pakistan into a story line, before the CIA began attacks there, in June 2004. Beckner acknowledged, “The Hellfire missile thing, they suggested that. I didn’t come up with this stuff. I think they were doing a public opinion poll by virtue of giving me some good ideas.”76 According to John Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel or deputy general counsel for eight years after 9/11, Hollywood productions have routinely allowed CIA operatives to pose as members of film crews for movies filmed in foreign countries, and star actors have served as assets for specific projects.77
A suite of offices at 10880 Wilshire Boulevard in West Beverly Hills is home to liaison offices of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Each service branch offers advice and even actual military equipment for movies, music videos, and video games—but only after the armed services have determined that they are comfortable with the content. As the Pentagon’s technical adviser to the 1994 thriller Clear and Present Danger, Army Maj. David Georgi, said of the production, “If things were being changed, if they were shooting scenes in different ways, I’d say, ‘Well, I’m taking my tanks and my troops and my location, and I’m going home.’ ”78
The Pentagon and the CIA—in concert with Hollywood—dole out access to projects that inflate threats and promote their missions, thus shaping American perceptions about the world. The story lines they endorse are overwhelmingly tilted toward playing up foreign dangers and promoting the indispensability of their own organizations in combating them.
Ironically, the tools utilized by members of the TIC are so effective in drawing attention and raising national concerns that they are imitated by groups that literally are trying to save the world. Humanitarian relief organizations, human rights activists, and even environmentalists will frequently portray their pet causes in the most alarmist and selective manner. It is hard to be overly critical of such efforts because the ultimate goals of such groups are primarily well meaning. However, by highlighting bad news at the expense of much more prevalent good news, they are yet again giving Americans a misleading characterization of the world.
Take, for example, the Belgian beer giant Stella Artois, which in 2017 began a massive, multiyear advertising campaign featuring the actor Matt Damon, a longtime champion of improving access to clean drinking water. In one commercial, Damon approaches a tower of spinning Stella-branded glasses, pauses, and despairingly tells the camera, “A glass of water—it’s one of the simplest things for some of us, but for many, it’s the most complicated.” The Stella Artois logo on the gold-rimmed glasses then changes to a cartoon of a woman balancing a bucket on her head while walking down a dirt road. Damon explains how his organization is pairing with the beer company to provide access to clean water and to end the “global water crisis.” The name of the campaign? “Buy a Lady a Drink.” Unmentioned in this ad is that potable drinking water has become readily available to 90 percent of the world’s population today.79 Diseases associated with lack of clean water have collapsed: most prominently, guinea worm—an often painful and debilitating disease caused by drinking water contaminated by water fleas. In 1990, there were six hundred thousand cases of guinea worm worldwide. By May 2018, the number had fallen to three.80 It is not that those who lack clean drinking today do not need help, but the notion that consumers need to enable a beer company to solve “the global water crisis” is deeply misleading.
Or consider the Doomsday Clock, a tool put out by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But the clock’s setting (which has always been incredibly close to midnight) is completely subjective. In fact, when the clock was introduced in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight because, according to the artist who created it, “it looked good to my eye.”81 Yet, even as the threat of nuclear war has dissipated with the end of the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock has actually moved closer to Armageddon. In January 2018, it was set to two minutes away, which is the closest it has ever been. The clock’s boosters do not even try to hide their intent. According to Lawrence Krauss, who is a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, “For one day a year, there are thousands of newspaper stories about the deep, existential threats that humanity faces.”82 Of course, in reality, while the threat of nuclear war exists, it is a smaller danger than it was in the 1960s and 1980s—and one might argue that the clock, rather than raising awareness, is raising fears of a nuclear conflict, which can increase popular support for a risky, destabilizing, and uncertain preemptive military attacks to alleviate the threat.
Us
The final and most essential participant of the Threat-Industrial Complex is all of us. As humans, we are hardwired to care first and foremost about our survival, passing on our inherited genetic traits, and ensuring the safety of our children and grandchildren. Threatening information or imagery imprints far deeper on the brain and is more readily recalled than nonthreatening information is. As the Nobel laureate and leading scholar in the field of human judgment Daniel Kahneman describes this phenomenon, “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”83 More colloquially, President Richard Nixon vocalized what many politicians intuitively know and practice: “People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.”84
In short, fear trumps facts, and to a disproportionate degree, that simple truism drives America’s foreign policy and national security debates. Whether it is Condoleezza Rice evoking the image of mushroom clouds over American cities to justify the Iraq War or Richard Clarke and Keith Alexander raising fears of cyberterrorism or even a TV talking head fearmongering over the threat of a rising China to promote military sales, we are all susceptible to manipulation and exaggeration based on perceived danger. The fact that these dangers pose, at worst, minimal danger to actual Americans is all too rarely considered or discussed.
One does not need to be a politician to understand this very human vulnerability—and how to use that knowledge to promote not America’s interests but rather one’s own.