Leadership Quote by John Linder

Linder’s line turns bureaucratic mission statements into a quiet accusation: we’re preparing for the wrong kind of danger, and the mismatch isn’t accidental. By splitting “how” from “who,” he frames threat assessment as a choice between two worldviews. The CDC (standing in for public health and technocratic preparedness) thinks in mechanisms: pathogens, vectors, vulnerabilities, systems that fail. The military, he suggests, thinks in enemies with names and flags. It’s a tidy contrast, designed to sound like common sense while implying that one side is naive and the other is realistic.

The subtext is a post-9/11 argument about priorities and imagination. “How” evokes bioterror, pandemics, and the unnerving idea that catastrophe can come from infrastructure and biology rather than from a recognizable foe. “Who” evokes the familiar politics of adversaries and retaliation: the kind of threat that justifies budgets, alliances, wars, and a moral narrative. Linder’s move is to imply that the CDC’s focus is too abstract, too process-oriented, even as the phrase “our enemies” quietly borrows military language to keep fear in the frame.

As a politician, he’s also auditioning for authority: praising the military’s clarity while nudging suspicion toward civilian expertise. The sentence works because it’s compact, parallel, and slippery. It sounds like coordination; it plays like critique. It doesn’t prove the military actually focuses on “who” over “how,” but it invites the listener to feel that it does - and that feeling, in security politics, often wins.