Global Threat: Target-Centered Assessment and Management

Global Threat

Praeger Security International Advisory Board Board Cochairs Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.) Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advisory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews (U.K.) Members Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (U.S.A.) The´re`se Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission, and Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), Paris (France) Sir Michael Howard, former Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regis Professor of Modern History, Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.) Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.), former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army (U.S.A.) Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.) Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia) Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.) Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.)

Global Threat Target-Centered Assessment and Management

Robert Mandel

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL

Westport, Connecticut

•

London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mandel, Robert Global threat : target-centered assessment and management / Robert Mandel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–35845–6 (alk. paper) 1. National security—United States. 2. United States—Military policy. 3. Terrorism—Prevention— Government policy—United States 4. World politics—1989- I. Title. UA23.M2768 2008 355’.033073—dc22 2008020458 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Robert Mandel All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008020458 ISBN-13: 978–0–313–35845–6 First published in 2008 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Figures

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Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1: The Global Threat Challenge Chapter 2: Distinctiveness of Post–Cold War Threat Chapter 3: The Nature of the Enemy Chapter 4: Threat Analysis Deficiencies Chapter 5: Target-Centered Global Threat Assessment Chapter 6: Recent Global Threat Cases Chapter 7: Refining Threat-Related Decision Making Chapter 8: Target-Centered Global Threat Management

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Notes

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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Figures

FIGURE 2.1: COLD WAR VERSUS POST–COLD WAR THREAT FIGURE 3.1: FEAR/HATRED, PERCEIVED THREAT, AND ENEMIES FIGURE 3.2: DEGREE OF THREAT TARGET INTOLERANCE OF ENEMIES FIGURE 3.3: COMPARING POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND CULTURAL ENEMIES FIGURE 3.4: COSTS AND BENEFITS OF FOCUSING ON ENEMIES FIGURE 4.1: CONTRASTING MODES OF THREAT MISIDENTIFICATION FIGURE 4.2: THREAT COVERAGE SHORTCOMINGS FIGURE 4.3: MISLEADING EFFORTS AT THREAT ASSESSMENT FIGURE 5.1: TARGET-CENTERED GLOBAL THREAT ASSESSMENT FIGURE 6.1: COMPARING RECENT GLOBAL THREAT CASES FIGURE 7.1: REFINING THREAT-RELATED DECISION MAKING FIGURE 8.1: CHANGING THREAT RESPONSE ORIENTATION FIGURE 8.2: IMPROVING COUNTERTHREAT POLICIES FIGURE 8.3: ADDRESSING THREAT ASSESSMENT ELEMENTS FIGURE 8.4: WHEN IS MISASSESSING/MISMANAGING THREAT MOST DEADLY? FIGURE 8.5: WHEN IS MANAGING INCOMING THREAT MOST DIFFICULT?

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Preface

This book is the product of years of deep pondering. My continuing concern with post–Cold War global disorder has appeared in several published articles and in four recently published books, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground: Transnational Security Threats in a Disorderly World (Praeger, 1999); Armies Without States: The Privatization of Security (Lynne Rienner, 2002); Security, Strategy, and the Quest for Bloodless War (Lynne Rienner, 2004); and The Meaning of Military Victory (Lynne Rienner, 2006). In many senses, the notion of threat lies at the heart of all crucial national security issues. This book resulted from the intense controversy surrounding what constitutes severe threat in the post–Cold War world. In recent years, it has seemed sometimes as if no reliable metric has existed that anyone could use to determine whether or not a threat to national security actually existed and whether or not such a threat was significant. Today conflicting conceptions of threat abound among global leaders, inadequate understanding of how to gauge the severity of elusive dangers is rampant in the international security setting, and, consequently, responses to threat have generally failed to achieve their objectives. There is a need for significant rethinking and reformulation of security concepts that often have had commonly accepted meanings carry over far beyond their reasonable period of applicability. The significant transformation in the post–Cold War and post-9/11 global security environment requires a corresponding major shift in analytical tools utilized to evaluate and respond to key trends in this setting. The intellectual puzzles are truly intriguing posed by the challenge of systematic threat assessment and effective threat management. Both proper appraisal and proper response to global threat are quite complex. My hope in undertaking this investigation is not only to shed significant new light on the topic so as to create a more

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coherent understanding of post–Cold War threat, but also to help those responsible to grapple more successfully with emerging international dangers. This book takes a fresh integrative conceptual look at threat so as to analyze and address the pitfalls and opportunities surrounding assessing and managing foreign dangers. Those new to threat analysis may discover a comprehensive and probing review of existing findings and new insights regarding global threat assessment and management. Those knowledgeable and experienced in international threat concerns will find most traditional ways of thinking called into question, with alternative ways of analyzing and responding to threat proposed. In either case, rather than simply being exposed to interesting empirical accounts of how threat operates in today’s world, readers will be encouraged to take a broad critical look at the underlying processes in assessing and managing threat. This book is thus designed to speak not only to students, but also to both international relations scholars and security analysts and policy makers about the opportunities and limitations surrounding global threat. Bridging the gap between academic and government security studies is highly challenging, but yet absolutely crucial to increase sensitivity on both sides to the different perspectives involved and to allow each group to benefit directly from the findings of the other. Thus this book makes every effort to avoid reliance on scholarly or policy-making jargon, unexplained acronyms, or implicit assumptions of any prevailing school of thought.

Acknowledgments

Because the concept of threat is inherently interdisciplinary, scholarly discussions of the topic emerge from many different angles, and this book attempts to bring together and integrate these insights. A wonderful undergraduate student research assistant, Alex Harsha, helped me with the case research. However, I take full responsibility for any egregious errors found in this volume. I wish to thank several anonymous American intelligence and defense officials for their substantial input on this book. All of these kind and insightful people took time out of their very busy schedules to answer my questions—and my seemingly endless follow-up queries—about the security puzzles surrounding the assessment and management of threat. They even were willing—quite unexpectedly—to reflect on the differences they had with each other, without engaging in holier-than-thou diatribes against those who held conflicting views. For obvious reasons, I cannot name them specifically or identify who said what. However, for those who inappropriately generalize about the ‘‘United States government perspective’’ on threat, I can report that opinions about threat assessment among officials working for the American government defense and intelligence communities vary sharply, and thus attempts to portray the government vantage point as monolithic are decidedly misguided. It was frankly gratifying to see government officials even from the same agencies holding diametrically opposed positions on key issues surrounding threat recognition and response, with all of them able to defend convincingly justifications for their particular vantage points. Although serious discussions among those holding contrasting views may not yet be the norm, such constructive disagreement suggests the promise of future lively within-government interchanges on improving threat assessment. This book is dedicated to intelligence analysts who endeavor to the best of their abilities to assess global threat, and to security policy makers who endeavor to the

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best of their abilities to manage global threat, so as to protect domestic citizenry and enhance global stability. These two sets of officials toil without ceasing to comprehend, adjust to, and overcome the ever-changing nature of contemporary global threats. Although at times threat may be misassessed and may lead to underreaction or overreaction, the sincerity of effort among those who strive to accomplish it should not be underestimated.

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The Global Threat Challenge America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. —U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 7, 2002

We could easily be attacked. The intent to attack us remains as strong as it was on September 10, 2001. We’ve done a lot to degrade the enemy’s capability but the enemy has also done a lot to retool its capability . . .. All these things have given me kind of a gut feeling that we are in a period of increased vulnerability. —U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, speaking in Chicago, Illinois, on July 10, 2007

Suppose a powerful society was unexpectedly the target of a devastating coercive strike from a foreign source that the society had previously perceived as too weak, disorganized, and peripheral to plan and execute such an attack. Suppose further that, after the coercive strike from abroad, the leadership of the powerful society became somewhat paranoid and xenophobic about it vulnerabilities, and the powerful society poured resources into bolstering its defense against any kind of future threat. Suppose even further that the powerful society, in the midst of its newly invigorated obsession with its security, attempted to pinpoint the threat sources responsible for the devastating coercive strike it had experienced, and then—once having done so—launched retaliatory wars against them in order to nip the roots of the disruption in the bud. Finally, suppose the powerful society discovered, after years of fighting such wars, that its efforts were not ultimately successful in managing the threat and that these efforts were not only not widely supported but were actually opposed and severely criticized by both domestic citizens and foreign onlookers. This not-so-hypothetical scenario highlights several crucial issues. How did the powerful society perceive threat prior to the unexpected coercive strike, why did it not anticipate the strike, and how did it change its mode of threat perception after the strike? Were the vulnerabilities evident from this particular kind of threat ones that could be readily reduced through resource expenditure? Was this the kind of threat where launching retaliatory coercion had any realistic hope of success? What

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kind of threat assessment system was being used in the powerful society to gauge the severity of threat, and why did its mode of threat assessment differ so markedly from those of inside and outside observers, with the powerful society unable to persuade them of the correctness of its course no matter how hard it tried? How did the powerful society’s threat assessment inform its threat management, why was its threat response ineffective, and why did this response receive such criticism from both domestic citizens and foreign onlookers? CENTRALITY OF GLOBAL THREAT Across time and space, virtually every society has sought to recognize external threats to its way of life, to determine which are of greatest importance, and to manage them successfully. Identifying and prioritizing foreign threat have always been fundamental to national security, and this is particularly so in an anarchic world. How threat is framed ‘‘drives a wide variety of behaviors, from alliance formation and defense spending to trade relations and regime membership.’’1 Indeed, only with reasonable understanding of the nature of threat (and associated vulnerabilities) ‘‘can one begin to make sense of national security as a policy problem,’’2 for ‘‘when threat is not perceived, even in the face of apparently objective evidence, there can hardly be a mobilization of defense resources.’’3 Thus in the United States, for example, perceiving and responding to threat is considered the president’s preeminent responsibility.4 However, global threat is decidedly not an area where just knowing its importance to national security and throwing considerable resources at it are sufficient to make dangers go away. Despite significant expenditure of time and money, according to every measure most parties that feel subject to foreign threat just cannot get a handle on the nature of today’s complex dangers and how to deal with them. They remain overwhelmed by a kind of debilitating insecurity where they feel relatively helpless and unable to cope with perils that they find to be largely inscrutable. Although much current security analysis identifies the primary problem as threat targets not having sufficient resources to monitor and address threat effectively, in reality the greater problem is not having a solid comprehension of the dynamics of modern threat. CONFUSION SURROUNDING GLOBAL THREAT The confusion about global threat begins with its basic meaning. Dictionary definitions usually emphasize the expression of intent to cause harm, or, more specifically, to inflict pain, injury, or punishment. However, not all of the most pressing international dangers involve an expression of such intent—for example, natural disasters, pandemic disease, and human trafficking threats would be excluded by this narrow definition. Analysts strongly disagree about whether terrorism, global warming, or rogue states’ nuclear weapons development constitutes the most severe threat today, and no way exists to resolve these differences. With commonly held meanings for threat excluding many of the most widely acknowledged global dangers, it is not surprising that in recent years recognizing and responding to threat have become so muddled.

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Definitional confusion revolves around the most basic question about whether or not threat really exists. Does threat constitute a tangible phenomenon—one objectively provable to be present or absent through examining material elements such as the balance of military power? or instead does it represent simply a perceived or even contrived phenomenon that is simply a mental construct composed of ethereal images and ideas?5 Threat analyses differ sharply in terms of how danger is characterized, with psychologists leaning toward subjective notions and political scientists tilting toward objective notions. The differences here prove to be pivotal in deciding how to respond to threat, with those seeing it as imagined and subjective focusing on reducing fear and hatred, while those seeing it as concrete and objective focusing on deterring or containing a threat source and limiting vulnerability to damage. Deciding to follow an ‘‘either-or’’ approach in dealing with this controversy poses problems, as real threats may not be perceived and perceived threats may not be real. Confusion about global threat continues with difficulties in pinpointing threat sources and threat targets. Regarding threat sources, how is it possible to isolate instigators if a threat is embedded—as it often is—in a threat-counterthreat cycle between two or more parties (with each side seeing the other as the instigator and seeing itself as just responding to a threat)? Determining who is ultimately responsible for triggering existing tensions is often difficult in multifaceted international predicaments involving multiple parties engaging in diverse types of interactions over time, especially where information on the dangers is scarce or unreliable. Regarding threat targets, how is it possible to isolate the direction of threat when often there is no clearly enunciated target? Target identification is also complicated because the impact of a threat may be not just on those directly affected but also on those physically distant who become aware of existing dangers.6 This confusion proceeds further when attempting to determine and defend threat prioritization. Is there any systematic way to determine the relative severity of threats? How does one rank low-probability, high-impact threats? How should one evaluate threats about which there are conflicting or low-quality intelligence reports among those responsible within a target? How does one evaluate severe threats about which one can do nothing in response? Should the public trust government identification of key threats, and what responsibility do governments have to inform their citizens fully about existing threats? What should happen if leaders from various states who are allies have gaping differences about the importance of threats? No simple formula seems to suffice in determining which threats are the most significant. This confusion culminates in the ways targets choose to respond to threats. Because threat responses deal with what might happen in the future, they never rest on the kind of rock-solid foundation that undergirds responses to proven ongoing misconduct, and, as a result, subjective perceptual predispositions often enter the picture.7 Many targets do not link their threat responses tightly to their threat assessment. Faced with outside dangers, some targets undertake minor cosmetic countermeasures—such as increasing security checks at airports—that do not really address underlying tensions, hoping somehow the threats will just go away. Other targets spend a lot of time, effort, and money floundering about in implementing different

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strategies of threat management that have little or no positive payoff—such as indiscriminately increasing defense expenditures—with the only sense of satisfaction being that at least they tried really hard. Some targets seem to undertake threat responses simply as symbolic measures, full of hope that onlookers will be impressed but at the same time devoid of any real expectation that anything will change for the better. Overall, most targets just rely on the same ineffective standard operating procedures used in the past (such as the application of overwhelming military force) to confront threat, regardless of changes in current circumstances. For a wide variety of reasons, serious reconsideration of either threat assessment or threat management strategies usually faces strong resistance. Despite the significant transformation and diversification of post–Cold War foreign threats, presenting a distinctive set of challenges surrounding new ominous developments, policy makers have unfortunately persisted in carrying over outmoded Cold War concepts of threat and ways of addressing incoming dangers. As a result, heated controversy both within and among threat targets has surrounded how leaders identify foreign dangers, prioritize them, and respond to them. Widespread sentiment persists that these decisions are quite arbitrary, and the absence of unambiguous successes—in the eyes of both domestic and foreign onlookers—has not helped to dispel this worry. Moreover, international relations scholars have not refined existing theory concerning the broad range of incoming threats in a manner tuned to the distinctive tensions embedded in the post–Cold War security context. Despite significant advances in understanding other key dimensions of security, international threat theory has remained relatively stagnant for the past 30 years, as if past insights were sufficient to explain patterns in the current global setting. Indeed, given how fundamental threat is to national security, and how significantly the global security setting has transformed, it is remarkable that it has not recently received the critical conceptual scrutiny it so richly deserves. A thorough review of recent literature on global threat reveals a surprising paucity of analysis that looks at the overarching conceptual controversies surrounding post–Cold War threat. Although there has been some conceptual movement from emphasizing the strict tenets of realism in the direction of postmodern or critical security studies, from focusing on an opposing power to considering rogue states and terrorist groups, and from concentrating on traditional instability to addressing asymmetrical fears, none of these changes represent a fundamental conceptual shift of the ways in which threat is assessed or managed. In particular, post-9/11 scholarly discussions have largely focused on analyzing specific perils emerging from rogue states and terrorist groups involving Islamic extremists rather than raising more fundamental questions about the changing analytical challenges posed by a significantly transformed global security environment. The underlying threat posed by the 9/11 attacks has only rarely been placed within a broader interpretive threat context to facilitate the formulation of strategies that would in the future not only forestall this particular type of terrorist disruption but also aid with the early detection and effective treatment of other dangers as well. As was the case also with the Pearl Harbor attack, unexpected devastating

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foreign-initiated trauma can lead to a narrowing of security concerns rather than a more fundamental reconsideration of the entire framework for analysis. UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION OF THIS BOOK The principal thrust of this book is to address the critical conceptual questions surrounding incoming global threat. Why has recognizing threat become so much more difficult after the Cold War ended? What are the main deficiencies in how global threat is currently assessed, and why is vast disagreement evident over this appraisal? What explains the failure of current global threat management strategies, and what are the obstacles to improvement? When are ongoing misassessment and mismanagement of global threat most deadly? What could be done to change this unfortunate predicament, and when are solutions hardest to pursue? This book embeds the answers to these questions deeply within the broader security context. This book claims that, because existing techniques have failed to keep pace with the changing global security environment, target-centered threat assessment and management are far more effective than current best practices in coping with post–Cold War and post-9/11 dangers. The book’s purpose is to provide a fresh perspective on the causes, consequences, and cures surrounding today’s most pressing global security predicament. Its primary contentions include that (1) there is a need to integrate conceptually all forms of incoming global threats—state and nonstate, intentional and unintentional, human initiated and nature initiated, local and global, and narrowly focused and broadly focused; (2) there is a need to move from the current emphasis on threat initiator capabilities and intentions to this book’s innovative targetcentered alternative threat-assessment approach; and (3) there is a need to consider several viable target-centered policy ideas for managing incoming threat—changing the general threat response orientation and improving counterthreat policies— accompanied by strategic transformation. This book explains the changing challenges posed by post–Cold War threat and presents ways to improve how to evaluate and cope with that threat. Specifically, it addresses how threats have changed since the end of the Cold War, how existing threat assessment and management techniques have failed to keep up with the times, and how its novel target-centric approach to threat assessment and management is more useful in coping with current foreign dangers than current ‘‘best practices.’’ In the end, it provides a fresh perspective on the causes, consequences, and cures surrounding today’s most pressing global security predicament. The book is unique in several ways. First, it presents the first conceptual analysis comprehensively analyzing incoming global threat (with key elements depicted in a set of integrative figures); in contrast, most threat studies just examine particular cases or only limited conceptual dimensions. Second, it integrates in its analysis for the first time all forms of incoming global threats—state and nonstate, intentional and unintentional, human-initiated and nature-initiated, local and global, and narrowly focused and broadly focused. Third, it provides an overarching analysis of the distinctive post–Cold War global threat predicament within today’s anarchic

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global security setting, unlike many threat studies that focus more on the Cold War or on only one kind of post–Cold War threat. Fourth, it explores both assessing and managing global threat (and their interrelationship), whereas most studies look only at one of the two. Fifth, it demystifies global threat assessment and systematically critiques the ways in which global threat is currently evaluated; in contrast, many studies propose new modes of threat assessment without probing deeply into exactly what is wrong with the current system. Sixth, it develops an innovative target-centered alternative threat assessment approach, whereas most global threat assessment focuses on the threat initiator; although no individual element of this approach represents a revolutionary breakthrough, this is the first time that an inclusive target-centered set of elements has served as a means of assessing global threat. Seventh, it pays special attention to post-9/11 threat trends and comparatively chronicles for the first time a set of post-9/11 actualized threats representing the full range of today’s global dangers; in contrast, most studies consider post-9/11 changes as an afterthought or an aberration, or alternatively emphasize only one post-9/11 threat—such as terrorism—and downplay others. Eighth, it proposes integrated target-centered recommendations for managing global threat, ones that deviate significantly from currently applied approaches and that address the complete scope of modern peril.

