tostdavid

The United States must learn to defend against uncertainty. There is no way to predict the probable nature of the threat that can be firmly rooted in either an analysis of past patterns of attack, or a clearly identifiable threat from specific countries or foreign and domestic extremists. Furthermore, U.S. planning and analysis often tends to react to an emotive and generic approach to terrorism, and/or generalize from patterns and incidents that simply do not justify such generalizations. There has been only limited, sporadic efforts to develop national net assessments of the threat posed by foreign terrorism and no matching effort to create comprehensive net assessment of domestic threats. The net assessments that have addressed foreign terrorism have generally failed to address higher levels of asymmetric warfare and to provide any net technical assessment of how methods of attack may evolve in the future and what technology can do to improve defense.

Many elements of the U.S. government seem to find it difficult to accept the fact that asymmetric warfare is only illegal or illegitimate in the eyes of those who do not need to use such tactics, or find them to be the most effective form of attack, and the fact that the future threat posed by covert or proxy attacks by state actors may be at least as important, and far more lethal, than the threat posed by foreign and domestic terrorist-extremist groups and individuals.

With the exception of the DOD and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. government tends to use a relatively narrow definition of the word “terrorism” based on the currently most probable threats rather than examine the full range of possible asymmetric threats and consider how they may evolve over time. This focus on a narrow definition of “terrorism” has three major negative side effects: First, the threat analysis and characterization is based on the idea that the threat to the U.S. homeland comes only from illegal or illegitimate actors, driven largely by extreme political or ideological motives. Second, it leads federal planners to downplay or ignore the risk that governments may launch covert CBRN attacks against the United States or use proxies to do so, giving “terrorists” an access to far more sophisticated weapons than would otherwise be the case. And finally, it leads many agencies to define threats in terms of attacks that would produce limited to moderate casualties, with ten thousand deaths or less. The term “terrorism” has often been taken to imply attacks by small groups or independent organizations, rather than attacks by well-organized, nonstate actors or asymmetric warfare by states. This problem is compounded by the fact that federal agencies use different definitions of terrorism.