Created to Fall: The Common Trait of All Empires

The night of September 11th, 2001, I did not sleep well. I don't think anybody did, especially those of us in public safety. Fear of the unknown seemed to be the thought of the day, or days thereafter. Every expert on CNN for months afterward predicted the emergence of "sleeper terrorist cells" that had secretly amassed WMD and were intent on unleashing them against our citizenry. I had just completed a patrol shift with four hours over-time, because I was assigned to guard a facility that was deemed "essential" although no actionable intelligence existed indicating the building was ever a target by anyone other than our local purse snatcher. It took me one shift to realize that this knee jerk reaction, that policing is well known for, would not last for long. It simply didn't make any sense. While I was guarding a building, my buddy was sitting in cruiser watching a water tower in the middle of no-where. Police leadership, in my experience, was doing what they were good at whenever there is a crisis; something I call the principle of "we've got to do something even if it's wrong.". An emergency occurs, 911 call centers get swamped and cops massively deploy everywhere without focus. We only succeed in accumulating huge amounts of overtime and snarling up traffic. Does this really help our community? Didn't the Russians do this? Russians? What?! Keep reading...

We did it first.

One of the reasons why the "West", otherwise known as NATO powers, won the Cold War against WARSAW Pact Forces, i.e., former Soviet Union and her allies, is because we simply out spent them in the trillions. The strategy, although overtly militaristic, was actually economically based. The Soviets fell victim to the "thermodynamic law of entrophy", meaning more effort was being spent on maintaining their control, status quo, instead of expanding. Collapse came from within. The asymmetry of strategy applied to defeating the WARSAW Pact wasn't a new concept. Simply put, find your opponents weaknesses and exploit them, or in the words of Sun Tzu:

"Therefore one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful."

Every time our Terrorist Threat Advisory Level increases our national bank account dips into the negative. Thank God the federal government does not have to balance their check book the way we have to. However, the bad news is that state and local government must pass a balanced budget and when massive agencies like NYPD had to increase their overtime spending by 100% (or $436.7 Million per year FY03-05) to deal with counter-terrorism someone has to bail them out. The Fed's claim they can't do it. You do the math; X amount of dollars pumped into our government budgets via taxation, and Y is spent. Ideally, as a municipal manager, you want to break even or at best, have a little left over in reserve for that "rainy day fund." Massive increases for unbudgeted intangibles will put you in the red. Other city and state programs get cut to help offset the shortfall. The vicious cycle continues.