FOCUS OF THIS BOOK In light of transformation in the global security environment, the focus of this book is to present a conceptual analysis that provides an alternative approach for assessing global threat—one that serves to improve recognition of the full set of ongoing dangers and prioritization of the most severe dangers—and for managing these global perils. Although this analysis is quite comprehensive and multifaceted, it cannot cover every single dimension of global threat; to attempt doing so would be a Herculean task (one that no single work has ever accomplished). So despite its determination to undertake a broad conceptual investigation of global threat, this book makes key discriminating choices about what to emphasize in its analysis. Emphasis on Defensive Threat Orientation The notion of threat encompasses two distinct facets, one offensive and one defensive. The first involves intent to harm another, a warning that punishment may result if demands are not met; and the second involves anticipation of incoming harm,8 with the prospect of the ‘‘loss of something of value, such as territory and population, restriction or loss of sovereignty, economic assets, or political constitution.’’9 These two functions are often institutionally separated: within the United States, for example, the Department of Defense deals defensively with incoming threats from abroad, whereas the White House, the National Security Council, and the Department of State issue offensive threats to foreign targets.

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This book covers only the defensive facet, dealing with incoming rather than outgoing threat. Justifying this choice is that it appears that the greatest deficiencies in the recent past, and the greatest potential for global calamity for the foreseeable future, have been in the areas of recognizing, prioritizing, and responding to foreign threat. Moreover, the potential seems to be growing for the threat-counterthreat cycle spiraling out of control; because so many countries today perceive themselves as simply undertaking defensive moves to respond to threats from others, it seems vital to shed new light on this defensive threat orientation. This defensive orientation, which links directly to this book’s target-centered focus, has the normative benefit of being consistent with enlightened underlying values of global stability and peace. Emphasis on Foreign Threat Furthermore, threat can emerge both internally and externally, from within one’s own domestic population and from foreign sources. Both kinds of threat are important, and Third World states have found in recent decades that their primary sources of threat are internal rather than international.10 As with defensive and offensive threats, many societies institutionally divide responsibilities for tracking domestic and foreign threats—in the United States, for instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks domestic sources of disruption, while the Central Intelligence Agency tracks foreign sources of disruption. Nonetheless, this book emphasizes foreign threat and downplays exclusively homegrown domestic threat. The rationale for this decision is that the greatest security fears surround outside peril, and foreign threats are the ones that usually pose the most disruptive challenges to core values with the greatest probability and magnitude of damage. However, because in today’s world external and internal threats are increasingly interconnected, and the lines between the two are increasingly blurred, this analysis explicitly includes transnational threats integrating both internal and external instigators, threats posed by disruptive groups within a given society sponsored or trained by outsiders, threats within one area that have spillover effects on another area, and threats from instigating groups with no identifiable home base. Foreign threats need not be substantiated to be labeled as such. Emphasis on Post–Cold War Threat to the West Because this book’s approach is conceptual, when analyzing global threat the insights and propositions presented are not intrinsically limited to any particular region or time period. Indeed, one of the benefits of an overarching analysis of incoming threat is to uncover parallels that exist between dangers today and those in the past and between perils experienced in one country and those in another. The threat assessment and the threat management recommendations are neither universal nor inherently limited. However, one cost associated with such a broad discussion is the unavailability of differentiated special insights for any type of threat target in the contemporary

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security environment. As a result, in its principal thrust and especially in exemplifying the tendencies associated with global threat, this book does have both a temporal and spatial tilt. As to time period, the emphasis is on post–Cold War threat—particularly on pressing dangers since the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, an event that had a broad ripple effect on security thinking. The justification for focusing on recent predicaments is to show the relevance of explanatory analysis and policy recommendations to today’s distinctive global security dangers. As to geographical area, the emphasis is on the West, for it perceives itself as being the primary global target of violent threat, is uncertain about how to assess and prioritize it, and despite its power is having great difficulty successfully responding to it. Emphasis on Including Both Intended and Unintended Threat This book’s notion of threat explicitly encompasses both conventional intentional dangers—such as the imminent prospect of a military attack—and unconventional unintentional dangers—such as natural disasters (including global warming), pandemic diseases, and undesired waves of mass migration. Once again, this choice flies in the face of customary security institution arrangements in most countries, where defense ministries are typically responsible only for traditional intentional dangers (such as military invasion), with nontraditional dangers assigned elsewhere. The justification for this approach is a belief that inclusive consideration of foreign dangers—encompassing both orthodox and unorthodox threat sources—is crucial to understand and manage the current global security environment. In some cases, traditional instigators of violent disruption may piggyback onto nontraditional dangers by taking advantage of the ensuing chaos. In other circumstances, it is difficult to differentiate sharply between intentional and unintentional threat: for example, if a hostile state is building a nuclear weapons facility ostensibly for use against a particular target and, in the construction process, an accident occurs in which toxic nuclear fallout is about to contaminate the target society, is that a case of intentional or unintentional threat? Even if unintended dangers are incorporated, it might seem that evaluating and responding to these threats ought to differ markedly from intentional dangers. Many security scholars and policy makers doggedly insist that the two types of threats be completely separated, subjected to very different and disconnected modes of assessment and management. In contrast, this book points to the need for a single integrated threat assessment and management system—both analytically and institutionally—in which foreign threats of all stripes can be compared to each other within the same conceptual security context. The rationale for this integration is the need for coherent prioritization of dangers, for it would be difficult to determine coherently the allocation of defense resources to monitor and address differing kinds of dangers that pose the greatest overall potential for harming a particular society. From the victims’ standpoint, it may make little difference if their loved ones or possessions are threatened with destruction emanating from a foreign military attack or a natural disaster—they want full protection from harm in either case.

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Emphasis on Societally Disruptive Threat In purposely incorporating unorthodox unintentional threats, one might well question what this new approach’s limit is on the type of threat covered. Why not include as well other forms of danger that have produced significant loss of life, such as crime, auto accidents, bathtub drownings, suicides, and the like? Influencing the answer to this question is what one considers important in making threat significant from a global standpoint—is that a function of the potential for human deaths and injuries, pain, and suffering among the mass population, or something else? What kinds of threatened disruptions have the direct potential to have broad system-wide repercussions? In this book, the key determinant of the type of dangers covered (within the given emphasis on foreign incoming threat) is the potential embedded to have dire disruptive impacts not only on individuals and groups within the mass population, but also on stability of governments in affected states or on the functioning of authority structures in nonstate targets. Dangers such as crime, auto accidents, bathtub drownings, and suicides may trigger widespread societal damage, but do not generally cause system-wide instability. In contrast, even a narrow state security focus would reveal that undesired mass migration, pandemic disease, nuclear accidents, and natural disasters can have—despite lacking customary intentionality or military capabilities—a direct debilitating impact on central societal institutions. Although this disruptive impact may be only temporary, it could be sufficient to interfere with the smooth functioning of the governing infrastructure and ultimately to have an impact on the international system as a whole. ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK In response to the major global security challenge presented in this chapter, this analysis begins by discussing in Chapters 2 and 3 the distinctiveness of post–Cold War threat and of the nature of enemies prevalent in today’s world. The discussion of post–Cold War threat includes changes in threat sources, threat styles, threat targets, international system context of threat, and threat deterrence, with special attention paid to changes wrought by the 9/11 terrorist attack. The discussion of enemies incorporates the origins of the enemy image, resistance of the enemy image to change, degrees of intolerance of enemies, enemy classification systems, costs and benefits of focusing on enemies, and political manipulation of enemy images. Afterward, Chapter 4 considers prevailing threat analysis deficiencies—those surrounding threat identification, coverage, and assessment. Included in this discussion are the roots and nature of policy makers’ threat misperception and their difficulties in definitively isolating threat sources, the mismatch between what policy makers emphasize and what constitutes the actual pattern of recent foreign threat, and policy making tendencies to utilize overly simple, narrow, and subjective means to perform threat assessment. To rectify these problems, Chapter 5 proposes an alternative target-centered conceptual approach for recognizing and prioritizing threat that aims

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to enhance the analytical coherence and explanatory value of threat assessment: this approach specifically incorporates the importance of risked assets within threat targets, the capacity of risk sources to disrupt threat targets, the threat targets’ risk anticipation and preparation, the likelihood of risks occurring within threat targets, and the impacts of actualized risks on threat targets. Illustrating this approach’s value in Chapter 6 are four post-9/11 cases—the weapons of mass destruction and terrorism threat linked to the 2003 Iraq War, the natural calamity threat linked to the 2004 tsunami disaster, the terrorist threat linked to the 2005 London Transport bombings, and the undesired mass population threat linked to the 2006 American illegal immigration tensions. The last two chapters conclude this effort by providing some target-centered ideas about how to cope better with incoming threat. Chapter 7 suggests ways to refine the threat-related decision process, including divorcing threat assessment from emotional fear and hatred, refocusing intelligence to stimulate threat awareness, and utilizing multiple independent threat assessments. Chapter 8 proposes target-centered policy recommendations for managing global threat: (1) for changing the threat response orientation, it suggests making threat management a function of threat assessment, acknowledging past threat management deficiencies, and analyzing trade-offs among threat management approaches; (2) for improving counterthreat policies, it suggests developing overarching counterthreat doctrine, lowering mutual hostility among enemies, preventing escalating threat-counterthreat cycles, promoting threatsensitive leadership and local accountability, and enhancing defense resources for unorthodox disruptions; and (3) for addressing the target-centered threat assessment elements, it suggests a series of more specific remedial policies. The chapter also identifies the conditions under which mismanagement and misassessment of threat are most deadly and under which incoming threat is most difficult to manage. Finally, the conclusion calls for strategic transformation in ways intelligence analysts and policy makers approach foreign threat, moving away from outmoded standard operating procedures toward a proactive approach combining openness and agility.

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Distinctiveness of Post–Cold War Threat Post–Cold War threat has occurred within a distinctive—though by no means historically unique—anarchic global security setting. More complex and challenging than the simple bipolar ‘‘us-versus-them’’ Cold War environment, this setting has made it more difficult to assess enemies (especially transnational nonstate foes) compared to the Cold War Soviets1 and to evaluate and respond to global threat. This chapter analyzes the most significant transformations in the global threat environment between the Cold War and the post–Cold War period, highlighted in Figure 2.1, including changes in threat sources, threat styles, threat targets, international system context of threat, and threat deterrence, with special attention paid to changes wrought by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The purpose of this analysis is to isolate exactly in what ways the post–Cold War security setting calls for different modes of threat assessment and management. CHANGES IN THREAT SOURCES During the post–Cold War era, international coercion has gone well beyond formal threats of direct military attack from states and often has taken on the guise of far more subtle and varied modes of ‘‘informal penetration’’2 by nonstate groups. Emerging threats have been typically covert, dispersed, decentralized, adaptable, and fluid, with threat sources relatively difficult to identify, monitor, target, contain, and destroy, and with these sources’ past actions not necessarily a sound guide to their future behavior. This pattern reflects ‘‘the ‘de-massification’ of threats in the world,’’ where ‘‘a single giant threat of war. . .is replaced by a multitude of ‘niche threats.’’’3 As this trend spreads, ‘‘war will not be waged by armies but by groups we today call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits, and robbers’’:4 ‘‘their organizations are likely to be constructed on charismatic lines rather than institutional ones,’’5 ‘‘to be motivated less by ‘professionalism’ than by fanatical, ideologically-based, loyalties,’’6 and to involve patient and politically astute insurgent, guerrilla, or terrorist groups utilizing elaborate political, economic, social, and military communications networks to demoralize and undermine superior military power.7 Primary Threat Instigators Three distinct international instigators are responsible for much of the threat to the West in today’s world—rogue states, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations.

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Cold War Threat

Post–Cold War Threat

THREAT SOURCES Rival Superpower (Soviet Union) Rogue States and Transnational Terrorists and Criminals Opposing Bipolar Bloc Global Warming, Natural Disasters, Disease, and Illegal Migrants THREAT STYLES Usually Static, Overt, and Symmetrical Usually Dispersed, Fluid, and Asymmetric Major Threat Sources Self-Evident Covert Deadly Transfers of Illicit Commodities THREAT TARGETS Antagonistic Governments across States Innocent People and Critical Infrastructure across Societies Those with Contrasting Political-Economic Those with Contrasting Cultural-Religious Beliefs Beliefs INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM CONTEXT OF THREAT Predictable Dual Hierarchy Unpredictable Open Anarchy National Sovereignty Largely Intact National Sovereignty Overshadowed by Globalization THREAT DETERRENCE Mutual Assured Destruction Generally Threat of Counterforce Usually Ineffective Effective Nuclear Weapons Stalemate Stable Weapons Stalemate Nonexistent Figure 2.1 Cold War versus Post–Cold War Threat

Rogue states, commonly identified as countries that shun civil participation in the international community, such as Iran and North Korea, seek to ignore any existing rules, to expand their own power, and to undermine the influence of the major powers; the threat from these states, with their military bullying and support for antigovernment groups, is increasing.8 Terrorist groups, composed of desperate forces arrayed across national boundaries alienated from the dominant system, seek to achieve a variety of disruptive political ends through violence and threats of violence, and these groups appear to have a bright future, as their destructive potential increases due to the increased availability of weaponry and to their expanding appeal to more diverse disaffected parties who within their own societies face the absence of constructive opportunities and frustration in achieving progressive goals.9 Transnational criminal organizations, coordinated more than ever as unified forces operating across states and refusing to follow existing regulations, seek illegal economic gain through a variety of coercive and salacious business activities; transnational organized crime is growing rapidly and represents a global phenomenon that is penetrating political institutions, undermining legitimate economic growth, threatening democracy and the rule of law, and contributing to the post-Soviet problem of the eruption of small, regionally contained, ethnic violence.10

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The explanation for the rise of these unruly instigators is that each cannot fit into prevailing society or operate under its rules, becomes angry and frustrated, and, rather than separating from the situation, undertakes disruptive activities that wreak global havoc. Recognizing the dominance of a system that they reject, and lacking legitimate means to cause significant change, they perceive the need to go outside the bounds of civilized behavior and utilize every tool at their disposal—including weapons of mass destruction when available—to achieve their ends. Given the world’s open structure, each can continue and even expand these activities due to the low-profile nature of the unacceptable behavior or to the lack of effective international sanctions associated with global anarchy. Either way a kind of immunity from prosecution prevails, serving to increase both threat from these sources and fear among potential threat targets. Unorthodox Threat Sources Despite the prominence of these three perpetrators, today’s incoming threat has broader roots, as significant dangers may emerge from accidents or natural calamities as well as from intentional acts to cause harm. Since the Cold War ended, concerns have risen about a type of danger—sometimes termed ‘‘threats without threateners’’—lacking intentional initiation by hostile parties and not usually covered by either conventional threat theory or defense policy analysis: If they are a threat, the threat results from the cumulative effects of actions taken for other reasons, not from an intent that is purposive and hostile. . ..Those who burn the Amazon rain forests or try to migrate here or who spread pandemics here, or even those who traffic drugs to the United States, do not necessarily wish American harm; they simply want to survive or get rich. Their self-interest becomes a threat to us.11

This threat cluster differs from traditional perils in that it tends not to be acute and short-term, zero-sum, reversible, susceptible to unilateral responses, controllable under national government jurisdiction, unity-promoting, or inexpensive.12 Aside from undesired mass migration waves—including illegal human trafficking operations run by transnational criminal organizations—and devastating nuclear accidents (such as the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster), much of this emerging threat originates not from states or even humans, but rather from natural phenomena.13 Examples of these nontraditional dangers include pandemic diseases such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), a contagious respiratory illness that in November 2002 appeared in southern China and spread to 32 countries and killed 800 people before being contained in July 2003; and natural cataclysmic disasters such as hurricanes, volcanoes, floods, and earthquakes. Natural disasters and infectious diseases have recently killed far more people than civil strife,14 as evidenced by comparing after the Cold War the staggering human devastation from floods and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) to the far smaller loss of life from domestic and international violence. While the frequency of natural disasters has remained relatively stable over the

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centuries, the toll of human death and property damage has dramatically increased,15 far outstripping the coping capacities of the local, national, and even global assistance efforts; during the 1990s, ironically designated by the United Nations as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Prevention, the world witnessed the ‘‘most costly spate of storms, floods, and fires in history.’’16 Similarly, with respect to infectious diseases, since the early 1980s ‘‘both the medical establishment and the general public were shocked to discover that the microbial adaptation was outstripping the ability of the scientific community to remedial treatments,’’ with old diseases (such as tuberculosis) resurfacing recently in more drug-resistant forms.17 Receiving special attention of late has been global warming, which may cause devastation in the world’s food crops, extinction of many plant and animal species, intensification of hurricanes and droughts, human illness or death from heat stress, global proliferation of tropical disease, and severe flooding in coastal cities and low-lying islands. Besides environmental, energy, and economic impacts, a group of retired American generals and admirals recently warned that global warming ‘‘presents significant national security challenges to the United States’’18 and is a ‘‘threat multiplier’’ that intensifies instability around the world by worsening water shortages, food insecurity, disease, and flooding that lead to forced migration; these concerns are so great that the United States Congress is currently considering a bipartisan bill requiring a National Intelligence Estimate by all federal intelligence agencies to assess the security threats posed by global climate change.19 The resulting chaos ‘‘can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and the growth of terrorism,’’ with the possibility that ‘‘global warming’s impacts on natural resources and climate systems may create the fiercest battle our world has ever seen.’’20 Even with the massive damage generated and its the destabilizing impact on governments as well as mass populations, unorthodox catastrophes—unsanctioned mass illegal migration, nuclear accidents, global warming, and pandemic disease—tend to be more neglected by the security establishment compared to orthodox humaninitiated threats.21 This widespread tendency to attend most to traditional threat sources, especially military invasion from hostile states, reflects a deep-seated reluctance to grapple with the new set of dangers that do not involve an identifiable enemy and are far more difficult to address. CHANGES IN THREAT STYLES In place of superpower rivalry, a variety of ‘‘lesser’’ threats have emerged after the Cold War, including terrorism, extremist Islamic fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation, biological and chemical weapons stockpiles, renewed nationalist self-assertion among some newly industrial societies, and disintegration of some developing states into warring tribal factions.22 Overall, global security threats are ‘‘more varied in nature, more numerous in terms of the countries able to project them, above all more capable of being delivered from one side of the globe to another, than at any time in history.’’23 These changes in threat styles have so far thwarted any centralized and coherent monitoring of dangers.

