What Is Security?

What is security? During the Cold War, the answer seemed simple. If the Soviets tried to annihilate us, we'd annihilate the Soviets -- and vice versa. The logic was straightforward, if a bit perverse: The way to ensure security was to make destruction mutually assured. And the way to add an extra layer of protection was to write lengthy treaties that the two sides signed in elaborate ceremonies.

But where the Cold War had high stakes and elementary rules, the Gray War has high stakes and bizarre rules. We're less certain who "they" -- and at times "we" -- really are. The enemy is so dedicated that it is willing, even eager, to die. It is so loosely organized that it's hard to know who should be at a negotiating table. We can't use deterrence. We can't use diplomacy. What do we do? Linda Millis has the beginnings of an answer. "National security," she says, "is everybody's business."

Millis works for a Washington, DC nonprofit called Business Executives for National Security (BENS), one of a legion of think tanks and policy shops that form the capital's motley shadow government. Usually, these groups occupy the nosebleed seats of political theater. But every so often, events conspire to thrust certain ones to center stage. In the past few months, that's what has happened with BENS.

In the decade since the Cold War ended, BENS has been warning businesspeople and politicians about ominous new threats: cyberattacks, suitcase bombs, and bioterrorism. Few people listened. BENS founder and chairman Stanley Weiss traveled Europe and the United States giving speeches about anthrax and Osama bin Laden. In 1999. Few people cared. BENS argued that these new threats were the kind that business was in a unique position to repel, but that doing so would require a new type of cooperation between the public and the private sectors. The typical response: Ho-hum.

Then what was unthinkable to most, but inevitable to BENS, actually occurred. "Before September 11, we went around trying to get people's attention," says Millis, a former CIA analyst who is BENS's vice president of new tools with the New Teams for New Threats division. "Now we have their attention." And now, she and others say, is the time for all good businesspeople to come to the aid of their country.

Millis and her colleagues argue that security today won't come from bigger bombs or faster planes. It won't come exclusively from the government. And it won't be absolute. Instead, Millis says, the best way to battle the bad guys is to "respond quickly to anything they do." Adds Weiss: "You have to get ahead of them. You have to do all kinds of things that the government is not nearly as good at doing as people in business are."

What is security?

It's still hard to say. But in this new era, it will depend more than ever on -- yes -- fast companies.

Civilian War Games

One Tuesday in October, 20,000 people file into the San Jose Convention Center for Wescon, an engineering-design conference. The event is a huge success. But by Thursday evening, strange things begin to happen. A 47-year-old software engineer who had attended the conference goes to the emergency room of the San Jose Medical Center with a high fever, cough, and headache.

On Friday, local companies notice that an unusually large number of employees have called in sick. Then events turn grim. The 47-year-old engineer dies. Soon, emergency rooms throughout northern California are clogged with coughing, feverish patients.

Investigations begin. And the preliminary findings turn out to be too awful to fathom: It's yersinia pestis -- the plague. Law-enforcement officials trace the disease to the San Jose Convention Center, where they find canisters that are rigged with biological agents attached to the ventilation system. Black Death has invaded Silicon Valley.

How does the Valley respond? That's what BENS wanted to know. In August -- a month before the terrorist attacks -- BENS invited officials from the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI, the State of California, Santa Clara County, and several Silicon Valley companies to walk through this bioterrorism scenario. The results were not heartening.

When those 35 people gathered in the conference center of BEA Systems, an e-commerce software company based in San Jose, they quickly realized that they had barely a clue about how to respond to a terror-induced pandemic. Indeed, when they took their seats around a horseshoe-shaped table, they discovered that most of the people tasked with coordinating such an effort didn't even know one another. "The first part of the meeting, and one of the most useful exercises, was just exchanging business cards," says BENS chief of staff Marcia Johnston, who ran the project.

The public-health officials discovered that Silicon Valley businesses were essential partners in responding to terror. "Companies have wonderful communications networks," says Johnston. "They have warehouses. They have facilities that can be turned into clinics." Overnight-delivery companies could rush medicine and supplies where they were needed. Trucking companies could haul products and people away from dangerous areas. Fast-food outlets might repurpose their drive-through windows as efficient places to distribute medicine. The experience also reinforced a broader point: When the battlefield extends to conference halls and cubicles, even civilians must participate in war games.