Negative 1nc

Security

2ac threats real

Some threats are objective – defer to expert judgments, the alternative isn’t credible

Cole, 12 – professor of law at Georgetown (David, “Confronting the Wizard of Oz: National Security, Expertise, and Secrecy”, 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1617, http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub
Rana notes that in the early days of the republic, every able-bodied man had to serve in the militia, whereas today only a small (and largely disadvantaged) portion of society serves in the military.11 But serving in the militia and making decisions about national security are two different matters. The early days of the Republic were at least as dominated by “elites” as today. Rana points to no evidence that decisions about foreign affairs were any more democratic then than now. And, of course, the nation as a whole was far less democratic, as the majority of its inhabitants could not vote at all.12 Rather than moving away from a golden age of democratic decision-making, it seems more likely that we have simply replaced one group of elites (the aristocracy) with another (the experts).

Second, to the extent that there has been an epistemological shift with respect to national security, it seems likely that it is at least in some measure a response to objective conditions, not just an ideological development. If so, it’s not clear that we can solve the problem merely by “thinking differently” about national security. The world has, in fact, become more interconnected and dangerous than it was when the Constitution was drafted. At our founding, the oceans were a significant buffer against attacks, weapons were primitive, and travel over long distances was extremely arduous and costly. The attacks of September 11, 2001, or anything like them, would have been inconceivable in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Small groups of non-state actors can now inflict the kinds of attacks that once were the exclusive province of states. But because such actors do not have the governance responsibilities that states have, they are less susceptible to deterrence. The Internet makes information about dangerous weapons and civil vulnerabilities far more readily available, airplane travel dramatically increases the potential range of a hostile actor, and it is not impossible that terrorists could obtain and use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.13 The knowledge necessary to monitor nuclear weapons, respond to cyber warfare, develop technological defenses to technological threats, and gather intelligence is increasingly specialized. The problem is not just how we think about security threats; it is also at least in part objectively based.

Third, deference to expertise is not always an error; sometimes it is a rational response to complexity. Expertise is generally developed by devoting substantial time and attention to a particular set of problems. We cannot possibly be experts in everything that concerns us. So I defer to my son on the remote control, to my wife on directions (and so much else), to the plumber on my leaky faucet, to the electrician when the wiring starts to fail, to my doctor on my back problems, and to my mutual fund manager on investments. I could develop more expertise in some of these areas, but that would mean less time teaching, raising a family, writing, swimming, and listening to music. The same is true, in greater or lesser degrees, for all of us. And it is true at the level of the national community, not only for national security, but for all sorts of matters. We defer to the Environmental Protection Agency on environmental matters, to the Federal Reserve Board on monetary policy, to the Department of Agriculture on how best to support farming, and to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Security Administration on how best to make air travel safe. Specialization is not something unique to national security. It is a rational response to an increasingly complex world in which we cannot possibly spend the time necessary to gain mastery over all that affects our daily lives.

If our increasing deference to experts on national security issues is in part the result of objective circumstances, in part a rational response to complexity, and not necessarily less “elitist” than earlier times, then it is not enough to “think differently” about the issue. We may indeed need to question the extent to which we rely on experts, but surely there is a role for expertise when it comes to assessing threats to critical infrastructure, devising ways to counter those threats, and deploying technology to secure us from technology’s threats. As challenging as it may be to adjust our epistemological framework, it seems likely that even if we were able to sheer away all the unjustified deference to “expertise,” we would still need to rely in substantial measure on experts.

The issue, in other words, is not whether to rely on experts, but how to do so in a way that nonetheless retains some measure of self-government. The need for specialists need not preclude democratic decision-making. Consider, for example, the model of adjudication. Trials involving products liability, antitrust, patents, and a wide range of other issues typically rely heavily on experts.14 But critically, the decision is not left to the experts. The decision rests with the jury or judge, neither of whom purports to be an expert. Experts testify, but do so in a way that allows for adversarial testing and requires them to explain their conclusions to laypersons, who render judgment informed, but not determined, by the expert testimony.

The US is more likely to underestimate threats

Schweller, 4 – professor of political science at Ohio State (Randall, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing” International Security, JSTOR)
Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject. Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their survival.

There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are, |in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do one harm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this pathology (hubris and over- confidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described).

That noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naivete associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and un- appeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public.

A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats, however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats. After all, the nuclear revolution was not about over- kill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them. At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war that nobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94

Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and un- able to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society.

The arguments presented here also suggest that elite fragmentation and dis- agreement within a competitive political process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96 This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few, if any, compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.