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Asymmetric Threat The West now confronts asymmetric threat on a regular basis, involving the threat of ‘‘violent action undertaken by the ‘have-nots’ against the ‘haves’ whereby the havenots, be they state or sub-state actors, seek to generate profound effects . . .by employing their own specific relative advantages against the vulnerabilities of much stronger opponents.’’24 With new constantly evolving tactics and a threat style that seems endless, obtuse, and nearly impossible to counter, the possibilities for spread of this kind of unruly behavior appear to be limitless. Many enemies of the West today ‘‘make up for their lack of raw power in their capacity to fight smart—and sometimes to avoid fighting at all, preferring corruption and co-optation to confrontation and conflict’’; these foes are often network based, transnational, and highly flexible and adaptable, able to learn from their mistakes, to embed themselves undetectably in key political, social, and financial institutions, and to regenerate resiliently after setbacks.25 Buoyed by the apparent successes of much smaller forces with staunch commitment to their causes against the West’s vastly superior weapons technology, the credibility of this modern threat is extremely high, and the results are often lethal. Any military power advantage the West has over an individual foe may be ‘‘somewhat nullified by the fact that the powerful armed forces of the Western liberal democracies are being used more than ever before on expeditionary operations’’ around the world.26 Most enemies of the United States could not win in a direct, conventional military confrontation, due to its overwhelming superiority, so they identify key weaknesses in its military capabilities, and—being innovative and resourceful—adopt unconventional techniques that exploit areas where it is underprepared. For example, insurgents, knowing that the West is reluctant to harm innocent civilians, often attempt to blend in with locals and thwart counterinsurgency operations. While Western states ‘‘today are more hamstrung by the laws of war than they ever were,’’ ‘‘not only are many asymmetric adversaries unrestrained in their use of violence, there is actually a great incentive for them to use or threaten to use violence in a different, illegal way that stands outside of the norms of accepted behavior.’’27

Deadly Transfers Along with posing asymmetric threat, rogue states, terrorist groups, and transnational criminal organizations engage in ominous covert activities that often go unnoticed by conventional threat analysis. These ‘‘deadly transfers’’28 include clandestine conventional arms, illicit psychoactive drugs, illegal human migrants (including the most demeaning forms of human trafficking), unsanctioned hazardous materials (including both toxic waste and nuclear materials), lethal infectious diseases (including spreading unintentionally deadly microbes and intentionally lethal biological agents), and incapacitating ‘‘cyber-warfare’’ information disruptions. Rogue states, terrorist groups, and transnational criminal organizations often work together in undertaking nefarious activities,29 and the various deadly transfers are often tightly

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intertwined, making it difficult for country-specific or transfer-specific Western sanctions to prevent these ominous flows from moving freely without harassment around the world. Exemplifying the cross-instigator coordination, rogue states are often major state sponsors of terrorism, transnational criminal organizations regularly sell weapons to terrorist groups, and many terrorists are funded through illegal enterprises such as narcotics, extortion, and kidnapping.30 Illustrating the crosstransfer coordination, profits made from the sale of illicit drugs have often fueled the purchase of covert arms and facilitated the cross-national flow of illegal migrants.31 Together these ominous transnational flows pose huge threats to Western states in a manner they find difficult to control. In many ways, these unruly forces of fragmentation appear to be very astute in assessing the global security environment. They harbor no illusions that they are functioning in an orderly, civilized setting and reasonably assume that many others— including seemingly respectable and legitimate parties—will choose to collude with them for private gain or ignore these disruptive parties’ behavior as long as it does not have a direct negative impact on the security interests of regimes turning a blind eye to this activity. Disruptive forces have been quick to adjust to the new tools now at their disposal and seem more at home in the current security environment than they were during the Cold War. Illustrating their savvy and sophisticated approach is the reality that ‘‘today’s terrorist masterminds know that the main benefits of attacks on critical infrastructure is not the immediate damage they inflict, but the collateral consequences of eroding the public’s trust in services on which it depends.’’32 While the unruly players are not themselves responsible for the creation of global anarchy, they appear to be cleverer in exploiting it than existing authority structures are in managing it. Failed State and Advanced Technology Facilitators The effectiveness of these new styles of threat is enhanced by the growing number of failing states. During the Cold War, substantial aid and occasionally coercive intervention from a superpower through an established patron-client relationship often kept shaky regimes in power and gave them some level of control over their societies; but after the Cold War ended, this aid has often dried up and this intervention has become spottier, and as a result subnational and transnational violent insurgent movements have felt freer to operate, causing more fragile governments to wilt under the pressure when left to their own devices. Collapsing, imploding, or ‘‘black hole’’ states, where ‘‘central authority has largely disintegrated in the face of local warlordism, ethnic groups, crime syndicates, or terrorist groups’’ can suck in outsiders to back rival factions in a civil war and export unwanted refugees.33 The growing global rich-poor gap34 can exacerbate these problems. In addition, failed states can provide a safe haven for destabilizing elements35 such as criminals and terrorists and, through their governments’ declining capacity to meet basic human needs and enforce the rule of law, can serve as fertile training ground for operatives eager to engage in globally disruptive activities.36 Due to the chaos when weak states are unable to control

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their territory or provide for their people, the proliferation of failed states poses an indirect threat to the West. The wide availability of advanced technologies also facilitates the expansion and success of the new styles of threat: The time when a few states had monopolies over the most dangerous technologies has been over for many years. Moreover, our adversaries have more access to acquire and more opportunities to deliver such weapons than in the past. Technologies, often dualuse, move freely in our globalized economy, as do the scientific personnel who design them. So it is more difficult for us to track efforts to acquire those components and production technologies that are so widely available. The potential dangers of proliferation are so grave that we must do everything possible to discover and disrupt attempts by those who seek to acquire materials and weapons.37

The threat of weapons of mass destruction disseminating to these unruly threat sources is perhaps the greatest concern of Western security organizations—indeed, many observers believe that the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons ‘‘is the most serious threat to the national security of the United States and other nations.’’38 In addition, the ready availability of the Internet ‘‘as a tool of tactical communication and strategic propaganda’’ has aided threat sources considerably in their nefarious ambitions:39 through such technology the power of the image can be used not only to undermine the strong, but also to encourage the weak; the effects of any small attack carried out by asymmetric players can be leveraged into something with far greater propaganda impact through the help of media outlets, notably Internet sites.40

The current global security setting has created a more even playing field in terms of access to the instruments of power and influence, providing a direct advantage to disruptive forces that otherwise would have a lot more difficulty obtaining or utilizing them and thus would be relegated to far less disruptive international operations. CHANGES IN THREAT TARGETS During the Cold War, the traditional threat target was the opposing government and its political ideology, and carrying out threats involved a top-down approach in which a state regime was usually the first target of attack. In this mode, mass populations were mostly spectators to foreign dangers even when a threat was actually carried out. In contrast, after the Cold War, the target pattern shifted significantly: contemporary security threats often ‘‘do not target states, but societies and individuals,’’41 with innocent civilians usually those who suffer the bulk of the dire consequences from actualized threat. When global threat is carried out and crossnational violence occurs, these bystanders usually bear the brunt of deaths and injuries, with even uniformed soldiers playing a much more peripheral role in the carnage than in the past.

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Undermining Public Confidence and Civilized Infrastructure Thanks in part to improved communication and transportation technology, recent threats have often been more over the ‘‘hearts and minds’’ of the people rather than over who is in power or what kind of territory one can acquire. Instead of coercively attempting to overthrow a head of state, enemies have been prone to undertake activities to reduce public confidence in its political leadership or to subvert the ability of political leaders to govern effectively. With the spread of democracy increasing the casualty sensitivity among Western states, this change in primary threat targets has ironically made the fear associated with formally or informally issued threats more profound and widespread. In contrast to Cold War threats reflecting political-ideological splits, in focusing on the mass population post–Cold War threat sources select targets based more on cultural-religious divides, involving a mind-set even more divergent from traditional Western thought than was Soviet communism. The end of restraining influence by the superpower blocs during the Cold War opened up the opportunity for ethnic antagonisms that had simmered for centuries once again to erupt into open violent conflict. The West frequently identifies those holding extreme fanatical religious views as especially dangerous, but does not understand these threat sources or know how effectively to contain, thwart, or neutralize them. Demographic shifts have caused those populations and countries with belief systems most different from the West to be growing the fastest. This kind of destabilizing threat is particularly resistant to compromise and outside intervention and thus poses a major challenge for threat assessment and management. Rogue states target advanced industrial societies—the so-called ‘‘civilized’’ states— and indirectly the integrity of the entire international system. Terrorist groups also choose developed states as their primary targets, where the shock value of their politically motivated violence is highest, as well as multinational corporations that symbolize the oppressive status quo power structure. Both rogue states and terrorist groups support and inflame local insurgent groups seeking to disrupt government stability. Transnational criminal organizations, operating under the radar, are more indiscriminate in their choice of targets and go anywhere in the world where underhanded profit can be made. These crime syndicates attempt to seduce influential government officials and wealthy corporate executives and prey on vulnerable volatile groups seeking quick escape from unfortunate situations (such as urban gangs, drug addicts, and undocumented aliens). Thus targets tend to be either those who represent the prevailing establishment and its norms or who are disenfranchised elements of society and are highly vulnerable to the seductive appeal of the unruly players. In particular, critical elements of societal infrastructure are emerging as threat targets. In many threat targets, rendering ineffective energy grids, food or water supplies, means of communication or transportation, or the stock market or banking system has the potential to be far more devastating than just assassinating a political leader: ‘‘social and economic activities depend more and more on large-scale services, many of the industries providing these services face increasing vulnerability to

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disasters, and the very competitive pressures that give rise to higher risks also reduce incentives for firms to invest in measures that mitigate those risks.’’42 An alarmist 1995 Washington Post article warned of the threat of an ‘‘electronic Pearl Harbor’’ emanating from the spread of information disruption capabilities, where ‘‘if the civilian computers stopped working, America’s armed forces couldn’t eat, talk, move or shoot,’’ with ‘‘no ability to protect themselves from cyberattacks and no legal or political authority to protect commercial phone lines, the electric power grid and vast databases against hackers, saboteurs and terrorists.’’43 As early as 1996, the United States government recognized that cyberdisruption was at the core of this selection of nontraditional threat targets, calling for an interconnected ‘‘cybersystem’’ that would provide early warning and minimize damage of attacks on computers controlling the stock market, banking, utilities, air traffic, and other ‘‘critical infrastructure’’ information banks. 44 The random and sporadic nature of these information break-ins, along with their confidentiality, makes it difficult to estimate precisely the aggregate global frequency and impact of this ominous transnational activity. Increasing Vulnerability of Threat Targets Potential threat targets today appear to face a higher level of danger than during the Cold War. In particular, ‘‘the Western perception that the status quo can be maintained. . .by military means if need be, is not sustainable given the vulnerabilities of advanced wealthy states to paramilitary action and asymmetric warfare.’’45 The vulnerability is due to not only changes in threat sources, but also changes in threat targets: natural disasters, technological risks, and terrorism threats have always existed in one form or another; but society faces a new scale of these events today and . . .even more so tomorrow, because of increased aggregation of people and assets exposed to risks, along with the emergence of new forms of threat.46

So targets need urgently to become aware of this increased vulnerability and adjust to this change. Unlike the threat sources, threat targets in the West generally appear to have an inadequate understanding of the security setting in which they function. These targets express surprise and sometimes genuine shock when they end up being victims of unsanctioned behavior, even though an increasing number of those around them have been similarly victimized in the past. These targets are also astonished to see unruly instigators violating international norms and defying international agreements in behavior toward others. Advanced industrial society threat targets often operate in a ‘‘wishful-thinking’’ world in which they believe everyone else thinks as they do and accepts the virtues of their values. The establishment targets express anger and resentment that law-enforcement institutions, both national and international, are not capable of preventing the abuses or, at the very least, immediately tracking down and apprehending the perpetrators, even though the success

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record in this prevention and apprehension has historically been consistently quite low. The last thing many of these targets consider is the possibility that some of their own values and behavior—including their own rash unilateral actions that may fly in the face of widespread global opinion—may have inadvertently contributed to their selection as targets, making them at least partially accountable for their plight. So these targets cling at least initially (this may change over time) to an ideal notion of how everything should function, rejecting and refusing to adjust to the stark realities of the post–Cold War world. CHANGES IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM CONTEXT OF THREAT Considering international organization as a starting point for how the changing international system affects threat, the United Nations possesses the most comprehensive global scope in its legitimate purview to deal with international threat, but it lacks any semblance of enforcement capabilities (notwithstanding the largely symbolic UN peacekeeping forces) and constantly is thwarted by national sovereignty concerns. In the post–Cold War security setting, international organizations have been handicapped in being able to help contain global threat both by the growing diversity of global values and the growing ambiguity of international threat. Even the United Nations Security Council—the organ tasked with managing global threat—has been paralyzed by these changes. Clash of Anarchy, Sovereignty, and Globalization Much of the chaos in the global threat environment is due to the clash among the competing pressures of anarchy, sovereignty, and globalization. The state of anarchy reflects the absence of overarching common norms and common meaningful authority structures on the international level, fostering a kind of ‘‘every-state-for-itself ’’ mentality. The perpetuation of the notion of national sovereignty involves a continuing belief by states that they should be able to have complete jurisdiction over what goes on within their boundaries and that they should not have to undertake significant compromise in these state rights for the common good. Increasingly transnational and subnational groups—especially separatist and nationalist movements— want similar levels of autonomy over their own affairs, complicating jurisdictional issues tremendously. Globalization implies that, due to growing cross-linkages among states, each party’s actions will increasingly have international repercussions and that, as a result, it makes the most sense to approach issues on a broad multilateral basis. Globalization unwittingly aids the global spread of unsavory threats, highlighting Western states’ considerable vulnerability to disruption in the post–Cold War world: When markets quake in Indonesia or Mexico, they send tremors from Main Street to Wall Street. When political unrest racks Central America, southern California’s social services feel the aftershock. When our allies are struggling with economic recession, they

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are unwilling or unable to pull their weight on the global stage—leaving us to shoulder more of the burdens. When new democracies lack the means or experience to enforce their domestic laws, international criminals can set up shop—and stretch their tentacles beyond our doorstep.47

An open interdependent world magnifies the impact of any localized disruption and prevents states from selectively sanctioning certain types of dangerous cross-national activities. Major tensions develop when anarchy, sovereignty, and globalization collide in the post–Cold War setting. When globalized threats emerge, national sovereignty can create a stubborn refusal to confront them cooperatively, and the prevailing sense of anarchy creates a fatalistic expectation that efforts enacted jointly are doomed to failure. Sovereignty concerns can provoke an unwillingness to allow foreign officials to track down the perpetrators or to establish common punishments for threat sources no matter where they operate. As a result, threat sources can move across possible targets, finding the ones with the most distracted, inept, or corruptible authority structures in which to operate. These threat sources can then thrive and expand into effective international operations because their ability to overcome the rigidities of sovereignty take advantage of anarchy and mirror a kind of interdependent efficiency that may be far greater than that of most status-quo-supporting Western states. Post–Cold War Global Rules of the Game With the old Cold War rules largely gone, there appears to be little understanding of—or compliance to—a new set of rules. In the absence of a uniform and universal rule set that is consistently voiced and followed, each party is free to behave according to its own idiosyncratic premises. The West generally assumes its rules are universal and either projects in a misleading way its rule set onto others (interpreting others’ behavior in terms of its own rules) or attempts to impose directly its rule set onto others and force compliance. Unlike in the past systems, core powers do not seem to be able to set by themselves the rules of the game, at least in part due to their lack of widespread legitimacy in the global arena, a deficiency that can also increase their vulnerability to threat.48 The West tends to operate unrealistically as if a mix of military coercion, economic dependence, legal prohibition, and moral outrage will suffice to quell violations of its conception of the rules of the game. With major powers still clinging to a largely outmoded set of rules, weaker states are able to ignore them and nonstate groups can subvert them. The increasing popularity of moral relativism, with its premium placed on nonjudgmental multicultural patterns of diversity, can cause any discussion of establishing a more coherent set of rules of the game—especially by the West—to run the risk of comparison to the most virulent forms of cultural imperialism; to establish more universal rules in this way of thinking seems to be the equivalent of an antidemocratic squashing of each global party’s ability to experience independent empowerment by defining its own mode of behavior. For disenfranchised states, the very notion of rules of the game

