By Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff

There are obviously domestic characteristics to terrorism, but in terms of what the public is concerned about and certainly what the department was formed in order to address first and foremost, it is global, radical terrorism. And as Thomas Friedman said recently in his latest book, The World is Flat, it is really -- terrorism in the 21st century is really the globalization of the kind of terror acts that we saw in the 20th century. And much as globalization has transformed the world of business, it has transformed the world of terror. And so we need to think about how we confront terrorism by looking at 21st century structures and characteristics that terrorists exploit in order to carry out their missions.

As David pointed out, 9/11 itself is a great example of this. We're talking about a plot that was hatched in Central Asia with recruits who came from Saudi Arabia, who were trained in Afghanistan, who set up and began to develop their infrastructure and their platform in Europe, and then who carried out and executed their mission here in the United States. That is globalization. That is networking. That is outsourcing. That is all the characteristics of 21st century organization that we're accustomed to thinking about in the context of international business but that unfortunately is also available to those who want to commit acts of international terror.

So we are fighting a different kind of a war. It's not a war that we are going to win in the same way that we won World War II by massing superior forces in the field, or even the kind of war that at least the first part of the campaign in Iraq was, where we bring in superior air power, mobile forces, and then we crush the enemy. This is fighting a network, and so as we talk about a strategy to deal with global terror, we have to start to think about what is a strategy for dealing with a network. And clearly one way to look at it is we have to create our own network to compete with that network and to combat that network.

We also have to look at what vulnerabilities networking has, and those vulnerabilities tend to be things like communication, transportation, movement of people, movement of cargo. Those are the kinds of activities that bind a network together. If you think about, for example, a benign network, a global business -- you have to communicate with the various parts of the business; you have to move people and goods and services. And that's how a network works in a positive way.

In a negative way, as well, of course the terrorists exploit that strategy to carry out their missions. And so we need to look at the peculiar vulnerabilities that networks have, and that is this connective tissue that allows bad people and bad stuff to move back and forth internationally. What that tells us right away is that if we're going to challenge the kind of interdependence that a terrorist network thrives upon, we have to be able to confront the network everywhere it operates. And that means we have to be able to function internationally and do it in partnership with our overseas allies.