Plans to shoot down threatening planes and to seize weapons of mass destruction on the high seas long before they reach US shores are part of the military's first full homeland defence strategy due to be finalised next month, a senior Pentagon official said.
Overhauling a domestic defence structure that was designed for the Cold War and failed to prevent the September 11, 2001, hijacked aircraft attacks, Pentagon officials are designing an air, sea and land strategy to counter threats from other states as well as the new dangers of international terrorism.
"It's the first comprehensive homeland defence strategy in the history of our nation," Assistant Secretary of Defence for Homeland Defence Paul McHale told Reuters.
"On the date of the September 11 attacks, the concept of homeland defence as we know it today really did not exist," he said in a Thursday interview, adding it had become "the highest strategic goal of transnational terrorists to attack the United States on our own soil."
Since the 2001 attacks, the Pentagon has refined its homeland defence strategy on land, sea and in the air - including plans to shoot down planes in case of an emergency. On September 11, orders to shoot down the hijacked airliners did not reach fighter jets until the last plane had crashed. McHale said he expected to present the new, formal homeland defence strategy to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for review by September 15.
The strategy will complement the work of the civilian Department of Homeland Security, which does not have a military arm. It would primarily affect the operations of the US military's Northern Command (NORTHCOM) which is in charge of North America and includes the airspace and hundreds of miles of ocean around the United States, McHale said.
While also covering air and land, the new strategy will give the maritime domain particular attention since air defences are already considered more "mature" and land defence is largely the remit of US law enforcement, he said.
"In the maritime domain, we've got a big job ahead of us," McHale said. "We are still in an earlier stage in defining the necessary maritime defence that will be competent to defeat transnational terrorists on the high seas armed with weapons of mass destruction long before they get to our coast."
He said the US maritime defence "must be an active presence, not a passive response." It needed better tracking and surveillance of potential threats far out to sea, improved seaborne interceptions of dangerous ships or cargoes, and more remote WMD detection capabilities, among other things.
The strategy would also ensure the vast volume of information on possible dangers gleaned from spies, bugs, satellites, radar and other sensors was fused into one integrated system, rather than being "discrete collection capabilities" as they are now.
The new homeland defence strategy would also formally enshrine current doctrine allowing the military to shoot down airplanes threatening the country. McHale said that before September 11, the military had not envisioned or trained for the shoot-down of a commercial plane that had been turned into a weapon.
"Today, we do recognise the requirement of an intercept mission and we routinely train to the necessary and tragic requirement that under appropriate circumstances such an airplane might have to be shot down," he said.