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in today’s world is reminiscent of an era where they sacrificed autonomy in their foreign policy for what they perceived to be a quite arbitrary world order. Moreover, for many disadvantaged states and groups that seem permanently unable to be upwardly mobile in the global hierarchy, violating the rules of the game may be a primary means for escaping from a stifling and humiliating status quo, a system whose premises they feel powerless to influence.49 Those who do not want to play by the rules, including rogue states, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations, know that in today’s international system it is extremely difficult for major powers to exert effective pressure on them over the long haul to change their behavior, and indeed a significant component of these noncompliant parties’ status appears to derive from their ability to thwart in a flagrant way the major powers’ rules of the game and to get away with it without suffering devastating consequences. Thus it is actually useful to these unruly parties for the West to continue to portray its rules as universal so that their defiant power can be ever more visible to international observers. System-Level Threat Unpredictability Within such a global system fraught with frustration and misunderstanding, threat flourishes, but those who use it do not necessarily achieve desired ends. When an instigator issues a threat, a threat target may not completely comprehend the terms of the threat and may, therefore, unknowingly violate them and cause the threat to be carried out. Even after a danger is actualized, the target may not exhibit compliance in terms of the desired changes in behavior because of its perception that what is expected is ambiguous. Therefore unpredictability associates with today’s global threats. Specifically, ‘‘the problem is that demonstrable, quantifiable, and clear threats of global war are fewer; whereas fuzzy, fragmented, and less quantifiable—hence, less ‘visible’—threats are legion.’’50 This change demands adaptation by the intelligence community, which unfortunately has become ‘‘mired in the conceptual uncertainties of defining threats in post–Cold War world politics:’’ at the level of threat recognition, the end of the Cold War also meant a shift in intelligence’s stock and trade from puzzles or questions that could be answered definitively given the necessary information to mysteries or questions that cannot be answered with certainty no matter what information is received.51

Because the sources of modern threat are so multifaceted and dispersed, threat targets may remain uncertain about whether or not a threat will be carried out, and even after being carried out the primary purpose and exact origin of dangers may remain obscure—this is ‘‘an era of multiple but unpredictable threats to US and other Western interests.’’52 This threat ambiguity is more likely the smaller the number of powerful elites who know the enemy well, the lower the capacity to empathize with the adversary, and the fewer the communication channels among contending

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parties.53 Overall, the more ambiguous the threat, due to either contradictory or imprecise information, the more likely target leaders’ distorting perceptual predispositions will play a dominant role. A minimum level of uncertainty seems inevitable as threats interact with countermeasures,54 for it is commonplace for a response to threat to cause a major shift in the nature of the threat itself. Indeed, a certain level of subjectivity is inherent in all threat assessment since the process inescapably involves attempting to predict the future. Part of the uncertainty derives from difficulties in obtaining timely valid and reliable information about foreign dangers, as often data are insufficient to make useful predictions at any level of security classification;55 this information gap often seems insurmountable, for the uncertainty surrounding which incoming dangers are really important makes it extremely difficult to allocate intelligence resources in such a way as to obtain sufficient data on all major threats. CHANGES IN THREAT DETERRENCE As a result of changes in threat sources, threat style, threat targets, and the international system context, deterrence appears far less effective in responding to post–Cold War threat than it was in addressing Cold War dangers. After the Cold War, and especially in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the American government recognized a ‘‘profound transformation’’ in the global security setting, requiring it to move away from ‘‘deterrence of the enemy’s use of force, producing a grim strategy of mutual assured destruction,’’ because ‘‘traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents.’’56 Bilateral nuclear deterrence of a single state foe proved to be far easier than multilateral conventional deterrence of multiple state and nonstate foes possessing differing agendas: Tactically, success in our efforts to prevent attacks and control the spread of non-state actors like al Qaeda requires us to set aside policies traditionally used against our enemies. Deterrence will not work against the radical extremist core of terrorist networks. The United States cannot strike at their territory. They are elusive and hydra-headed, growing new branches even as we cut off others. They appear infinitely patient.57

Traditions such as proportionality of response ‘‘have little value when carrying out military operations against insurgents and terrorists.’’58 Causes of Deterrence Ineffectiveness Several explanations account for the recent decreased effectiveness of deterrence. Asymmetric threat is inherently difficult to deter due to instigators’ deep passions and willingness to die,59 and deterrent ‘‘retribution cannot be inflicted upon opponents who cannot be identified and located’’ and who have little to lose.60 More generally, classic deterrence faces difficulties because the West’s primary threat sources do

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not rely on the kinds of cost-benefit analysis that the West uses to define rationality and therefore do not spend time calculating that if they launch an attack the retaliation might be speedy and massive. More to the point, even if these unruly threat sources did perform this calculation and believed its implications, the results may not matter to them, and indeed paradoxically they might see the escalation of counterforce against them as an invitation to instigate a violent disruption, if only to demonstrate their imperviousness to any such restraining efforts. Functioning deterrence presumes a counterthreat that is credible to the threat source. Post–Cold War threat sources know well that the West will respond to their provocative violent acts, but they are not at all convinced that it can respond effectively. The ease and speed with which cross-cultural misperception, loss of control, and sizable arms transfers can occur in today’s international system serve to impede any significant movement toward a credible deterrent here. Consequences of Deterrence Ineffectiveness The consequences of deterrence’s declining utility are wide-ranging. First, in responding to incoming threat, threat targets would be unwise to rely exclusively on countermeasures that attempt to intimidate threat sources, for such intimidation would be exceedingly difficult. Second, attempting to acquire overwhelming force as a means to protect one’s regime, territory, citizens, and way of life may be futile, as possessing such capabilities would probably not restrain outside threat. Third, it would usually be erroneous to assume that successful countermeasures against one threat source would restrain other potential threat sources. In other words, the dismal post–Cold War record of deterrence, particularly regarding asymmetric threat, means that something beyond fear of reprisal ought to be used to deal with foreign dangers. The declining value of traditional deterrence in containing the new array of post– Cold War dangers is particularly troublesome for the United States, which has been used to employing counterthreats involving its superior military power as a primary means for the protection of its interests and maintaining international stability. Faced with a predicament in which accumulation of force does not readily achieve a deterrent payoff, the United States and its Western allies have floundered in attempting to discover new ways to translate their power into security against today’s elusive threats, which seep over national borders in ways that cannot be readily stopped through the application of military force. The West’s armed forces are ‘‘fundamentally flawed,’’ with some analysts arguing that ‘‘deterrence as a concept is useless for today’s challenges’’ because of the Western focus on conventional combat rather than more contemporary ‘‘savage’’ modes of confrontation.61 CHANGES IN THREAT WROUGHT BY THE 9/11 TERRORIST ATTACKS The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York and damaging the Pentagon in

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Washington, D.C., decisively altered Western threat perception. Armed only with box cutters, the terrorists destroyed four aircraft, killed almost 3,000 people, and caused direct damage estimated at $18 billion, bringing the most powerful state in the world to a halt for a few days.62 American citizens responded with uncertainty and fear,63 and a mix of shock, pride, and anger: they hung American flags everywhere, attended large prayer vigils, and listened approvingly to Toby Keith’s country song ‘‘The Angry American’’ promising swift and decisive retaliation. Many Americans (both in and out of government) turned from wishful thinking to worst-case thinking about dire national security dangers: prior to 9/11, within the United States ‘‘the political difficulties of persuading a complacent electorate that major changes would be required to keep the nation safe and secure were daunting’’;64 however, the ‘‘galvanizing moral electricity’’ from the terrorist attacks created at least temporarily a sense of unity of purpose against a threat that those on both sides of the political spectrum found to be heinous.65 President George W. Bush immediately announced that his top priority would be a war on terrorism, beginning with a drive to eliminate al-Qaeda (the organization responsible for the 9/11 attack), and stated specifically that the United States would target not just the terrorists, but also any foreign government supporting them. Fanning the flames of fear and hatred involved in this response was the consensus among the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security that al-Qaeda’s next strategic objective was to attack the United States even more shockingly with a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).66 More than any other type of threat, the potential emotional panic surrounding an imminent WMD attack is off the charts. High Threat Attentiveness As a result of the 9/11 attack, federal, local, and state government agencies elevated the priority of national security issues, particularly those protecting United States sovereign territory against foreign threat. President George W. Bush established in October 2001 the Office of Homeland Security in the White House to coordinate the work of over 40 federal agencies in defending the United States, and later in November 2002 authorized a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Alarmed about the free movement without detection of the 9/11 terrorists within the United States, in October 2001 the United States Congress passed the Patriot Act, expanding government police powers to snoop on citizens and reducing the rights of those suspected of terrorist activities. For Americans, identity checks proliferated, particularly during air travel where they encountered armed National Guard troops at many airports and armed federal marshals on many flights. Other advanced industrial societies to some degree quickly followed suit. In many ways, the 9/11 terrorist attacks have created an atmosphere where it seems as if no new security precaution or security expenditure to protect against threat could be too great. Few questions emerged about the cost-benefit value of each new step, and indeed after new safeguards were implemented there was little rigorous

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scrutiny or evaluation about whether or not each accomplished its designated objective or had any positive security payoff. It has appeared almost as if both the government and the mass public in the West have tacitly understood that many of these initiatives were simply symbolic, designed to show everyone the strong desire to increase protection without necessarily actually dramatically doing so. Unfortunately, the net result—by general consensus—has been that the United States today is far less secure than it should be.67 Low Security Expectations In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, uncertainty has surfaced especially within the United States about the exact nature of the minimal levels of required protection against threat: Everyone understands instinctively that we can’t do everything—100 percent security is impossible to achieve, especially in a nation like ours, which rightly places a premium on civil rights and civil liberties—and everyone agrees that for all we’ve already done, we need to do even more. But how much more? How much is enough? How little is too little? Exactly how secure are we? How much more secure do we need to be, or can we be? These are the key questions, yet no one inside or outside government seems to have the answer to them.68

Indeed, confusion has reigned about such central issues as how one would know the actual severity of the dangers posed to the American people, how one would come up with appropriate responses to such dangers, how one would determine whether or not efforts undertaken are sufficient to meet a challenge, when one would judge that such threat has been sufficiently contained, and most generally what one would look for to know whether or not security goals had been achieved. After the United States took defensive measures in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ‘‘the risk of further large-scale attacks on the U.S. mainland fell,’’ but ‘‘no one knows by how much’’;69 this indeterminate outcome has led to a widespread ‘‘better-safe-than-sorry’’ attitude about national security protection very much fitting the tendencies of worst-case analysis. For both Americans and many others living in the West, a new realization became common that emerging kinds of threat—against which governments could not provide secure protection—meant an inevitable acceptance of certain constant fears and sacrifice of certain civil liberties, recognizing as a result of the terrorist attacks that ‘‘the world has changed fundamentally and that there is a new security environment populated by smart enemies.’’70 Thus a major irony was evident in the post-9/11 security environment, involving more sacrifice for lower payoffs: as citizens in the West witnessed dramatically increased expenditure on security, they simultaneously had to deal with the reality that they could never realistically expect to feel truly safe. Indeed, the consistent tone of President George W. Bush’s most recent official assessments of American security from foreign threat is that great efforts are occurring, but

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goals are not yet achieved: ‘‘we have kept on the offensive against terror networks, leaving our enemy weakened, but not yet defeated,’’ and ‘‘we have focused the attention of the world on the proliferation of dangerous weapons—although great challenges in this area remain.’’71 The net result of this decidedly odd security predicament is that recently there has been a certain suspension—admittedly temporary—of the kinds of healthy skepticism and demands for ‘‘bang-for-the-buck’’ that usually accompany major new government security expenditures. Precisely because the threat represented by the 9/11 attacks was unanticipated, the public has been willing to operate on a sort of blind trust that virtually any counterterrorist step being undertaken would turn out to be helpful. Often when one suddenly becomes aware of one’s vulnerability to external disruption, a kind of ‘‘doing-anything-is-better-than-doing-nothing’’ mentality prevails even if responses are neither well thought out or ultimately effective to cope with threat. While emotionally understandable, this kind of desperate thinking cries out for more systematic ways to assess threat to guide responses to incoming dangers. CONCLUSION The changes in threat from the Cold War to the post–Cold War periods are thus quite profound. Threat sources are now more difficult to confront and reflect more unorthodox dangers, threat styles encompass the challenging combination of asymmetric commitment and deadly transfers, and threat targets face greater vulnerability and an undermining of public confidence in government protection capabilities. All these trends occur within an international system characterized by unpredictable dangers and clashing forces of anarchy, sovereignty, and globalization. Traditional deterrence policies have failed to eradicate threat, and in the wake of 9/11 the unstable combination of high threat attentiveness and low security expectations seems common in the West. The net effect of these changes in threat is to make it extremely difficult to orient one’s defense policies around a single unified and coherent notion of incoming dangers, pointing the way toward a more target-centered than initiatorcentered approach. The lack of preparation by Western states for these post–Cold War changes has been painfully evident through a long series of unsuccessful attempts to deal with the new kinds of dangers. Reflecting on this predicament rather quickly reveals the need to consider very different means of assessing and managing today’s incoming threats from those used during the Cold War. As a result, a recognition of the limitations of past strategies and an openness to alternative approaches seem very much in order.

3

The Nature of the Enemy Throughout history, the concept of the enemy has been as omnipresent as the concept of threat. Prior to chronicling the deficiencies in threat analysis due to failing to recognize profound differences in post–Cold War dangers, this chapter explores the origins of the enemy image, resistance of the enemy image to change, degrees of intolerance of enemies, enemy classification systems, costs and benefits of focusing on enemies, and political manipulation of enemy images. The purpose of this exploration is to understand more fully the dynamics of those involved in the most intense threat exchanges within the contemporary global security environment so as to highlight some of their dysfunctional dimensions and to highlight the need for change. Because of the difficulties in isolating enemies, this understanding is vital to explain the need to move away from initiator-focused toward targetcentered threat assessment and management. ORIGINS OF THE ENEMY IMAGE The notion of the enemy has very deep roots, going back to the idea of a nemesis in religion and folklore: identifying an outside counterforce promoting negative ends, against which one heroically struggles, has been across time and place a key element of societal identity. Such foes needed to be both powerful and clever to provide a worthy opponent, over which victory would be highly meaningful. Some of these enemies have been human, often in the form of outside groups involved in direct military invasion or conquest; while others have been supernatural, with form and scope of dangers purposely left to one’s imagination. For tangible terrestrial adversaries, enemy images tend to become reciprocal, enhancing the possibilities of an ensuing threat-counterthreat spiral and seem to be in many ways a study in contrasts—‘‘present yet distant, threatening yet out of sight, overwhelming yet aberrant.’’1 Regardless of form, however, those with the deepest concerns about enemy threats have not been madmen, villains, or deranged individuals, but rather decent people with powerful urges to shield and defend their societies.2 Indeed, enemies have helped to provide the purpose for one’s very existence, and affected societies have utilized overcoming the enemy as their very definition of security. Powerful mobilizing emotions—especially fear and hatred3—form the basis of an enemy image. Fear generates enemies because of the desire to protect oneself against sources of danger (more defensive), while hatred generates enemies because of the

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desire to punish sources of discontent (more offensive). Indeed, ‘‘the perceiving actor can be misled because he hates or despises another actor, harbors guilt feelings toward him, or has formed positive attachments’’; ethnic, religious, and ideological hostilities, reinforced by negative historical experience, are often behind these emotions.4 Fervent nationalism may play a pivotal role here. A natural though not inevitable progression,5 shown in Figure 3.1, exists from developing hostile attitudes based on fear and hatred to undertaking hostile actions, including international warfare. Often a nonredeemable demonic character is assigned to enemies: The image of the enemy is fear-filled as no other is, since no one attributes calculable ways of behavior to the foe, but, on the contrary, expects any manner of enormity from him. Though he be animalistic in being without human emotions and reason, he is thought to be capable of treachery, recklessness, and blood lust to superhuman extent. Based as it is on ignorance and primitive dread, this image prevents those who hold it from any reasonable calculation of the enemy’s actual strength or weakness.6

Thus an enemy image can emerge where one’s foes possess unlimited evil motives: the inherent intangibility of pure evil often requires that it ‘‘be given flesh and location,’’ but in doing so it almost automatically becomes ‘‘beyond redemption, beyond discourse, beyond comprehension and understanding’’ to those opposing it.7 The dark motives involved often reflect ‘‘imperial interests in economic, ideological, and communal domination’’ generated by leaders bound together by common passions and ‘‘able to plot and execute complex and sinister plans.’’8 The roots of this upsurge in often uncontrollable negative emotion can vary tremendously. Possible triggers include a direct threat of foreign military attack endangering a target’s survival; competition for dominance of a region; differing value systems accompanied by intolerance; a past history of a party suffering at the hands of another; another’s friendship with a hostile party; a dispute over territory; sharp visible ethnic, racial, or religious differences; ignorant encounters with outsiders; or a slight seen by a target as deeply insulting or humiliating.9 In each case, once emotions surface, the actual facts about who is responsible for what become largely irrelevant. During foreign policy crises—involving high outside threat, short decision time, and surprise—the emotions surrounding the enemy image can rise to a fever pitch among a threat target’s government officials and the mass population. The net result is that the distortions characterizing an enemy, as well as the rigidity of this characterization, can become even greater than in routine situations.10 Specifically, the high stress associated with international crises leads decision makers to become less likely to take into account the complexity of their environment, more likely to consider fewer policy options, and more likely to choose among policy alternatives impulsively with inadequate review of their consequences; those responsible may often wish to look at the issues comprehensively and to discover rationally alternative ways of evaluating the foreign predicament and alternative options for dealing with it, but due to limited time and high emotions this quest usually proves futile, with policy makers ending up persisting in relying on existing maladaptive approaches.11

