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We must De-Centralize D.C.

Defense

With WMDs sure to proliferate, it is foolishness of the first order to concentrate the apparatus of government in a single city. We have enough ways to communicate remotely and instantaneously to make the federal government of the United States robustly distributed. The price of not doing so is unacceptably high.

One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.

As the old adage goes, generals are always fighting the last war. Our generals, and our civilian leaders, are not even doing a good job of that.

The last really big 'hot' war, the Second World War, effectively ended with two mushroom clouds sprouting from what had been cities in Japan. We would have dropped the first ('Little Boy') on Tokyo, except that Tokyo had already been substantially destroyed by conventional bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen largely because they were basically untouched. We were seeking to clearly demonstrate -- to the Japanese and to the Russians that we had a new kind of bomb, one of which could ruin a city. We did not want damage from a bunch of other bombs to spoil the demonstration.

So: since World War II it has been possible in theory to throw a nation into complete disarray by ruining its capital with a single weapon, assuming you can deliver the weapon. In the 'cold' war with the Soviet Union that followed, both sides rapidly amassed so many nuclear weapons that it no longer made any sense to think in terms of occupying enemy territory. All that really mattered was that the other nation knew that launching first was as damn certain fatal as launching second. There wasn't a great deal of consideration given to defense. If anyone launched, it was time to find a deep dark hole comfortable enough to spend a hundred years in, and that was that.

Until 'Star Wars'. Here I mean the 'Strategic Defense Initiative' pursued under the Reagan Administration, the forebearer of the little panoply of missile defense technologies emerging today. I am not going to address these technologies here, except to concur that if another nation starts hurling missiles at us, such a system would be a nice thing to have.

Know thy enemy.

But: the present enemies of the United States will not attack our capital with missiles. North Korea, Iran, Al Qaeda: there is the short list of folks that we can guess would smile widest, to see us attacked. None of them can presently deliver a nuclear weapon to the U.S. mainland on a missile. Hence, missile defense of the mainland against these clear and present dangers is useless. Also, none of them in their wildest dreams imagines actually occupying the U.S. How on Earth could they manage that? No, they are in a very different position relative to the U.S. than we were in relative to the Empire of Japan. They cannot even realistically hope we will surrender.

If one of these enemies delivers us an atomic surprise, it will be in a speedboat, or a panel truck, or a cargo container. There is exactly one target that stands above all others, and that is the national Capital, Washington D.C. I am sure you remember that other Star Wars, not the Strategic Defense Initiative, but the landmark 1977 film with the spaceships, where a ragtag band of rebels, with one well-placed shot through a regrettably situated ventilation shaft, destroys the Imperial Death Star.

In the minds of our present enemies, we are the Empire; they are the ragtag band of rebels; and Washington, D.C. is the Death Star.

That's about as far as the analogy goes. It is actually worse for us. The Death Star was not the Empire's actual capital. And the real-world malcontents do not just have one shot. They can keep trying and trying until they get it right. What can we do?

De-Centralize D.C.

We can and should -- taking the long view, I would say that we must -- decentralize the apparatus of the U.S. Federal Government, to protect it from attack. Congressional representatives and their entourages should reside in their states. Supreme Court justices should all live in separate cities; perhaps, that stipulation aside, in the cities of their choice. All the large headquarters of federal agencies in Washington, D.C. should be scattered hither and thither across the land.

This should be done with all due consideration, of course. We must create a telecommunications network to bind all this together. It must be so secure and robust that disabling it is extremely hard. (At least, much harder than sneaking a weapon of mass destruction into the Capitol.) This implies there must be substantial redundancy, but we are fortunate to have a number of distinct platforms for rapid communication: satellites, optical fiber lines, and good old radio. The thing that would cause a distributed Capitol the most trouble is an Electro-magnetic Pulse (EMP). But shielding equipment against EMP is possible (we have slacked off on doing it since the end of the Cold War.) And really, EMP would be an equally serious problem under the status quo. It would be absurd to claim that distributing the federal government will be easy. And yet, it does not seem Manhattan Project hard, or Moon Landing hard. It has to be something we are capable of.

Since September 11th, 2001 the United States has spent a staggering sum -- probably nearly a trillion dollars -- toward the stated goal of keeping the nation safe from terrorists. The fact is that the nation is not safe from terrorists as long as so much of our state apparatus is in one city. Why has not one single official mentioned the possibility? It must have been considered by the Department of Defense. I know I am not the only person to think of it, because I have gone looking and there are ordinary people talking about it on message boards. Why is no one so much as floating the idea of decentralizing D.C.? I do not think there is a conspiracy. Just an utter lack of forward-looking leadership. Maybe our leadership needs a little friendly encouragement from concerned citizens who do not want to see our continuity of government interrupted by sudden decapitation.

There presumably are (there were during the Cold War) some plans to attempt to recover order in the case of such a catastrophe. As there should be. But a plan to recover from a disaster typically takes second place to a plan to prevent one. You do not leave candles unattended because you bought fire insurance. I would really prefer never to have to live under some kind of 'shadow government' that leaps out from caves in the earth to impose martial law. This kind of dreadful scenario may be the best we can hope for after a significant nuclear exchange. But we absolutely do not have to live this way because of some band of zealots scores big in the international arms market. We can calmly and deliberately take away the terrorists' only really compelling target.

Win.

Yes -- calmly and deliberately! We are not turning tail here. There is no indication that we have to panic. We almost certainly have years to pull this off. It is not something we have to do all at once. We can do it over five years or ten years, starting of course with the development of the necessary telecommunications; then proceeding to distribute the most crucial offices and agencies; and then, simply working our way down, until D.C. is no more attractive a target than St. Louis. Then, in addition to our other landmark American achievements, we will be the first nation in the history of the world to not have a big cumbersome Achilles' Heel of a capital. For the anti-American terrorists in the world, the game is as good as over.

Decentralizing D.C. will be extremely expensive. But if rebuilding New Orleans is worth it, and if bailing out Wall Street is worth it, decentralizing D.C. has to be worth it. It will of course be a massive hit to the economy of the D.C. metropolitan area. That is probably the biggest disadvantage, and it cannot really be avoided. But we are not doing the people of D.C. a big favor by making them a target of WMDs, either. One is reminded of Randal from the movie CLERKS, talking about the unsuspecting contractors that he reasons must have been living aboard the second Death Star, in RETURN OF THE JEDI:

"All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed- casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia-this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living."

To cushion the economic blow for our fellow citizens scraping out a living in Washington, the D.C. Decentralization Plan should include relocation assistance for federal employees and even contractors, who wish to follow their job to its new location. Probably this is just one of a thousand details to work out, and I think we need to have a discussion about how to undertake this reorganization in the best possible way. Only by doing this honestly and openly can we proceed in a bipartisan way, into a future where we have nothing to fear from ragtag bands of rebels.

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