In an interview with The Atlantic, former National Security Council member Richard Clarke says that in the last month we’ve seen historic incompetence when it comes to our national security.
“In terms of a major terrorist attack in the United States or on U.S. facilities, I think we’re significantly less ready than we were on January 19,” said Richard Clarke, who served on the National Security Council in the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. “I think our readiness is extremely low and dangerously low. Certainly [government] agencies at a professional level will respond [to an attack], but having a coordinated interagency response is unlikely given the current cast of characters [in the administration] and their experience.”
Like so many others, Clarke sees this new Republican administration as having so little understanding of how the government works—or a lack of respect for it—coupled with an inability to think in a complex enough way, as a major achilles heel for the United States.
Clarke is concerned not just with the Trump administration’s preparedness for a national-security incident—be it an act of terrorism or a provocation from a country like Iran or North Korea—but also with its approach thus far to national-security threats. In the first month of a typical administration, Clarke said, the National Security Council’s Principals Committee—a kind of “board of directors”—would prioritize issues to develop policy on and then hand the list off to the council’s Deputies Committee, which would organize working groups that consult with government agencies and produce policy proposals. Eventually, the president might approve those proposals as policy. As an example of how this process works, he cited a sarin-gas attack in Japan in 1995, which prompted President Clinton to ask Clarke and his colleagues for a study on the risk of terrorists using chemical and biological weapons in the United States. Within a few weeks, National Security Council staffers concluded that the U.S. was unprepared for that form of terrorism, and suggested a plan and a budget for a training program that was ultimately rolled out in 157 U.S. cities.
Richard Clarke is probably best known for being one of the officials whose warnings of the dangers of Osama Bin Laden were largely ignored by the new W. Bush administration, before September 11, 2001. Will we heed this warning?