Figure 3.1 Fear/Hatred, Perceived Threat, and Enemies

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Because the danger is so important, preparation is so small, and time pressure is so great, in such stressful situations chaos can ensue, with assessments of enemies not well formulated and responses toward them not well executed in terms of their short-term and long-term consequences. The sense of ‘‘a compelling necessity for action to avoid a significant loss’’ seems most likely to cause this chaotic outcome when time pressure is extreme—if ‘‘there is barely enough time to act in order to avoid a danger.’’12 It is ironic that, precisely when the need is greatest to think clearly, stress can cause paralysis or critical breakdown in foreign policy decision-making processes. RESISTANCE OF ENEMY IMAGE TO CHANGE Directly linking to the emotional nature of enemy image is the frequent use of selective attention to support one’s dire assumptions: Fears implicit in the anarchical international system lead statesmen to focus their attention on phenomena which present possibilities of danger, and statesmen develop characteristic misperception patterns as a result of this selective attention. Through this ‘‘adversary syndrome,’’ statesmen tend to exaggerate both the aggressiveness and the coordinated planning—in short, the threatening nature—of opposing nations. Thus they usually carry grandiose perceptions of the opponent’s goals, and the opponent’s awkward signals are frequently mistaken for proof of aggressive intent.13

It is extremely difficult to step out of this close-mindedly antagonistic mind-set, promoting a kind of negative self-fulfilling prophecy among mutual antagonists in which no action can be interpreted positively. Indeed, once formed, an enemy image is usually extremely resistant to significant change: Since an enemy is seen as a threat to national survival, to change his image involves dropping one’s guard—that is, acting as if he could be trusted. All life experience teaches that in the face of a serious conflict of interest, real or illusory, this is very risky, especially when there is no one to turn to for protection or redress should one’s trust prove to have been unjustified. The enemy may be frightening, but the thought of dropping one’s guard is more so.14

Because of the high levels of intense negative emotion associated with the enemy image, it is rare for societies—once they identify a major foe—to engage in continuous responsive flexible threat assessment. What normally happens after such enemy identification is that threat targets simply assume that the dangers emerging from it are severe and constant: the underlying presumptions—especially if enemy intolerance is high—are that its intentions are unwavering and hostile, its capabilities are ominous, and its potential impact on targets is devastating. It seems almost as if, once one has chosen a key source of threat, the actual threat levels do not need to

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be calculated over time because the ongoing assumption of peril is self-evident. An enduring enemy image can severely disrupt communication between opposing parties, and it can ultimately lead to greater polarization of good and evil; ‘‘long-standing hostilities and suspicions give rise to habitual patterns of responses in which activities of each party reinforce laudatory views of the self and negative views of the other.’’15 Static awareness simply of an enemy’s general background hostility, including its capacity and will to issue and carry out threats, is not nearly sufficient to assess at a given point in time ongoing dangers to the target. Such a fixed view usually leads to ineffective responses to enemies, as current attitudes and actions toward terrorists indicate: We are. . .inclined to see terrorists as fiends, wild-eyed expressions of evil, diabolical but two-dimensional, somehow alien—in a word, inhuman. Government officials routinely denounce terrorists as mindless fanatics, savage barbarians, or, more recently, ‘‘evil-doers’’—words that dismiss any intellectual content. The angry rhetoric may resonate with apprehensive homeland audiences, but it impedes efforts to understand the enemy. We cannot formulate multidimensional responses to terrorism that combine physical destruction with political warfare if we do not see our adversaries as anything other than comic-book villains.16

Assessing enemies in a more nuanced way appears to be crucial to anticipating their actions so as to avoid surprise, promote restraint, counter them effectively when restraint fails, and minimize losses.17 In reality, a given adversary can vary tremendously in terms of how threatening it is at any point in time, how unified it is in its beliefs, and how much of its resources it is willing to marshal to undertake any particular initiative. Even an archenemy rarely exhibits a constant level of threat across all circumstances, and tactics are likely to vary as well. Moreover, threat targets may change over time in their anticipation of and preparation for threat from a given enemy. Finally, in the post–Cold War global security environment, it is typical for any society to have multiple enemies, and any enemy to have multiple attractive targets; so part of the variability in threat severity would be a function of to what extent an enemy is focusing its offensive capabilities at a particular target and to what extent a target is reducing its vulnerability to a particular enemy. DEGREES OF INTOLERANCE OF ENEMIES Connecting this resistance to change to targets’ assessment of threat from their enemies is the broad spectrum of intolerance toward these adversaries. Such intolerance levels provide a significant indication of whether or not coexistence or compromise is possible among opponents, whether or not each side views the other as fundamentally changeable, and, most broadly, whether or not a mutual enemy relationship has passed the point of no return. Although a base level of intolerance exists

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Figure 3.2 Degree of Threat Target Intolerance of Enemies

toward all enemies, Figure 3.2 indicates there is significant variation in the degree of intolerance across differing circumstances. In much of the past, having attributed to a foe a demonic character, societies’ intolerance of an enemy was so complete that they believed that the only way to rid one’s society of a threat was to attempt to eradicate completely the foe’s existence. The results of a World War II survey of American soldiers illustrate this approach— 67 percent of enlisted infantrymen who had not yet left the United States ‘‘wanted the Japanese race ‘wiped out altogether’’’ after the war ended.18 Perhaps the most famous case of this further back in history was the Roman strategy to eradicate Carthage during the Third Punic War (149–146 B.C.), in which every inhabitant was killed and every building was destroyed. In many of these cases, no sense of any commonality existed between oneself and one’s enemy, and indeed portrayals of adversaries often made them seem subhuman due to long antagonistic relationships involving grudges lasting centuries. The resulting legacy was a long history of killing and the associated enmity across opposing societies. This pattern is extremely uncommon in the post–Cold War security environment (and indeed was rare during the Cold War as well). Within a slightly less black-and-white frame of mind, occasionally the dominant thrust would be to assimilate and absorb an enemy rather than to wipe it out completely. Sometimes justifying this pattern was the assumption that only the enemy leadership was evil, with the followers simply duped victims or ignorant pawns—the so-called ‘‘black-top’’ enemy image.19 In other circumstances the rationale involved using conquered people as slave labor. Assimilation was seen as a means of ridding targets of wrong-headed beliefs and training them to be supporters of one’s own cause, and as such this approach reflected some optimism about reeducating former foes to become loyal citizens. This pattern is more evident in modern times than the first pattern, but it is still not at all characteristic of the post–Cold War period. In a few instances, a notion has existed that enemies could be rehabilitated and that eventually reconciliation with a former enemy could occur. The goal in these cases was often simply to neutralize or contain an enemy, not to obliterate or assimilate it. Armistices, cease-fires, and peace treaties have occurred that actually lasted a considerable period of time among former adversaries. This third orientation toward intolerance, which reflects the greatest optimism about the ability of enemies to transform, has dominated the post–Cold War period. However, it would be a

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mistake to assume that humanity was slowly progressing toward a softer, more accepting and forgiving notion of enemies, demonstrated by the widespread anger and desire for revenge after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. ENEMY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS On the global level, enemies exist in many forms, often at the same time. The major classification systems include differentiating according to whether foes are (1) states or nonstate groups or (2) proximate or distant, as well as differentiating among (3) political, economic, and cultural enemies and between (4) enemies associated with intentional and unintentional threats. Understanding these distinctions appears crucial to dealing with the full range of modern threat. Perhaps the most important distinction is between state and nonstate foes. During the Cold War, for the West there was a primary overriding state adversary—the Soviet Union—while during the post–Cold War period, the West faces multiple adversaries, some of which are states (such as Iran and North Korea) and some of which are nonstate groups (such as the al-Qaeda terrorists). Images of an omnipresent and omnipotent enemy can target transnational terrorists20 just as much as states; an irrational sense of terror can make unfamiliar or uncontrollable threats seem scarier than familiar or controllable ones, with such vivid tangible threats as terrorism producing more fear than such gradual and abstract threats as climate change. The basis for inducing fear in each of these two cases is quite different: for states, the possession of raw coercive power is usually a key linchpin of credible threat; but for nonstate enemies, the covert, dispersed, norm-violating elements of surprise—combined with zeal usually unmatched among national governments—provide the foundation for perceived dangers. Thus state enemies are usually more predictable than nonstate enemies. A second categorization scheme distinguishes between proximate and distant enemies. As technology, communication, and transportation have progressed, societies have moved away from a focus on local neighboring enemies to more geographically and culturally distant global enemies. Although the buildup of regional armies or outbreaks of internal violence in distant places are unlikely to cause Western states to perceive foreign threat, they routinely recognize faraway dangers when a ‘‘challenger’s military expansion threatens the nerve centers of the world system or some ‘domino effect’ was anticipated.’’21 This recent distant enemy identification is not confined to the West, as the focus of Islamic extremists changed from the 1970s on attacking nearby Muslim regimes to the late 1990s on launching a new global jihad and attacking ‘‘the far enemy’’—the United States and its Western allies.22 More distant antagonisms often result from less tangible sources of friction, such as the clash of ideas. Distance increases the probability that sharp racial, religious, and ethnic differences become immediately evident, fanning the flames of existing cross-societal distrust. This distance also increased the unintelligibility of opposing cultures: truly understanding the enemy mind-set is always a difficult task, but to try to do so with foes with whom one has had little contact or experience is exceptionally challenging. Finally, the costs of responding to enemies have escalated,

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as implementing the logistics of complex diplomatic, economic, or military responses to distant foes is expensive in both time and money. A third typology of enemies distinguishes among political enemies, where the issue of contention is governing ideology; economic enemies, where the issue of contention is industrial competitiveness and market dominance; and cultural enemies, where the issue of contention is opposing societal beliefs and ways of life. In each case, the antagonisms appear to be most severe when a foe is perceived as attempting to spread coercively or noncoercively its values onto the rest of the world. Figure 3.3 summarizes key differences among political, economic, and cultural enemies. As illustrated during the Cold War, it is possible for a country to have different kinds of enemies at the same time—during the 1980s, many Americans saw Japan as their economic enemy and the Soviet Union as their political enemy. Because enemies may either have identical or opposing value systems, it is quite conceivable— though admittedly rare—that bitter foes could share exactly the same beliefs in today’s world, just as occurred prior to the Cold War when antagonistic relationships were often largely a function of great power rivalries. A fourth and final taxonomy distinguishes between enemies associated with intentional threats and enemies associated with unintentional threats such as natural disasters, pandemic diseases, global warming, nuclear accidents, and undesired mass immigration. Although it might initially appear that such unorthodox threats would be devoid of an enemy image, such is not the case: the perceived enemy may be a supernatural source, such as a flood or earthquake seen as an act of a deity; a set of negligent people seen as careless, such as nuclear reactor mismanagement or needless disease exposure; or a set of greedy people seen as using unfair methods to achieve personal gain, such as masses of illegal immigrants sneaking into a country to better their lives or producer/consumer short-term profit maximization that indirectly escalates global warming. In contrast to traditional threats, concern about these unorthodox enemies is usually not promoted by government propaganda and is often downplayed by security agencies. When potential victims perceive a threat as beyond any human control, Attribute

Basis for Fear Basis for Hatred Similarity in Orientation Predictability/Understandability Emotional Intensity Tolerance of Existence Justification for Defense Spending Speed of Disruption Link to Threat-Counterthreat Cycle Susceptibility to Rehabilitation

Political/Military Foe

Type of Enemy Economic Competitor

Cultural Opposite

High Medium Medium Medium High Low High High High Medium

Low Low High High Low High Low Medium Low High

Medium High Low Low Medium Medium Medium Low Medium Low

Figure 3.3 Comparing Political, Economic, and Cultural Enemies

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they still experience fear, but anger and hatred are usually less in evidence, as a sense of resignation and fatalistic inevitability often dominates; the abstraction of the threat source, the absence of a tangible malevolent human instigator to blame, and the difficulty of controlling the resulting devastation all combine to account for this greater acceptance of these unorthodox threats. Furthermore, with these threats devoid of intention, since the rehabilitation of knowingly evil perpetrators is usually irrelevant, responses are much less likely to focus on how to alter the motivations of an enemy and instead much more likely to focus just on how to contain the devastating impact. COSTS AND BENEFITS OF FOCUSING ON ENEMIES Reflecting on a security orientation revolving around enemies, while typically portrayed in one-sided ways, such a tilt could yield both costs and benefits. Figure 3.4 compares the trade-offs involved in a threat target focus on outside enemies or threats. Acknowledging both the pros and the cons increases understanding why sometimes an enemy focus is rationally chosen and other times it is avoided like the plague. Costs of Normal Enemy Focus Engendering an Action-Reaction Cycle Precipitating a Destabilizing Arms Race ‘‘Guns-Butter’’ Trade-off Eroding Social Services Decreasing Trust of Maligned Opponent Confusing Cultural Difference with Security Threat Preventing Comprehension of Opposing Parties Degrading Bargaining/Communication Narrowing of Decision-Making Options Falsely Appearing to Have Hostile Intent Pursuing Reactive Mode to National Security Costs of Extreme Enemy Obsession Genocidal Racism and Dehumanization Paranoid and Hysterical Mass Public Paralyzing Economy and Societal Infrastructure Inability to Distinguish among Types/Levels of Threat

Benefits of Normal Enemy Focus Promoting Sensitivity to Outside Interactions Rationale for a Desired Military Buildup Scapegoat for Internal Woes Distracting Citizenry Increasing Trust in One’s Own Authority Structure Clarifying Cultural Beliefs and Group Identity Smug Satisfaction about One’s Own Superiority Providing a Politically Unifying Crusade Sharpening Sense of Policy Focus and Mission Projecting a Strong ‘‘Don’t-Mess-with-Me’’ Image Tying Security Expenditures to Identified Threats Benefits of Extreme Enemy Obsession Satisfying Purification of One’s Own Population Mass Public Highly Attentive to Foreign Threat Firmly Establishing Priority of Security Issues Constant Preparation for Most Severe Dangers

Figure 3.4 Costs and Benefits of Focusing on Enemies

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Cost and Benefits Deriving from a Normal Enemy Focus The benefits of an enemy focus include serving such constructive psychological and political functions23 as being a scapegoat for internal woes, providing a rationale for a desired military buildup, fostering a politically unifying crusade, increasing sensitivity to outside interactions, inducing smug satisfaction about one’s own superiority, and creating a strong ‘‘don’t-mess-with-me’’ global image. Societies that feel they lack high levels of nationalism and internal effectiveness may often turn citizens’ attention to an external enemy as a distracting way to set everything right again. In the end, ‘‘accounts of danger, and of the groups who are seen as creating it, function to sustain identity’’ and ‘‘to sustain government,’’24 as those within the society with an enemy focus develop an increased trust in their own authority structure, clarify their own cultural beliefs, sharpen their sense of policy focus and mission, and tie security expenditures to specific identified threats (rather than broad resource allocation without clear justification). In contrast, the drawbacks of an enemy focus include engendering an inescapable action-reaction cycle, precipitating a destabilizing arms race, unwarranted militarizing producing a ‘‘guns-butter’’ trade-off in which social services suffer, reducing global trust and cooperation,25 leading an enemy to conclude wrongly that hostile intentions are present, degrading one’s bargaining and communication capabilities,26 inappropriately narrowing their decision-making options,27 and encouraging a highly reactive mode to pursuing security.28 Associated emotions can confuse cultural differences with security dangers and prevent recognition of any similarity between oneself and one’s foe or any meaningful comprehension of what makes enemies tick. Emphasizing external enemy dangers can ultimately lead to high feelings of insecurity and an insatiable desire to take futile protective actions. Costs and Benefits Deriving from an Extreme Enemy Obsession When obsession with external enemies becomes truly extreme, the consequences can be truly debilitating. More specifically, the ‘‘most familiar conduct associated with demonisation in the modern world is genocidal racism and ethnic stigmatization,’’29 often entailing complete dehumanization of enemies. A sense of public dread can emerge, where those affected are subject to depression, paranoia, edginess, impaired ability to think, hypochondria, and hysteria.30 Intense fear can easily lead to a mass panic that can ultimately cripple one’s economy31 and societal infrastructure. Such extreme obsession can ultimately eliminate completely one’s ability to discriminate among different types and levels of threat from an adversary. Yet, even in these extreme conditions, a silver lining may be present. There may be a sense of purification of one’s own population that key elements find satisfying, high mass public attentiveness to foreign threat, firm prioritization of security issues, and constant preparation for the most severe dangers. These outcomes are, however, admittedly beneficial only under very limited conditions.

