WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON - Seven years after al-Qaida took down New York's World Trade Center towers and struck the Pentagon itself, the United States does not have a coherent strategy to deter another attack, according to senior U.S. officials and analysts outside government.
Though America has not suffered a significant foreign attack on its soil since then, both officials and analysts say new approaches to deterrence must be developed - even as they acknowledge that it may be impossible to deter certain types of attacks.
"We continue to work on the deterrence problem ... trying to flesh out the concept," Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, the four-star chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in an interview.
The Bush administration reacted to the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people that day, by launching two wars intended to destroy the terrorists and to prevent further attacks.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq still rage today, engaging some 174,000 Americans in the fighting. The wars have cost $859 billion so far.
Al-Qaida, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, is thriving in its sanctuaries in Pakistan and actively training and positioning terrorists for new attacks in the West.
For this and a variety of other threats and challenges, the United States needs a clear, powerful and flexible deterrent, strategists say.
"The lack of a strategy ... is a major gap in the overall set of U.S. counterterrorist activities," Lewis A. Dunn, a senior Washington strategist, wrote in a recent paper for the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
Inside and outside government, experts like Dunn are working to create such a strategy and the capability for the United States to apply it. It will require an intelligence campaign unprecedented in scope and intrusiveness to penetrate and understand the leadership of rogue states and terrorist groups. And to manipulate their decision-making will require the tight coordination of many agencies in Washington not accustomed to working together.
Making this new deterrence strategy work is likely to be one of the most pressing national security jobs of the next president.
"We have islands of understanding" of how to deter terrorists, said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation and author of a new book on nuclear terrorism. "But there's no champion for it within government. We don't have an organization in government to do it."
