Page 6 RAIN June/July 1983 options. Thus the “insurance premium" we must pay for energy security actually pays us back. A "least-cost energy strategy" combining efficiency with appropriate renewable sources (as the Harvard Business School's energy study recommended) could save Americans more than two trillion dollars in the next two decades, provide more than a million new jobs, and solve many environmental and social problems. Indeed, such economically efficient investment is the only way we will be able to maintain a dynamic economy. The problem of secure and affordable energy supplies is being solved—but from the bottom up, not from the top down. Washington will be the last to know. The solutions that individuals are finding (with important help from the innovative community programs described in Brittle Power) don't need and probably can't even tolerate the mandates of Soviet-style central planning. They rely instead on a truth familiar to both Jeffersonians and free-marketeers: that most people are pretty smart and, given incentive and opportunity, can go a long way towards solving their own problems. Best-buy, accessible energy investments can simultaneously enhance Ameria's military preparedness and protect the individual choice and civil liberties that are central to the vision of our Republic. Thus a decentralized process, based on accessible tools as simple as the caulking gun, can—given a few decades' steady implementation—remove a major threat to national security. The importance of energy resilience to national security may hold wider lessons. First, focusing exclusively on centralized military planning to counter overt military threats may build costly Maginot Lines while the back door stands ajar. Indeed, there are many back doors: energy is not the only hidden vulnerability of our interdependent industrial society. The average molecule of food is shipped some 1300 miles before an American eats it. Drop a few bridges across the Mississippi and Easterners will soon starve. New York City's water arrives via two antique tunnels, each too small to permit either to be shut down for inspection or repair. A smart computer criminal could probably crash the whole financial system. There are doubtless other key vulnerabilities not yet discovered, and someone had better start finding out how to reduce them. Second, better security may not cost more money. At least in the case of energy—and probably of water, food, and data processing too—real security is the best buy. It is what a genuinely free market would produce if we had one. Third, better security doesn't necessarily come from Washington. It may indeed come best from the village square or the block association, rather as the Founding Fathers envisioned the local militia. The parable of energy security reminds us that real security in its widest sense begins at home. It includes a reliable and affordable supply of energy, water, and food; a healthful environment; a vibrant and sustainable system of production; a legitimate system of self-government; and a polity that preserves and refines our most cherished values. Most people who thus enjoy "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" will simply want to be left alone to enjoy them—not to fight anyone else. But such assets can only be safeguarded by protecting our neighbors' similar assets lest, deprived, they seek to take what we have. Perhaps real security, then, comes not from reducing our neighbors' security but from increasing it, whether on the scale of the village or the globe. Untold treasure has been devoted to a different theory of providing strategic security, by the actions of a central government and the greatest concentration of technical genius the world has ever known. This effort is currently costing our Nation more than ten thousand dollars a second. Yet in 1944 the United States was militarily invulnerable, while today, thirty thousand nuclear bombs later, it lies entirely exposed to devastation. Those bombs are said to have deterred nuclear attack, and perhaps they have so far. Yet in an era when the explosive power of a World War II can be packaged to fit neatly under your bed, bombs can arrive not only by missiles (whose radar tracks mark their origin for retaliation) but also by Liberian freighter, rental van, or United Parcel Service. If Washington disappeared in a bright flash tomorrow morning, but nobody said, "We did it," against whom are our strategic forces to retaliate? Anonymous attacks, whether nuclear or via a vulnerable energy system, cannot be deterred. Whatever military might has accomplished, then, it has not yet made us truly secure. Perhaps it never will. The roots of real security go deeper; they need greater nourishment than armies and missiles alone. One vital element of defense, for example, is a political system so firmly based on shared and durable values that it can never be subverted or taken over. Some Scandinavian strategists even suggest that military security comes foremost from organizing on such patriotic foundations a standing Resistance that will make one's national territory impossibly disagreeable for anyone else to occupy. The nuclear threat is terribly important. So is countering it as best we can (since it cannot really be defended against). But the complexities of that task must not obscure our understanding of our Nation's basic strategic assets. These include a geography that shields us against physical invasion from overseas; a freedom of expression that shields us from ideological invasion by exposing concepts to the critical scrutiny of an informed public; an ecosystem much of whose once unique fertility can still be rescued from degradation; a diverse, ingenious, and independent people; and a richly inspiring body of political and spiritual values. To mature within these outward strengths—strengths more fundamental and lasting than any inventory of weaponry— will require us to remain inwardly strong, confident in our lives and liberties no matter what surprises may occur. This in turn will demand, in the spirit of our political traditions, a continuing American Revolution which expresses in works a sincere faith in individual and community effort. It was that faith which inspired our Republic, long before strategists became preoccupied with the narrower and more evanescent kinds of security that only a faraway government could provide. It is that faith today, the very marrow of our political system, which alone can give us real security. □□ Reprinted with permission from the Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, March 1983.
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