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POLITICAL MANIPULATION OF ENEMY IMAGES Because identifying enemies is full of controversy, government officials have a wide berth to engage in internal and external manipulation and may deliberately misrepresent foreign threats in a way that desensitizes citizens to real dangers or alternatively makes citizens alarmed over nothing. Although mass public views of enemies are often a product of political manipulation by leaders, mass public opinion can also modify leadership stances regarding outside threat. The dynamics of this mutual influence relationship usually end up distorting the evaluation and response to enemy-related threat. Government Influence on Mass Public Opinion on Enemies Political leaders, sensing the centrality of threat, have never been shy in their manipulation or embellishment of antagonism toward an enemy to achieve their desired ends—‘‘if politicians do anything well, it is to fan the flames of Chicken Little hysteria; they have an innate talent for scaring neurotic people who are prone to believe whatever government tells them about potential threats.’’32 Indeed, deriving political gain from actualized threats is common practice under global anarchy. These leaders have powerful incentives to misrepresent enemy threat: ‘‘especially when confronting a potential enemy, leaders use public rhetoric to rally domestic support, bolster the confidence of allies, and coerce the enemy to give up.’’33 Utilizing preexisting fear and hatred, often of the unknown, these leaders have been frequently able to whip up mass populations into frenzied bloodlust that has led directly to a variety of forms of external violence: ‘‘one reason to depict the enemy as purely evil is that such an image helps create an obligation and incentive to fight.’’34 Exemplifying this tendency are several American government commissions convened in the 1990s to examine the new dangers emerging in the post–Cold War security setting: ‘‘as imperatives to action, the threat assessments conveyed in the commission reports had to arouse what their authors saw as a sclerotic government and a complacent population—they had to frighten.’’35 This manipulation by leaders seems particularly common when political leaders have already made the decision to initiate a war and are simply using the enemy image as a tool to drum up support. Considerable expertise has developed over the centuries in the use of propaganda and stereotypes to fuel these antagonistic emotions. Along with efforts by government agencies, private mass media have (due to their pervasiveness) a major effect on mass threat perception: these information sources may underreport, softpedal, explain as reasonable, or outright ignore certain kinds of threats, while at the same time overreporting and exaggerating others. Propaganda may depict enemies as so consistently vile that there is no real need to develop further understanding of them to be able to predict their behavior. There is absolutely no need for adversaries to engage in any kind of provocative behavior to stimulate, illustrate, or justify this kind of disinformation. These techniques have become so effective that if a foe were

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to engage in behavior that violated prevalent negative assumptions—such as by offering a compromise or proposing a means of reconciliation—it would be doubted, seen as a ruse, and ultimately summarily rejected. Mass Public Opinion Influence on Government Images of Enemies Within democracies, mass public fears, which are more than occasionally misguided or irrational, play an important role in policies toward enemies. Public views can help focus government attention on threat and significantly affect policy responses. For example, if public concern is disproportionately high in comparison to intelligence assessments, political authorities may nevertheless attach great significance to it. As a result, government intelligence assessment of the threat from enemies may not always correspond to government policy responses: government intelligence reflects available information obtained from noncooperative environments and the judgment of intelligence analysts who try to connect the dots, but the prevailing political climate—not necessarily related in any way to this intelligence—can significantly influence policy makers’ response to this information. The relationship between mass public perspectives on enemies and government policies toward enemies thus reflects a two-way influence: a regime possessing an obsession about an enemy may use its wide-ranging capabilities to have a sizable impact on the views of its citizenry about the incoming threat, but at the same time within democracies public views may independently have an impact on what governments do in response to enemies. In all likelihood, neither direction of influence is desirable for the very best assessment and management of incoming threat; however, both efforts are likely to persist indefinitely and sometimes can balance out each other. CONCLUSION A final enemy complexity needs addressing—if true security entails freedom from fear, as the standard dictionary definition suggests, then would that not mean that ideally security would involve freedom from having enemies and freedom from incoming threat? Although in today’s anarchic global security setting it seems ludicrous to imagine a world without enemies, even if such a situation could realistically emerge, it is unclear whether or not such a predicament would be completely welcomed from a security standpoint. Because it has become so common across time and culture to define basic security goals in terms of opposition to enemies and associated threats, their complete absence might very well leave security and defense establishments devoid of a specific purpose, especially in the minds of the mass public, and even lead to questioning about their need to exist. This in turn could ultimately lead to a society becoming highly complacent, oblivious to emerging peril, and consequently create complete vulnerability to future external intrusions. In this way in the long run the absence of external enemies could be viewed as destabilizing. Part of what this chapter’s insights have indicated is that many states have a vested interest in creating enemies when they are not really threatening or in perpetuating

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enemy images when real danger has ceased to be imminent. By focusing on the presumed hostility of others, states may indirectly trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy in which their underlying assumptions artificially foster an enemy relationship. The recent American general security apprehensions about China, or specific global concerns surrounding foreign missile defense, illustrate this general point. So a complete disappearance of outside enemies could undermine the security thrust of such states. Thus it might seem more reasonable to argue that true security involves simply minimization rather than elimination of fear from enemies—to the point where, though they continue to exist, they are at levels acceptable to a given target society. Acceptance of such minimization of fear and threat as a goal would absolutely require a level of trust, based on observation of successful past steps taken against enemies—that one’s leadership could recognize, prioritize, and respond effectively regarding any future foreign dangers. Within democracies, such an approach might well require considerably more transparency about threat assessment and management than is common today. Unfortunately, the requirement of trust is the Achilles’ heel of this fear minimization strategy. Cynicism runs rampant in today’s world, and trust in government leadership, along with consensus between leaders and the mass public about what is valued and what constitutes danger, is a rare commodity indeed even in democratic societies. Furthermore, those in the West have rarely in recent decades been able to look back and see a set of unambiguously successful past steps to deal with enemies. Much of the explanation for these problems revolves around the deficiencies in threat assessment discussed in the next chapter. In the end, the characteristics of the modern enemy image, when combined with the previously discussed transformed nature of post–Cold War threat, pose an incredible challenge to those responsible for the provision of security. The involvement of emotional fear and hatred, the resistance to change over time, and the resulting intolerance provide a charged atmosphere is which calm discussion and rational analysis is rare. The presence of different kinds of enemies—such as nonstate foes, culturally different adversaries, or those involved in unintentional threats—often renders traditional coping mechanisms ineffective. The political manipulation of enemy images by both government officials and members of the mass public clouds over the stark realities surrounding any international enemy predicament. Together these patterns create both ambiguity and confusion in dealing with the enemy component of global threat.

4

Threat Analysis Deficiencies The dramatic changes evidenced in the post–Cold War security setting combined with the increased ambiguity in pinpointing foreign enemies have led to seemingly unending controversy surrounding targets’ analyses of incoming threat. This chapter presents the deficiencies accounting for this disagreement: (1) regarding threat identification, major distortions exist in framing the existence or nonexistence of threat; (2) regarding threat coverage, a mismatch exists between diversified post–Cold War dangers and prevailing notions of threat; and (3) regarding threat assessment, misguided efforts have been unable to provide a systematic comparative evaluation of threat severity. The purpose of highlighting these deficiencies is to provide the basis for devising a new threat assessment and management system. THREAT IDENTIFICATION DEFICIENCIES To many observers, recognizing threat seems a straightforward military intelligence question, with the premise that leaders usually correctly perceive external dangers. However, in reality accuracy in threat identification has varied widely: government officials may falsely perceive outside threat—exaggerating others’ capabilities or their own country’s vulnerabilities 1—when identified sources have no malicious intent whatsoever and the dangers prove to be illusory, or they may inadvertently ignore imminent dangers that just do not fit into the filters they have for spotting incoming threat. Roots of Threat Misidentification The theoretical roots of threat misperception are quite multifaceted. They include psychological processes of black-and-white thinking, selective attention, projection, intolerance of ambiguity, rationalization, and self-fulfilling prophecy, where distorting enemy images can provide an artificial individual sense of clarity;2 sociological processes of ethnocentrism, where distorting enemy images can foster group solidarity;3 and international relations processes related to global ‘‘rules of the game,’’ where distorting enemy images can promote self-righteous guarding against alleged international rules violations to maintain global order under anarchy.4 Together these distorting processes make accurate global threat identification extremely unlikely.

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Sometimes an outside party can interpret relatively innocuous actions as sufficient to label the threat source hostile: for example, if one state denied another state airspace, that might prompt this labeling if a confrontation was occurring in which the side denying the airspace was aware of the other side’s offensive air power and was operating air defense capabilities specifically to prevent the first state from penetrating its airspace, knowing that command of the air is vital to the denied state’s strategy. In a complementary way, sometimes a state developing military capabilities may not be labeled hostile if one sees these capabilities as a defensive response to a perceived threat: for example, Arab-Americans seeing Syria as under siege by Israel, the United States, and Western Europe may view a new Syrian missile capability more as a crucially important defense than as a threat; Islamic extremists may view al-Qaeda not as a threat but rather as a response to threats from the United States; and China may view its offensive military forces along the Taiwan Strait (which the United States sees as a threat) as a defense against Taiwan wanting to assert its independence, considering them more for law enforcement than for offensive action. Enemy labeling is particularly tricky when relevant parties change, such as if another state’s regime is on the verge of being replaced by a more hostile one. Perceptual Vigilance versus Perceptual Defense Given these general tendencies, two specific contrasting modes of threat misperception are evident, displayed—along with when each mode seems most likely to occur—in Figure 4.1. Societies may be either ‘‘highly sensitive to evidence that an Perceptual Vigilance

Perceptual Defense

CHARACTERISTICS OF EACH MODE Oversensitivity to Evidence of Probable Undersensitivity to Evidence of Probable Undesired Outcomes Undesired Outcomes Worst-Case Thinking Wishful Thinking Mutual Hostility and Fear Mutual Trust and Complacency Intolerance and Closure Tolerance and Openness Anticipated Lifestyle Disruption or Harm Anticipated Continuation of Current Levels to Persons and Property of Security Danger of Perceiving Nonexistent Threat Danger of Being Unprepared for Threat Triggering Spiral of Reciprocated Hostility Inviting Foreign Aggression CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH EACH MODE IS MOST LIKELY If Sharp Ethnic or Religious Differences If Few Tangible Differences Exist between Exist between Threat Source and Target Threat Source and Target If Threat Source Is Depersonalized and If Threat Source Is Seen as Rationally Seen as Embodying Intrinsic Evil Responding to Situational Incentives If Threat Target Has a History of Incoming If Threat Target Has a History of Tranquil Foreign Threat Stability If Threat Target Possesses Considerable If Threat Target Lacks Significant Means Means to Respond to Threat to Respond to Threat Figure 4.1 Contrasting Modes of Threat Misidentification

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undesired outcome is likely’’ (perceptual vigilance) or alternatively may ‘‘avoid such evidence and underestimate the chances of harm’’ (perceptual defense).5 The first choice tilts toward addressing threats when they are small and not yet actualized, while the second choice leans in the direction of passively waiting until threats loom large.6 However, within both tendencies long-standing threats receive less attention than do new threats, even though ‘‘chronic threats are almost surely more debilitating than acute ones’’ because ‘‘threats that persist for a long time may use up one’s adaptational capacity so that resistance to the danger posed is lessened.’’7 Setting a threat threshold too low (perceptual vigilance) can risk widespread paranoia, resource waste, or needless aggression; while setting the threat bar too high (perceptual defense) can leave a society unprepared for external disruption.8 Despite desiring to stay in between these two extremes, those responsible for threat identification find it hard to avoid unwittingly drifting in one direction or the other. Even with quality threat information, it would take concerted effort to navigate between underreaction and overreaction to outside dangers. There is a natural tendency for national security policy makers to hedge their bets by thinking in worst-case terms, with the identification of threat in some ways seen as an essential justification for the very existence of the state.9 Military commanders are responsible for successfully carrying out their mission no matter what, so it is natural for them to worst-case everything. Built-in incentives exist for governments to elevate lesser dangers to the status of major threats so as to justify expenditures, short-circuit democratic processes, or create artificial clarity and unity in purpose. Government officials justify their distortions by claiming that overestimating risks may merely cost dollars, while underestimating risks can cost lives.10 The predisposition to perceive threat associating with perceptual vigilance increases if there is existing distrust, anxiety, negative past experience, ideological preconceptions, worst-case contingency planning, and institutions tasked with threat identification.11 Perceptual inertia derives from historical successes against incoming foreign threat, where past threat expectations set current threat predispositions: The facts that all perception is fundamentally selective and that selection is normally governed by working assumptions, or beliefs, about the outside world permit predispositions to intervene in the act of threat perception. One such predisposition is inertia, that is, a preference for escaping the rigors and puzzles of continuously monitoring the environment and of modifying existing schema if the signals do not fit, or of deliberately experimenting with differing sets of assumptions. People tend to defend their assumptions by means of either selective attention or of inattention to ambiguous information. As a result, pre-existing assumptions remain unquestioned for too long, although they tend to become obsolete over time even when they were fairly realistic originally. The easy and lazy thing is to predict today what you predicted yesterday.12

Generally, predispositions to perceive threat vary according to beliefs about one’s abilities to take counteraction when confronting danger.13 Barriers to mutual understanding among contending parties also serve to enhance perceptual vigilance. Intense hostility seems likely to emerge when sharp distinctions

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are present between adversaries, with emotions usually running highest when readily discernible differences revolve around ethnicity or religion.14 Combining a diabolical enemy image with ‘‘the thought of submission to an alien ideology and social system as more intolerable than death itself ’’ dramatically increases the potential occurrence and escalation of war:15 the link between perceptual vigilance and hostile action seems tightest if a state sees (1) a particular enemy as embodying evil and its defeat as eliminating global problems, (2) taking action against this enemy as the path to glory, and (3) anyone who disagrees with this view as a traitor.16 Furthermore, such hostility associates with degrading depersonalization of the enemy.17 Global electronic communications and long-range precision weapons systems can unwittingly immunize people against caring for fellow human beings and allow negative stereotypes to persist: despite globalization and interdependence, the lack of direct contact and psychological distance among today’s enemies can insulate combatants from any trauma deriving from the carnage they inflict on their enemy.18 Threat Identification Paradox With threat recognition often depending on whether or not the source is deemed hostile, a paradox emerges: (1) since the security dilemma associating with international anarchy directs attention toward anticipated harm, states may sense hostility everywhere they look,19 based on the reasonable derivative premise that ‘‘others were preparing to do as much harm to them as possible’’20 and (2) since states (friends and enemies alike) develop military capabilities in response to perceived threat, they all could legitimately claim a defensive orientation. So a threat target has logical incentives to see hostility everywhere and all its security actions as purely responding to outside threat, rather than to engage in a careful and balanced threat recognition process. In a world devoid of universally recognized moral absolutes, ‘‘it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish cleanly between good and evil, between threat and nonthreat, or between unjustified offensive aggression and justified defensive protection on the international level.’’21 THREAT COVERAGE DEFICIENCIES Chapter 2 indicated a significant recent diversification of threat sources, threat styles, and threat targets. Unfortunately, security thinking within the West has not kept pace with this expanded scope of threat and thus is a poor match for today’s security dangers. Figure 4.2 displays these mismatch problems, including an inability to cover the ambiguous and diversified range of threats, an outmoded Cold War threat focus, and a resulting readiness for the wrong kinds of threat. Inability to Cover Ambiguous and Diversified Range of Threats The threat transformation so marginalized many Cold War assumptions that, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, cynics have argued ‘‘the dangers of the post–Cold War

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Figure 4.2 Threat Coverage Shortcomings

world were too opaque, too numerous, and too fluid for U.S. intelligence agencies to assess the terrorist threat more effectively than they did.’’22 After the fall of the Soviet Union, ‘‘continued reliance on the Cold War intelligence paradigm permitted serious analytic shortfalls to develop’’ in the face of evolving post–Cold War security challenges.23 In particular, the American intelligence community’s formal reevaluation of post–Cold War threat has been somewhat deficient, slow to adjust to the massive changes following the fall of the Soviet Union,24 and national security policy makers have persisted in thinking along traditional lines.25 Instead of dealing with all dangers, political leanings can limit the scope of threat considered. Extremists from opposite poles pander to the politics of fear and hatred so differently that juxtaposing their notions of threat can arbitrarily lead to a skewed ‘‘apples-and-oranges’’ comparison: According to right-wing neoconservatives, the evil menace plaguing mankind is hordes of Islamic militants who target civilians and fly aircraft into buildings. We are told that

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these terrorist madmen will descend upon our homeland with weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical warheads, and ungodly violence to destroy Western civilization unless we act preemptively. On the opposite side of the political aisle, the big threat to the world is global warming. The leftists’ predictions are just as horrific as the rightists’. They contend that if mankind continues to pump out carbon dioxide (CO2), the world will suffer catastrophic flooding, severe droughts, rising sea levels, lasting hunger, and economic chaos. Some global warming alarmists actually predict the end of humanity within a couple of decades.26

Thus the two sides may talk past each other, with one emphasizing an immediate tangible threat and the other an abstract long-term one. For intelligence analysts, in contrast to the stable Cold War focus on the Soviet Union, the post–Cold War world appears ‘‘shapeless,’’ containing a virtually limitless range of threats and perpetrators requiring analytical understanding;27 now it is often a major hurdle even to isolate who is in control, let alone determine what they intend to do. It is not surprising that ‘‘transnational threats are particularly unsettling because they do not fit into the analytical frameworks that had been developed during the Cold War.’’28 The more distant a threat is from the traditional direct danger of foreign military attack, the more difficult it is to assess and manage—as foes become more covert, dispersed, and decentralized, threat sources become harder to identify, monitor, predict, and contain, and defensive battle planning and sound defense resource allocation become a greater challenge: how do you ‘‘massively retaliate’’ against a terrorist gang or narco-warlord, or even a tiny state, that has no important infrastructure or command center to attack? Or a team of ‘‘info-terrorists’’ arriving in the United States to sabotage critical nodes in the country’s highly vulnerable communication system and satellite links. Or, indeed, not arriving at all, but sitting at computer screens somewhere half a world away and penetrating the networks that process and carry satellite-derived data.29

From the experience of post–Cold War violent conflicts, hostile movements have learned to mutate, disperse, and fragment, utilizing limited low-cost actions that spread fear and force targets into costly and occasionally provocative responses.30 Outmoded Cold War Threat Focus Tragically, the West is still oriented toward conventional Cold War military threats. The pattern of according military threats the highest national security priority continues because military action usually endangers all components of a state and can disrupt affairs very swiftly’’;31 as a result, many military leaders steadfastly oppose change and support preserving existing force structure—including fighter and bomber wings, heavy divisions, nuclear submarines, and aircraft carrier battle groups. Unlike the infrastructure-free ability of terrorists and insurgents to adjust rapidly to new pressures or opportunities, ‘‘realigning the military is like turning a

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battleship’’32 due to its vast size, complexity, and enormous momentum. The new kinds of threat require a kind of ‘‘strategic agility’’ in response, based on better threat coverage. Policy makers in Western states often assert that the global spread of democracy is the best way to address incoming threat, but this approach ignores key cultural and religious dimensions of threat that highlight current limitations in threat coverage: for example, in Islamic thinking, only clergy who are steeped in learning about the Koran are qualified to issue guidance to the people, not only on spiritual matters but also on all civil affairs, logically leading to the concept of theocracy; so when the American government introduces the idea of democracy to Muslims, their reaction is not that the United States is trying to help them live a better life, but rather that it is attacking their religion by urging them to throw off the yoke of religious rule and give individuals the right to have a say in how they are ruled. American policy makers have not been institutionally oriented toward covering the security implications associated with contrasting religious beliefs, yet this is essential to cope with contemporary threat; seeing such attitudes as primitive or irrational simply compounds existing problems. Readiness for Wrong Kinds of Threat Thanks to its inability to cover the ambiguous and diversified range of post–Cold War threats and its outmoded Cold War threat focus, the West ironically possesses the greatest preparedness for exactly the kinds of threat that are least likely to occur today—ones calling for applying conventional military force in direct coercive confrontations. Western states seem to be hoping that their enemies would revert to more traditional modes of threat with which these states are more comfortable. Moreover, due to gaps in threat coverage, Western leaders are often confused about how to cope with nontraditional dangers involving dispersed threat sources, subtle threat styles, and increased threat vulnerability in their security planning that relies heavily on conventional forces. THREAT ASSESSMENT DEFICIENCIES Determining when dangers are grave enough to constitute major security threats is crucial yet challenging. Inescapably finite security resources mean that separating consequential from inconsequential threats is essential. Undertaking such assessment appropriately has become more challenging: during the Cold War, intelligence analysts relied on Soviet military capabilities as the primary determinant of threat;33 however, after the Cold War, the calculus became much more uncertain. It is not surprising that, since the end of the Cold War, despite concerted efforts by those responsible, threat assessment has been frequently misguided, as the threat identification deficiencies and threat coverage deficiencies noted earlier largely doom the assessment effort before it is even started. If one has not been able to recognize key dangers or incorporate the full range of dangers, then prioritizing threats

