War & Peace Quote by Tom Ridge

An “indefinite period of time” is the kind of phrase that sounds like reassurance until you notice it has no end date. Tom Ridge, speaking as the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in the early post-9/11 years, isn’t just forecasting a long campaign; he’s normalizing a new baseline. The real work of the sentence is managerial: it trains the public to accept that emergency measures, heightened alerts, and expanded security powers won’t be temporary wartime exceptions but an ongoing civic condition.

The specificity of “this war” paired with the vagueness of “terrorism” is doing a lot of political lifting. Wars typically have enemies you can name and victories you can narrate. “Terrorism” is a tactic, not a state, and that slipperiness quietly authorizes mission creep: if the target is a method, then almost any threat can be folded into it, and almost any policy can be justified as prevention. Ridge’s diction is calm, bureaucratic, even antiseptic, which is exactly the point. It’s a soft-sell of permanence.

The subtext is a trade offer: you’ll get the promise of safety, but you’ll live in a long-term posture of surveillance, readiness, and fear management. In that era, the color-coded alerts and the creation of DHS were signals that the government was reorganizing itself around a perpetual threat narrative. Ridge’s line doesn’t rally the troops so much as rewire the social contract: the state will stay on war footing, and the public is asked to treat that as ordinary.