3 former national security officials sum up the changes of the last decade

By Rickisha Berrien

Best Defense
department of catastrophic change

Here's how three former officials -- one from the world of
intelligence, the second from the Pentagon, the third from the State Department
-- see how the world has changed since 9/11.

--Former Acting Director of the CIA John McLaughlin,
speaking at the commemorative event at Johns Hopkins' School for Advanced
International Studies (SAIS), said he believes that within the last decade the
intelligence community has faced the greatest period of change since the height
of the Cold War. The decade before 9/11 was characterized by an emphasis on
peace, and in the years before the attacks the ranks of the intelligence
community were cut by about 23 percent. After the attack, McLaughlin says that
it became evident very quickly that the war would be an intelligence war. This
new kind of war necessitated key changes within American intelligence. First,
within the last decade we have had unprecedented integration of intelligence
and the U.S. military, providing us with new and powerful capabilities that we
didn't possess 10 years ago. This new integration culminated in the takedown of
Osama bin Laden. Second, since about 50 percent of the intelligence community
today was hired after 9/11, we now have an intelligence workforce that has been
trained and socialized during a time of war. This has not been the case since
the time of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA,
during World War II. We do not know the ramifications that such change will
have on the community in the years to come.

--Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman,
addressing the same event, called a decade free from a domestic terror attack
an "incredible achievement." The United States has succeeded in many areas in
our War on Terror: al Qaeda is on the run and state sponsorship of terror
organizations has greatly diminished. However, two major national security
challenges still lay ahead of us: the emergence of new nuclear-armed states and
the rise of China. Though we have had limited positive accomplishments in
curtailing the nuclear threat, there is still a long way to go. Both Iran and
North Korea are still rogue nuclear threats that the United States has yet to
deal with successfully. Furthermore, the expansion of the Chinese military
looms as an underappreciated threat to American influence in the Pacific.
Edelman noted that the bipartisan defense panel on the Quadrennial Defense
Review that he took part of last year came to the conclusion that "the ability
of the United States to operate in the Western Pacific in the face of some
anti-access and area-denial capabilities that China has developed has been
called into question". This undercuts the ability of the United States to
maintain the balance of power in Asia and Europe as it has since WWII.

--Former Counselor of the U.S. Department of State Eliot
Cohen discussed whether the war on terror was indeed a war, and if so, what
kind? He questioned the term itself, arguing that the U.S. government made a
mistake by "casting this very broadly as a war on terror, which would be a
little like the United States declaring war on dive bombers after Pearl Harbor.
Terror is the tactic, not the enemy."