There is yet another assurance the president must give -- that we are prepared for what the secretary of defense, among others, believes will be virtually inevitable retaliatory terrorist attacks on the United States for our invasion of an Islamic country. As recently as three months ago the Council on Foreign Relations task force that I co-chaired reported that we are woefully unprepared for, and still at risk of, future terrorist attacks. It is imprudent in the extreme to attack a nation in a region seething with hostile suicidal forces when we are vulnerable to their retaliation.

Which leads, of course, right back home to the new age of homeland security. On Jan. 31, 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century strongly recommended to President George Bush that a new National Homeland Security Agency be created to restructure and reorganize federal assets, and well over a year after the first terrorist attack, one is finally being established. This must not become a domestic Pentagon, a bureaucratic behemoth that crushes initiative and imagination. A very large coordinated agency can succeed only if it integrates functions but at the same time rewards individual creative energy. At this moment, that new department is not moving with the sense of urgency it must possess.

Structured from almost two dozen existing federal offices, the new department will have, among its many missions, two crucial ones -- control of our borders and protection of our critical infrastructure: our communications, finance, energy and transportation systems.

But an even greater challenge for the nation itself is the search for a balance between security and liberty. Here the role of the standing military in civil society becomes crucial. The Pentagon is creating a new Northern Command, headquartered in Colorado Springs, whose duties are as yet unclear. The new command will be tasked with coordinating the role of the military in homeland security. The easiest and most obvious solution is to put the entire mission in the Department of Defense.

There are, however, important reasons why it is not that easy. A review of the constitutional debates in 1787 makes clear that the founders understood the danger to a republican form of government from stationing full-time soldiers on the streets of our nation. This was a fear that united the often divided founders. Indeed, this fear led to the passage of a statute, the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, a hundred years later, prohibiting the military from enforcing the laws of the land. Congress wanted to make it clear that there is a great difference in a democracy between protecting our nation from foreign attack and policing our neighborhoods.

Now some in Washington are saying we should "review" this law with an eye to qualifying or even repealing it. Beware. This would be a mistake of dangerous proportions. For then, the very liberties for which we stand and which we are seeking to protect would be in danger. Short of an emergency of catastrophic proportions and a presidential declaration of martial law, we neither want nor need the 82nd Airborne Division on the streets of Cleveland, Boston or Denver. And, schooled in constitutional principles and history, the vast majority of professional military officers do not want that mission either.

But who, in addition to our public safety agencies, our police and fire departments and emergency responders, should help respond to an attack and keep the peace and restore order? Might there not be the need for some kind of military capability? Once again, based upon their understanding of classical history, our founders anticipated the future. They created such an army and called it the militia: citizen-soldiers under the immediate command of the various states that can be deployed in times of emergency. Since the late 19th century these militias have been known as the National Guard, and they were created and given constitutional status as the first responders and the first line of defense in the case of an attack on our homeland.

Our commission on 21st century national security insisted that the National Guard be given the principal mission of response to homeland attack. These are people like us, teachers, office workers, bankers and business people, nurses and medical personnel, who are or quickly can be trained and equipped for the primary homeland security role. They also do not conjure up the danger of military rule so feared by republicans since the Greek city-state.

So now we can begin to see the outlines of a national security structure and a set of strategies, tactics and doctrines necessary to protect us in an age of multiple revolutions. First, we must understand the changing nature of conflict and the concurrently changing nature of security. Second, we must appreciate the nature of threats and respond to the causes of those threats not only with military means but also with economic and diplomatic imagination to reduce the despair that fuels terrorism. Third, the military means we use when necessary will look dramatically different from the recent Cold War age. They will capitalize on our technological superiority but recognize its increasing dependence on skillful human direction. And fourth, homeland security must achieve a balance between security and liberty by constant recognition of our peculiar constitutional heritage and the mandate that heritage provides to rely on citizens and citizen-soldiers devoted to civic virtue and civic duty.

For the first time since 1812, our security has become a function of the community. America will prevail in this new age more because of the strength of its citizens than the power of its arsenal. But our citizens must be engaged in this fight, to a much greater degree than they have been, by the president himself.

The new century of paradox dictates that the world's greatest power must look not to its far-flung branches but to its roots -- not to its elaborate materialistic systems of production and consumption but to its ideals and principles, not to its greed but to its honor. From 1949 until 1991, we lived under the threat of nuclear war and depended on a policy of containment and a doctrine of deterrence to protect us. That was the basis of our national security. I leave to you the task of coining a name for the new national security policy for a new age.

But whatever it is called, we must never forget that those tasked with carrying it out are our neighbors and fellow citizens, men and women with homes and families just like ours. When we take their vigilance and sacrifice for granted, we demean our rich heritage of democratic freedom guaranteed by the bloodshed of generations of Americans who have stood the lonely post far from home to assure our safety and security.

Until we discover ways to eradicate evil from the hearts of those who wish us ill, those who accept the duty of standing that post will risk, and tragically lose, their lives so that we here may enjoy our freedom. Somewhere in the Persian Gulf there is a young sailor who is someone's daughter, a combat pilot who is someone's husband, a young Marine ready to go ashore who is someone's son. For the American nation, they are all our sons and daughters.

War is not an instrument of policy; it is a failure of policy. We cannot here today discuss the use of military power as an instrument of national policy without recognition that it is the lives of our sons and daughters that are most immediately at stake. We all must now earn our rights by performance of our duties. And our duty to our sons and daughters requires our policy makers to hold their lives in sacred trust. Only then will our national security be just as well as strong and only then can we be truly proud of who we are.

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