Contextualising ‘national security’

Abstract

States quite naturally spend a great deal of time, energy, talent, and money on national security, prioritising protection against external armed attacks, for which traditional military forces are vital, and against internal threats such as espionage and subversion. In recent decades, this traditional security problématique has broadened to include defence against non-traditional security threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks, foreign meddling in domestic politics, and information warfare. Collectively, these challenges can be daunting, and the cost of failure can be high. But how do leaders know whether they are investing resources wisely? What would be an appropriate way of answering a question of this kind? In this paper, I suggest that calibrating resource allocations to security problems requires asking and attempting to answer a series of very basic questions that rarely attract the attention they warrant. These questions include the following. What does ‘security’ mean? How might one provide it? What things are worth securing, and why? How important are the various things the ‘security’ of which competes for resources? In most cases, I submit, if state leaders conducted a security audit using a rubric such as this, they would discover that they are spending their resources very unwisely indeed.