OPINION: What's Measured Can Be Understood and Improved
Every month, we get a Consumer Confidence Index telling us how Americans feel about the economy. It's time for a National Security Confidence.
By James “Phil” Huber
GUEST COLUMNIST
Every month, we get a Consumer Confidence Index telling us how Americans feel about the economy. We even have a Fiscal Confidence Index that tracks how worried people are about the national debt.
But there is no simple score that tells us how confident we should be that our leaders are actually protecting the United States from foreign enemies—and from the Americans who help them.
In 2026, that’s not a minor oversight. It’s a danger.
Why Fredericksburg should care
Here in the Fredericksburg region, this isn’t abstract.
Our area sits between major military, intelligence, and government corridors.
We’re surrounded by data centers and infrastructure that keep the national economy and government running.
If a hostile foreign power wanted to disrupt America—through cyberattacks, infrastructure sabotage, or worse—places like ours would feel it fast.
This region helped launch the country. George Washington spent his boyhood just across the river. Today, our security depends less on muskets and more on servers, networks, and strong alliances.
We should be asking, plainly: How secure are we, really?
What a National Security Confidence Index would do
We know how to measure complicated things with a single number. We do it all the time:
Consumer confidence.
The unemployment rate.
Fiscal confidence.
An independent National Security Confidence Index would answer one question:
How well is the United States protecting Americans from hostile foreign powers and the domestic actors who help them?
To stay simple and useful, it should track four things.
1. Our stance toward allies and adversaries
Call this our external security posture.
Are we strengthening or weakening key alliances like NATO?
Are we standing with frontline democracies like Ukraine—or cutting them loose?
Are we pushing back on dictators, or praising them and giving them what they want?
When a president threatens to abandon NATO, talks about letting Russia “do whatever they want” to our allies, or fawns over strongmen, that doesn’t just embarrass the country. It makes us less safe. In a real index, those choices would drag the score down.
2. Internal enablers and political violence
Foreign threats don’t work alone. They rely on domestic helpers:
Politicians and media figures who repeat foreign disinformation.
Officials who attack the FBI and intelligence community for investigating foreign interference.
Leaders who wink at political violence or threaten public servants doing their jobs.
Every time a leader excuses extremists, undermines investigators, or spreads propaganda that started in Moscow or Beijing, they are doing our enemies’ work for them.
A serious index would count that:
More political violence and open extremism → score down.
More elected leaders defending institutions and rejecting violence → score up.
3. Readiness in cyber and critical systems
Wars and attacks today often start with keyboards, not tanks.
A National Security Confidence Index should ask:
Are we finding and fixing serious software vulnerabilities quickly?
Are we investing in modern systems and cyber defense, or pretending nothing has changed?
Are we coordinating between federal, state, and local agencies—or leaving cities and towns on their own?
Independent experts already score countries on their cyber defenses and legal frameworks. Those scores, combined with basic “are we patching the holes?” data, can be turned into a clear number.
For Fredericksburg, that matters. A major cyber incident could hit:
Federal workers commuting up and down I‑95.
Local businesses and hospitals that rely on regional networks.
Data centers that host services you use every day.
If national leaders underfund or politicize cybersecurity, our local risk goes up—even if nobody here ever sees a tank or a missile.
4. Public trust and expectations
Security isn’t just hardware and laws. It’s also whether people believe their government is:
Competent enough to handle a crisis.
Honest enough to tell the truth.
Serious enough to treat threats as threats, not as talking points.
Public trust in the federal government is near historic lows. Many Americans simply do not believe leaders will “do the right thing” most of the time. Low trust makes it harder to:
Evacuate people in an emergency.
Respond to a cyberattack.
Ask for shared sacrifice in a real crisis.
An index could ask three straightforward questions:
How concerned are you about foreign interference and political violence?
Do you think leaders are treating these as top priorities?
Do you expect America to be more or less secure in the next few years?
Combine the answers, and you get a “confidence” score the public can understand.
What the score might say now
Imagine opening the paper and seeing:
May 2026 National Security Confidence Index: 42 out of 100
Allies and adversaries: Weak
Internal threats: Rising
Readiness: Mixed
Public trust: Near historic lows
You wouldn’t have to agree with every detail. But you’d know one thing: the status quo is not safe.
Who should run this index?
Not the White House. Not the Pentagon. Not any administration.
If the same politicians who are part of the problem get to grade themselves, the score will always be “A+.”
Instead, the index should be run by an independent partnership, for example:
A respected national‑security think tank.
One or more universities with strong public‑policy and statistics programs.
A nonpartisan polling organization that already measures public opinion nationwide.
Their job would be to:
Publish the questions and data sources.
Update the score on a regular schedule, no matter who’s in office.
Let the public see the full methodology.
The point isn’t to create a partisan weapon. It’s to create a warning light on the dashboard we can all see.
Why this matters now
Some people say national security is too complex for a single number. But we already trust single numbers to summarize big systems—the economy, unemployment, even consumer moods.
Complexity is not an excuse for ignorance.
If a CEO treated corporate security the way Donald Trump has treated American security—threatening to walk out on key partners, flattering hostile strongmen, attacking internal watchdogs, and encouraging people who break the rules—shareholders would dump the stock.
Voters deserve the same clarity shareholders insist on. A National Security Confidence Index would let us ask, every month:
Are our leaders making us safer?
Or are they putting us at risk?
Until we have that measure, Americans—and communities like Fredericksburg—are flying blind. It’s time we demanded a simple, trusted number that tells the truth about our security, and about the politicians who are supposed to protect it.
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