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appropriately becomes next to impossible. Beginning with a faulty set of perceived perils thus precludes the possibility not only of fairly analyzing their relative severity, but also of making informed discriminatory judgments about their overall need for policy responses. As a result, efforts to gauge post–Cold War threat have exhibited a number of missteps, highlighted in Figure 4.3: oversimplifying the notion of threat, prioritizing threat source over threat target concerns, and utilizing flawed threat assessment methodologies. Oversimplifying the Notion of Threat Looking first at oversimplifying the notion of threat, many threat assessment approaches define danger too restrictively. Some forms of threat assessment focus exclusively on anticipated direct physical harm: 34 this emphasis ignores severe psychological trauma, where the emotional dangers to people in a threat target may

Figure 4.3 Misleading Efforts at Threat Assessment

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be considered far more severe than any threat of physical destruction of persons or property; and it downplays many subtle foreign dangers, where highly probable tangible immediate physical damage is low—for example, the immediate physical lethality of a cyber threat is minimal, yet it can trigger massive disruption of a society’s military, political, and economic infrastructure by paralyzing vital computer systems. Other varieties of threat assessment concentrate on judging dangers in isolation without examining security context influences on relevance or gravity—for instance, assessing a change in a regional balance of power as constituting a security threat35 without taking into account other relational elements. The justifications for these overly narrow conceptions of incoming global threat usually boil down to ease of measurement—it is far simpler to utilize a single yardstick to judge severity of dangers than to incorporate multiple yardsticks, and it is far easier to use yardsticks readily susceptible to observable quantitative measurement than those that take into account more subtle forms of outside peril. However, any effort seeking to capture the full variety of international threats cannot succumb to this quest for parsimonious simplicity in judging a concept that is so multifaceted. Prioritizing Threat Source over Threat Target Concerns In moving to prioritizing threat source over threat target concerns, the most commonly used threat assessment system appears to be the most problematic—the higher a threat initiator’s capabilities and intentions, the greater the incoming threat.36 Within this capabilities-intentions framework, a ‘‘balance of threat’’ may be central, with such a balance increasing when one state perceives that it is losing power relative to another state and when the first state perceives that the other state’s intent is hostile and aggressive, accompanied by a perceived shift from a defensedominant to an offense-dominant military position.37 Interestingly, when using common threat formulations involving capabilities and intentions, status quo powers tend to emphasize capabilities more, using a kind of capability-based intentions assessment where intentions are measured by calculating which threats are feasible; whereas challengers of the status quo tend to emphasize intentions more, using direct intentions assessment where estimates of a foe’s usable capabilities are extrapolated from its political intentions.38 However, examining adversary capabilities and intentions alone is decidedly inadequate to assess threat: this method downplays crucial target concerns and the greater difficulty in determining post–Cold War enemy intentions and capabilities (especially for transnational nonstate foes) compared to those of the Cold War Soviets.39 Furthermore, neither large capability nor hostile intention may be absolute prerequisites to threat. Given that together source capabilities and intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient to assess threat systematically, it is surprising that so many scholars and policy makers rely on these indicators. First, distorting fallacies typically surround enemy intentions estimates.40 Having an antagonistic party amass coercive capabilities may alone be sufficient for threat without any immediate signaling of hostile intentions: if a state with which one has

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a history of enmity develops a nuclear weapon—such as North Korea in the context of its relationship to the United States—then that alone may be sufficient to provide the basis for perceived threat.41 Similarly, a rising power such as China that challenged the status quo—both the hegemony of existing great powers and the global acceptance of democratic values—could be threatening without any hostile intent. Explicitly voiced intentions may be ‘‘an unnecessary element of threat’’42 due to unintentional foreign threats such as disease epidemics or unintentional nuclear accidents. Moreover, threat credibility empirically rests more heavily on possessing substantial military power than on developing a reputation for resolve showing intent to carry out threats.43 Increases in certain types of capabilities may provide ‘‘a clue to intent’’ (even though intentions to use such capabilities may not always be present):44 for instance, Iran has had no need to state explicitly to the Israelis that it might launch its missiles against them due to Iran’s lethal combination of long-term hostility and development and deployment of offensive systems. Second, threat may not depend on possessing substantial capabilities: for example, a mass population movement into a state may be a threat, even though immigrants harbor neither hostility nor substantial coercive disruptive capability, if they have the potential to disrupt substantially the social services and way of life within a country. Furthermore, a state with opposing beliefs lacking both military capability and stated hostile intentions may cause (and help others cause) significant damage by aligning itself politically with stronger hostile states to vote in a contrary way in the United Nations, thwarting one’s regional diplomatic objectives, hurting one economically in trade councils, harboring malevolent forces (like terrorists) within its borders, aiding in the development of insurgency forces at little cost or risk, launching computer network attacks or information warfare, doing nothing to stop or encouraging drug trafficking and organized crime, or conducting and supporting hostile intelligence operations. Utilizing Flawed Threat Assessment Methodologies Finally, moving to flawed threat assessment methodologies, much threat assessment relies on incredibly subjective indicators. Specifically, measuring both intentions and capabilities is unsystematic: for intentions, ‘‘judging others’ intentions is notoriously difficult’’45 and creates huge obstacles in hard intelligence collection through either human or electronic means; and for capabilities, ‘‘threat assessments based on the numbers and types of hostile weapons are likely to overestimate real capability for enemies with modern equipment but limited skills, but underestimate militaries with older equipment but high skills.’’46 Often this subjectivity embedded in threat assessment methodologies opens the door to political manipulation by those receiving the results. Many analysts utilize an ex post facto approach where they judge the correctness of threat assessment methodology based on whether predicted threats are carried out and unforeseen threats are not.47 Some observers, for example, look at the absence so far of a major foreign terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11 and conclude

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quite inappropriately that the mode employed for analyzing and responding to incoming threat must be working.48 Such an approach is notoriously faulty: (1) recognition of a threat can lead to action (such as aggressive intelligence and preventative measures) that prevents it from being actualized, (2) threat assessment methodology may be correct even if a predicted threat never is realized (the probability of occurrence may indeed be high, yet during the time period the target lucked out) or if an unpredicted threat is realized (the probability of occurrence may indeed be low, yet a bizarre sequence of events triggered its occurrence), and (3) reliance on threat recognition ‘‘batting averages’’ is misleading (just as when used in intelligence forecasting) because maximizing the congruence between what is identified and what actually occurs may be less important than ensuring that no major danger is missed. A last distorting threat assessment methodology is the widespread belief that if a threat exists about which a target perceives that it can do little, the threat should not be assessed as severe. This key contaminant in any threat assessment process inappropriately looks ahead at possible solutions as a component of judging the significance of current dangers. This fatalistic ‘‘cart-before-the-horse’’ approach is deeply flawed: a threat target’s belief that it can do little in the short-run in response to an incoming danger could be misguided; even if this were not so, the ability to address a threat is not fixed and could readily change if the threat became the focus of concerted attention; and, since many threats are embedded in a complicated threat-counterthreat cycle, it is possible that addressing another component of the cycle could indirectly reduce an incoming danger in ways never anticipated by a threat target. A balanced and accurate threat assessment thus needs to be in complete isolation from any concern about the availability or unavailability of immediately implementable responses. A real-life illustration of problems surrounding threat assessment is the American Homeland Security Advisory System. On March 12, 2002, the American government initiated the Homeland Security Advisory System, a five-level colorcoded public warning system designed to combine threat information with vulnerability assessments, to communicate to American public safety officials and the mass public the severity of incoming threat and to guide American protective measures to reduce the likelihood or impact of a terrorist attack. Although this appeared to be a major step forward in terms of assessing and prioritizing threat, what many onlookers failed to realize was that little systematic threat assessment appears to undergird this severity determination; no published criteria exist for the threat levels, the Department of Homeland Security has never explained the sources and quality of intelligence upon which the threat levels were based,49 and thus no independent method is available to verify the accuracy of the current threat level. This lack of disclosure makes the system highly vulnerable to government manipulation. Specific concerns50 have emerged about the Homeland Security Advisory System’s vagueness of warnings; lack of specific protective measures for, and obstacles to disseminating warnings to state and local governments, the mass public, and the private sector; coordination of this system with other federal government warning systems; and costs of threat level changes, including (1) an average increased expenditure of

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$1 billion a week for elevating the alert level from yellow to orange and (2) a danger that public downgrading of threat levels may advertise to terrorists that defensive measures have been reduced, giving them incentives to strike. CONCLUSION In deciding which dangers to emphasize and which to downplay, the deficiencies in threat identification, coverage, and assessment have made the prioritization extremely arbitrary and poorly grounded. Indeed, dangers that have been hard to evaluate and hard to prepare for have had the advantage in ascending to the top level of national security concerns. 51 Often ‘‘breathless, needlessly melodramatic language’’ has been the tone for communicating these threats, with press conferences called to broadcast them becoming ‘‘political theater,’’ generating allegations of sordid political motivations.52 Closely cross-checking a proposed threat scenario in light of actual facts and past history has often proved to be superfluous: The line began to blur between government portrayals of hypothetical events and pure fiction. If analysis becomes more speculative, then well-informed fiction is not so different. Either one could influence policy. A well-crafted novel about biological terrorism reportedly helped to persuade Bill Clinton that the country needed to devote more attention to the threat. Publicized government concerns sparked new headlines that further inspired novelists and screenwriters. Everything lurched toward the lurid, especially as television news broadcasts increasingly adopted the attributes of popular entertainment. As fact and fiction blended, public perceptions of the threat were limited only by Americans’ imagination.53

With few constraints or solid analytical tools present to help onlookers distinguish between real dangers and imaginary ones, threat and fantasy may have become indistinguishable, lacking a systematic way to reject any alleged threat as not deserving immediate attention and resources. Western intelligence agencies and defense ministries charged with assessing threat severity have often lacked an established procedure for prioritizing incoming dangers and instead often viewing such prioritization as a product of ‘‘case-by-case judgment’’ in which decision makers would ‘‘know it when they see it,’’ but not necessarily be able to explain what makes one threat more or less important than others. This ad hoc approach treats each danger as unique and is extremely dependent on the individual expertise and experience of the analyst or policy maker doing the threat evaluation. Such an attitude stymies attempts to improve threat assessments or responses by impeding any ability to compare threats, to justify ranking one danger as more severe than others, or to legitimize a coercive response to threat to one’s own citizens or to foreign onlookers. Many observers are aware of this deficiency, but the daunting task of devising a means by which the diverse and ambiguous post–Cold War threats can be assessed has left them with the fatalistic assumption that no useful systematic means of assessment could be developed. For this reason, many analyses exist about the failures of

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post–Cold War and post-9/11 threat assessment, but precious few exist that take the essential step to attempt to propose alternative, more rigorous threat assessment so as to help to avoid such failure in the future. So many current threat studies get so involved in one particular type of threat—especially terrorism—that they sidestep the opportunity to ask whether or not a mode of threat assessment could be developed that applies to the full diverse range of post–Cold War foreign dangers. Basic reconceptualization of post–Cold War and post-9/11 threats has been assiduously avoided, despite the pressing need for exactly that kind of heavy lifting.

5

Target-Centered Global Threat Assessment Given that often threat identification is highly distorted, threat coverage is overly narrow, and threat assessment is quite misleading, there is a pressing need for a different mode of threat analysis. Such an alternative approach would need to follow customary risk assessment practices—guiding the collection of data to gauge the probability of risks occurring, the consequences if risks materialize, and the feasibility of various measures for reducing either the risks or the magnitude of the consequences1—but would need to overcome the difficulties in pinpointing threat, expand the incorporated range of threat, increase the validity and reliability of threat assessment, and ultimately help threat targets to respond more effectively to incoming threat. Several underlying premises form a foundation for developing a sound alternative approach to threat assessment. First, global threat is comprised of both objective and subjective components, as most threats represent a combination of real dangers that genuinely pose the prospect of harm to a target and contrived dangers that involve a threat target’s distorted sense of peril. Second, threat behavior is considered to be part of an influence process, not a discrete random event, so it seems essential to investigate the threat context and probe for relevant overarching patterns.2 Third, threat assessment needs to be examined holistically as a function of several elements, avoiding the temptation to narrow analysis down to just one or two measures because of the need to incorporate the many dimensions of incoming danger. Fourth, evaluating threat deals with the potential for not only overt acts of violence but also a wider variety of statements and actions that foster intimidation or deep psychological distress in others.3 Fifth, the focal point for threat assessment ought to be potential victims, for they would suffer the ensuing devastation if a threat is carried out, and different groups of victims could evaluate dangers differently; because ‘‘identity plays a central role in the assessment of threat,’’4 understanding the context and perspective of those most affected appears to be a vital prerequisite to gauging threat severity. As a result, there is a pressing need to reject the typical international relations focus exclusively on initiator capabilities and intentions in favor of a risk analysis focus5 on direct target susceptibility to damage or loss, common in many other areas such as theft insurance and medical contagious disease management;6 prioritization of threat thus would rest less on threat source attributes than on threat target exposure to incoming dangers. With these premises in mind, this chapter presents an alternative target-centered approach to global threat assessment. Figure 5.1 displays the five elements of this new framework: (1) the vital interests or protection priorities, reflecting the

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Figure 5.1 Target-Centered Global Threat Assessment

importance of risked assets within threat targets; (2) the dangerous instigators or harmful events, reflecting the risk sources’ capacity to disrupt threat targets; (3) the vulnerability to damage or loss, reflecting the threat targets’ risk anticipation and preparation; (4) the probability of damage or loss, reflecting the likelihood of risks occurring within a threat target; and (5) the magnitude of damage or loss, reflecting the impact of actualized risks on a threat target. After presenting these elements, this chapter discusses this alternative approach’s advantages and the complexities faced in considering a base threshold of severe threat. From a national security perspective, one could easily imagine that otherwise ominous perils might be perceived as trivial if the dangers did not pertain to a state’s vital interests (such as an impending natural disaster in a part of the country where the government did not care about the welfare of the people and their personal property); if dangerous instigators lacked the capacity to disrupt a target (such as a small state without sophisticated weaponry threatening to attack a large well-armed state);

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if a target is not vulnerable because it is fully prepared with countermeasures to forestall any damage should the threat be realized (such as the presence of an effective antiballistic missile system to counter an impending missile attack); if the probability of a threat being carried out against a target was low (such as an instigator that either was highly constrained or lacked the will to engage in internationally aggressive action); or if the magnitude of damage to a target was low if the threat was carried out (such as a mild threat with negligible impact if executed on a target). Thus threat priority would be highest when the most crucial target interests are threatened by a highly capable source, when the target has not anticipated or prepared for the threat, and the threat has a high probability of being carried out in the near future with a potentially massive devastating impact on the target. This alternative threat assessment approach specifically gauges threat severity,7 facilitating systematic prioritization of incoming dangers. The purpose behind developing this approach is to determine the relative8—not absolute—levels of threat severity so as to be able to compare different types of dangers and to develop appropriate means of responding to them. In a world facing multiple kinds of threat from multiple kinds of threat sources, what appears to be most critical is the ability to discriminate systematically among incoming dangers in such as way as to be able to distinguish between those deserving immediate attention and significant security expenditures and those that can be placed on the back burner because they are of lesser importance. This prioritization system is designed to prevent arbitrary determination of what threats are important and what threats are unimportant, as well as of what constitutes a severe threat in the first place. In a broad sense, this alternative approach to threat assessment is evaluating the level of control9 by a threat target over adverse external ominous circumstances it faces. Specifically, the focus is on evaluating the ratio of a threat source’s coercive ability in marshaling resources to disrupt a target, compared to a threat target’s ability to resist that effort and manage its own affairs as it sees fit. Although traditionally such control issues are considered a simple direct function of the overall military, economic, and political power of contending parties, the transformed nature of incoming threat in the post–Cold War security setting makes such framing of control between threat source and threat target decidedly inappropriate. VITAL INTERESTS/PROTECTION PRIORITIES Threat assessment logically begins with a determination of the vital interests or protection priorities of threat targets, a consideration that influences threat priority by determining whether or not perceived dangers are central or peripheral, or, more specifically, whether or not they jeopardize core institutions and values critical to the survival of the target. Often the presence of certain high-profile assets may increase a target’s attractiveness in the eyes of a threat source. Many global dangers do not significantly affect a particular state’s core interests, particularly if these interests are carefully circumscribed: for example, random violence or localized ethnic strife halfway around the world would usually not qualify as a national security danger.

