Joint Chiefs Issue Doctrine on “Homeland Defense”
A new publication of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presents U.S. military doctrine on “homeland defense” (pdf).
“It provides information on command and control, interagency and multinational coordination, and operations required to defeat external threats to, and aggression against, the homeland.”
See “Homeland Defense,” Joint Publication 3-27, July 12, 2007.
The document further extends the unfortunate use of the term “homeland” to refer to the United States, a relatively recent coinage that became prevalent in the George W. Bush Administration.
Not only does the word “homeland” have unhappy echoes of the Germanic “Heimat” and the cult of land and soil, it is also a misnomer in a nation of immigrants.
Moreover, “homeland” is defined by the military exclusively in terms of geography: It is “the physical region that includes the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, United States territories and possessions, and surrounding territorial waters and airspace.”
This means that actions to defend the Constitution and the political institutions of American democracy are by definition excluded from “homeland defense.”
For the Joint Chiefs, constitutional liberties are subordinate to, and contingent upon, physical security:
“To preserve the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the Nation must have a homeland that is secure from threats and violence, especially terrorism.” (page I-1).
“One thing became increasingly clear: AI doesn’t simply introduce a new category of risk. It changes the speed, scale, complexity, and interaction of risks that already exist.”
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly.
“What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.”
Ask people what worries them most right now, and they’ll say the cost of living and their livelihoods, not climate change. But those concerns are not separate.