9/11 Triggered a Homeland-Security Industrial Complex That Endures
After the attacks, federal policies swelled a defense sector that has reshaped U.S. surveillance as well as northern Virginia’s suburbs
WASHINGTON—The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led policy makers to embark on one of the largest spending binges in federal government history, transforming the private sector, the Washington metropolitan area and Americans’ relationship with their government.
Two cabinet departments—the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the attacks to consolidate a number of existing agencies—saw huge funding increases as Washington geared up to fight two conventional wars, conduct world-wide operations against small, distributed networks of terrorists and harden the home front against future attacks.
The world’s sole superpower in 2001, the U.S. had been cutting military spending for nearly a decade before the terrorist attacks. Military spending as a share of gross domestic product had shrunk to less than a third of its size at the height of the Vietnam War and less than half what it had been in the Reagan years.
Policy makers cast that reduction as a “peace dividend,” expressing hope that the Cold War’s end would usher in an era of prosperity in which military outlays could be redirected into social services and tax cuts.
“9/11 changed the dynamic,” says Hawk Carlisle, a retired Air Force general who now serves as the president and chief executive of the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group that represents the defense industry. A military long focused on keeping the Soviet Union at bay, and briefly recast to center on peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance, suddenly faced a very different mission: fighting terrorism at any cost.