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Calculating Vital Interests/Protection Priorities These vital interests, which help to form the basis of group or national identity and are relatively stable over time, may include preserving the form of government (such as the American emphasis on promoting democratic institutions at home and abroad) and prevailing political leadership and ideology; human life or human rights of the population as a whole; territorial integrity of an inhabited area; economic freedoms, material wealth, and the overall commercial infrastructure; cherished cultural traditions, including language, holidays, and religious beliefs; or most generally simply the autonomy to make all choices by oneself without any constraint imposed from outside. More specifically, for advanced industrial societies, critical infrastructure components or key assets include transportation facilities, terminals, and other areas with concentration of persons; public utilities, including electricity, water, natural gas, and waste treatment; and public and government facilities, symbolic sites, town halls, county buildings, police, fire, and school buildings, stadiums, museums, and monuments.10 Complexities Surrounding Vital Interests/Protection Priorities Threat targets have to make judgments on a continuing basis about the degree to which their interests or assets may be at risk, and gauging how centrally a danger relates to vital interests or protection priorities may be highly subjective. Smaller and more homogeneous threat targets tend to have an easier time reaching consensus about vital interests than do larger and more heterogeneous targets, and threat targets that have existed for a long time tend to have more agreement on core interests than those that have recently formed. Because of the diverse values present in today’s global anarchic system, it would be impossible for an outside party to identify a single set of vital interests that apply to all potential threat targets, or a universally accepted notion of a particular target’s set of vital interests, let alone one that persisted unchanged over time. For these reasons, the most accurate calculation of a threat target’s vital interests or protection priorities at any point in time would always be that generated by those within the target (even when no within-target consensus exists about these interests and priorities). Although it may occasionally appear as if a threat target has misjudged the relative importance of its risked assets, threat assessment would benefit little from having other parties tell it what its interests and priorities should be. Included in this vital interest calculus would be not only how a danger directly affects one’s own people, structures, and territory, but also how a threat indirectly affects one’s close allies. Especially given increasing cross-national interdependence, national interests with respect to threat can readily include regional concerns, with dangers faced by allies taken carefully into account and directly influencing national threat priorities. A threat aimed at an ally and not at oneself may warrant attention because a weak ally to threatened states will not receive aid from them when it is needy. The priority of threats to allies is likely to rise even higher in the future, as states deliberately build the capacity of their friends and partners to undertake

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military operations to diversify risk. Moreover, increasingly ‘‘threats seem generally more likely to generate a genuine perception of common danger. . .because of the potential for spillover effects in today’s world, as turmoil and stress in one nation spread to its neighbors.’’11 DANGEROUS INSTIGATORS/HARMFUL EVENTS After identifying vital interests and key assets, in assessing threat it is then important to identify dangerous instigators or harmful events, affecting threat priority by determining to what extent the sources of risk have the capacity to disrupt the threat target. It is here that the capabilities and intentions of instigators can play a role, but there are two key differences from traditional initiator-oriented assessment: in this target-centered approach, a threat source’s capabilities and intentions play a subsidiary rather than decisive controlling role in determining threat severity; and the capabilities-and-intentions analysis focuses exclusively on the capacity to disrupt a specific designated target, rather than on a generic overall capacity for external disruption (a threat source may have a sizable overall capacity to disrupt, but may not be able to bring its power to bear on some types of targets). Calculating Dangerous Instigators/Harmful Events The calculation of a threat source’s capacity to disrupt a threat target takes into account the threat source’s degree of access to a given target, its capability to carry out a disruption, its stated or implied intent to do so, its history of past similar disruptive activity, and its discernible preparation to engage in such foreign disruption.12 The absence of any one of these can substantially reduce a threat source’s disruptive capabilities. As evidence of this capacity to disrupt a threat target, one would examine the kinds of resources the threat source controls13 that could be used for externally disruptive purposes, as well as the public pronouncements and private intelligence pertaining to leaders’ plans to use these resources. It is extremely important in assessing dangerous instigators to distinguish between an instigator’s bluster, reflecting an attempt to amplify its capacity to wreak havoc, and its actual capacity to disrupt it. A part of this calculation would consider the payoffs the threat source perceives as resulting from this external disruption. Complexities Surrounding Dangerous Initiators/Harmful Events However, in light of the asymmetric threat prevalent in the post–Cold War and post-9/11 context, what is pivotal within a threat source is not just the presence of substantial offensive military capabilities and an unambiguous intention to employ these capabilities against a particular target, but also an unyielding will involving an openness to sacrifice anything—including the lives of its own people—in pursuing its cause. Such unyielding will has repeatedly proven to be a kind of force multiplier in today’s violent global confrontations: for example, one ingredient making the

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‘‘vulnerability gap’’ in the United States so wide in the terrorists’ favor is that ‘‘our resolve to defeat the terrorist threat here at home does not match the terrorists’ resolve to defeat us here at home.’’14 Some foes do not have the capability to project their power overseas to affect a particular target, and others do not possess the intention or will to do so effectively. If an interconnected web composed of multiple hostile threat sources (possibly mixing state and nonstate instigators together) launched a given threat in a conspiratorial manner, its severity would be decidedly higher than if one of the sources independently instigated the threat. For the category of dangers reflecting ‘‘threats without threateners’’ not involving intentional human initiation, threat targets would evaluate incoming harmful events on the basis of the capacity of a natural disaster, pandemic disease, undesired migration wave, or nuclear accident to disrupt a target state, without focusing on either intentionality or will. Estimates of this disruptive capacity would rely more on empirical observation of persistence, enormity, and direction of prevailing trends than on figuring out the mind-set of hostile parties. With many unintentional threats, the possibility of preventing an instigator from carrying out a threat through countering with verbal persuasion or coercive force is simply not on the table. One of the trickiest aspects of evaluating dangerous instigators or harmful events as an element of target-centered threat assessment is determining the extent to which there is a focus on a particular target. Even if one has fully and fairly calculated the capacity for external disruption, it is often difficult to assess whether a given party is either the primary target or would suffer the bulk of the damage if the threat actually came to pass. Intelligence explicitly directed at targeting strategies or trajectories can help to reduce the ambiguity surrounding the question of whether or not a threat has a focused target. VULNERABILITY TO DAMAGE/LOSS Once vital assets and danger sources are identified, threat assessment needs to look at a threat target’s vulnerability to damage or loss, reflecting a threat target’s risk anticipation and preparation. This assessment element forces consideration of whether or not sufficient target defenses and contingency emergency plans are in place to secure vital assets against probable dangers. These contingency plans include such elements as evacuation strategies, stockpiling food, water, and medical supplies, frequent drills and exercises simulating the actualization of risks, and an unambiguous chain of command.15 Vulnerability is in essence a weakness, defect, or security hole in protection of physical structures or personnel that a threat source may exploit. Determining vulnerability includes considering how accessible a target is to a threat source, the adequacy of protection of these resources, and the availability of security responses.16 Calculating Vulnerability to Damage/Loss Examples of vulnerability include if hostile parties can successfully attack and disable a country’s electric power plants, if taking out a critical node in the air traffic

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control system can stop a state’s entire continental air transportation grid, or if public health capabilities are incapable of handling an outbreak of contagious influenza. Although many analysts associate threat vulnerabilities largely with weak states,17 even the United States is highly vulnerable in areas such as borders, ports, energygenerating and food-processing facilities, financial institutions, government buildings, mass transit systems, and culturally symbolic sites;18 indeed, in advanced industrial societies, vulnerabilities in areas that are sentimentally valued, densely populated, or vital to the political and economic infrastructure abound.19 Insufficient anticipation of and preparation for risks are at the core of vulnerability, such as when adequate defenses exist, but insufficient strategic warning of incoming threats keeps defenses from being mobilized in time to protect assets. National vulnerability often reflects not technological but rather leadership and organizational deficiencies, as lack of readiness for incoming dangers is a function as much of human as much as technical deficiencies. For democratic state threat targets, eradicating certain types of vulnerability is difficult regardless of the best efforts of government officials: these states are wide open, providing an irresistible invitation to terrorists and insurgents to cause enormous harm at low cost. In comparison, American security costs the economy hundreds of billions of dollars, with little payoff in return; mounting truly effective domestic defenses would not only bankrupt the United States, but also severely circumscribe citizens’ freedoms. This lack of anticipation of and preparation for threat embedded in vulnerability to damage or loss may also relate to dependence on external means for coping with imminent dangers. If a threat target requires military or economic aid from other parties to cope with an external threat—such as in the case of an alliance member that engages in burden sharing to provide its defense—then anticipation and preparation for outside peril becomes a lot more complicated, requiring not only the target but also the aid providers to recognize and commit the resources to deal with the impending dangers. Those threat targets that depend only upon themselves for anticipation of and preparation for threat have the advantage that they can move more quickly and decisively in doing so, but only if they possess internally adequate resources to undertake protective action successfully. Otherwise, those with external protection dependencies—which may be a product of prudent choice20 rather than weakness or desperation—may have a distinct advantage here. Complexities Surrounding Vulnerability to Damage/Loss Vulnerability to damage or loss is complicated by the explicit requirement that a threat target examine not only the incoming dangers it faces but also the countermeasures it takes to address these dangers. Changes in vulnerability may generate changes in the ways threats are manifested: vulnerabilities have a tendency to change continuously over time, not only because a target may take steps to reduce a particularly vulnerability—this assessment element is the one threat targets can affect most directly—but also because a threat instigator may switch strategies and focus on different assets as existing target vulnerabilities change over time. A key complexity

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in calculating vulnerability revolves around the resiliency of an affected threat target. If such a target possesses the will, determination, and know-how to recover quickly from a devastating disruption, then the vulnerability to damage or loss from actualized threat would be lower than if a threat target lacked these attributes. Thus estimating a threat target’s readiness to repair any damage would be critical, related to its anticipation of and preparation for incoming threat, in calculating its vulnerability to damage or loss. PROBABILITY OF DAMAGE/LOSS With the vulnerability of vital assets and threat sources determined, the next threat assessment step is to examine the probability of damage or loss, determining the likelihood that a risk will occur within a threat target. This determination specifically involves careful calculations of the chance that identified risks will become actual events within a specified period of time, with higher probabilities of damage or loss directly raising the priority of associated dangers. Many ominous perils are not the subject of much security policy attention because their chance of actually coming to pass seems remote (a classic example is Earth being hit by a meteor from outer space). Calculating Probability of Damage/Loss The probability of damage or loss needs to incorporate the imminence of the impact, reflecting whether or not a threat is likely to be carried out in the very near future or to originate from geographically proximate sources. It is easy to imagine a threat that exhibits a high probability of damage to a target over a ten-year period, but not over a one- or two-year period of time, and—all else being equal—the more imminent threat would be the more severe one and would deserve the higher threat priority. However, imminence is often quite hard to calculate with any certainty because incoming intelligence—absent an explicit time-specific ultimatum—is rarely that precise. Calculating the probability of damage or loss relies on the best short-term and long-term intelligence data about the past frequency of occurrence and severity of impact from a threat source against a particular target. Critical to this process is extrapolation over time of relevant changes in the target and in outside threats.21 Meaningful scrutiny of past disruptive patterns seems most productive when a threat target has a long history of outside interference and when quality documentation exists on these past disruptions. For unintended natural threats, these historical data concerning the past frequency and intensity of the dangers would seem particularly pivotal. Included in this probability calculation would be assessing the credibility of (1) a threatening source (whether or not an enemy’s interests justify the costs it would need to pay to carry out the threat and whether or not actualized threats have emerged in the past) and (2) the threat itself (whether or not carrying out a threat is currently feasible and is of relatively low cost).22

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Complexities Surrounding Probability of Damage/Loss If an external threat is one time only, has no past parallel, or is discrete rather than continuous, then estimates concerning the probability of damage or loss from external threat become more difficult, distorted by subjective opinion rather than hard data, and shaky in terms of their confidence threshold. External threat emerging from multiple sources at one time could also pose probability calculation complexities, as appropriately aggregating the differing individual probabilities associating with each threat source may be difficult. Looking at past frequency of occurrence is not an infallible guide, as the future may not always repeat the past.23 A key obstacle to calculating the probability of damage or loss is that such an estimate can be quite volatile, changing dramatically over time as a result of transformation taking place within a threat source, threat target, or the global security environment. A typical defect in extrapolating future threat is the inertia-laden assumption that current dangers will continue unchanged and that no new threats will emerge.24 This rapid pace of possible change, along with the interactivity of elements affecting this change, means that probability of damage or loss needs to be continually reassessed. Because such continuing monitoring and assessment by threat sources and targets may themselves directly affect the probability of damage or loss, estimating this probability can sometimes become quite convoluted. MAGNITUDE OF DAMAGE/LOSS A final threat assessment step—going hand in hand with the probability of damage or loss—is considering the magnitude of damage or loss, reflecting the impact of actualized risks and the scope and intensity of the ensuing devastation within a threat target. Threat prioritization is heavily influenced by how crippling the damage would be and how widespread the damage would be, that could occur, with the key issue being the degree to which a target’s integrity and ability to function is impaired by a disruption. In cases where the devastation is easy to contain in just one geographical sector or is confined to just one group of people, then the relative priority of the danger would generally be low, although it is admittedly difficult to compare the severity of one danger that threatens to decimate totally a small area to another danger that threatens a lower level of disruption to a much larger area. Calculating Magnitude of Damage/Loss Determining the weight of a carried-out threat’s consequences includes loss involving humans (death, injury, disease, and suffering and psychological trauma); individual or institutional finances; physical environmental damage within one’s sovereign territory; disruption of critical political, economic, and social infrastructures; degraded military capabilities—particularly defensive ones—that enemy action could neutralize; and lower effectiveness of one’s deterrence, foreign policy,

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and leadership. Within a small time frame, the magnitude of damage or loss to a target a threat is likely to generate rarely fluctuates dramatically. Considering this impact of actualized risks on a threat target provides a way of estimating how disruptive ominous dangers could be well before their occurrence, allowing one’s leadership and people to steel themselves for such a shock and to formulate where feasible postdisruption recovery plans. If a target ends up being externally dependent for this recovery, calculating this impact of actualized risks in advance becomes even more important. How long a target is incapacitated by a disruption is crucial, as in some cases long down times can be deadly, and having recovery plans in place can reduce this significantly. Often a threat target inappropriately spends far more time calculating the probability of dangers being actualized than it does figuring out the actual damage that it would suffer if a threat were to be carried out, preventing serious consideration of postdisruption recovery. Complexities Surrounding Magnitude of Damage/Loss Figuring out such losses may reflect considerably more than the monetary value of material destruction, as the psychological effect on fear, uncertainty, and resentment is critical. The strength of this internal attitudinal reaction may partially be a function of how surprising the devastation was following the carrying out of a threat. If a threat is substantially different from that experienced by a threat target in the past, with the potential for distinctive kinds of devastation, then the psychological impact within the threat target may be more severe. When threat targets assess this possible damage, it is quite common for them to downplay or even ignore completely the crucial emotional consequences that can directly affect unity and resiliency of the target in the face of ominous peril. The threat of nuclear attack, regardless of its probability of actually being carried out, exemplifies how a potentially devastating emotional impact can dramatically affect threat prioritization. Although determining psychological impacts is much more complex and difficult than determining physical destruction, the emotional ramifications of actualized threat are crucial to examine because of their direct relevance to postdisruption stability, demoralization, and resiliency. ADVANTAGES OF TARGET-CENTERED THREAT ASSESSMENT This book’s alternative target-centered threat assessment approach has several advantages over traditional modes of analysis. Most fundamentally, this alternative approach to assessing threat avoids several prevailing problems in threat assessment: (1) needing to focus on elusive initiator motivations in order to gauge threat severity, (2) needing to make sharp arbitrary differentiations between human-initiated intentional conventional threat and nonhuman initiated or unintentional unorthodox threat, (3) needing to utilize highly subjective estimates of foreign threat, and (4) needing to emphasize facets of threat about which a target can do little. Despite incorporating a broader range of threats, target-centered threat assessment engages

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in more restrictive tangible localized threat assessment, avoiding the vagaries of evaluating the global implications of threat by concentrating exclusively on the specific context of a particular target, and limits the information minimally required, involves more valid and reliable measurement, and enhances the potential for threat targets to undertake remedial action. Focusing on the probability of risks occurring within a target and on the impact of actualized risks on a target rather than on the intentions of a threat initiator shifts the emphasis to easier-to-evaluate phenomena rather than speculative guesswork about motivations of enemy leaders. There is little doubt that potential threat targets would be more able to gather valid and reliable information about their own vulnerabilities than about some outside party’s intentions. This decreased subjectivity could help to reduce the distorting influence of perceptual vigilance and perceptual defense tendencies in threat identification. This emphasis shift is especially important because in today’s world discrete, easily recognizable threats are rare, and their exact source and associated motivations may never be known because intelligence isolating the threat initiator and its plans is elusive; a threat may manifest itself more through slowly escalating aggression, exploiting ambiguity, inconsistency, and plausible deniability using third parties. Moreover, focusing on the vital interests of a target rather than on initiator concerns shifts the emphasis to consequences only of direct concern to the threat targets rather than on a wider range of potential outcomes. Because this alternative approach to threat is oriented toward localized security rather than global security, threat targets are in a much better position to try to assess the extent to which dangers directly affect them rather than the extent to which generic global peril is present or absent. A key underlying assumption is that it is easier for a target to determine systematically a foreign threat’s potential negative impacts on itself—especially in assessing its own vulnerabilities and core interests—than it would be to calculate wider regional or global impacts. Furthermore, in focusing on the capacity of threat sources to disrupt threat targets, incorporating both orthodox and unorthodox security dangers forces an integrated analysis and response to both unintentional/non-human-instigated threats and conventional perils in order to increase the overall coherence of security protection against any disruptive outside dangers no matter what their nature. This integration seems vital because, despite their very different origins—unorthodox dangers may have potential disruptive impacts quite similar to orthodox ones and assessing them in separate and isolated ways impedes the development of a unified effective protection system guarding against any form of incoming disruption. The challenges for determining threat severity when facing traditional and nontraditional threats appear to be quite parallel: just as not every occurrence of traditional saber rattling from an antagonistic state would be classified as a high-priority threat, so not every specter of nontraditional terrorist violence or natural calamity would warrant security prioritization. Finally, from a policy response standpoint, focusing more on target vulnerability than initiator attributes shifts the emphasis to specific security holes about which a

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target can potentially take remedial action, instead of an adversary’s overall military power about which a target can do little and seems likely to get frustrated. Reducing domestic vulnerability in response to outside threat is not only potentially more effective in achieving security protection goals but also less likely to generate misunderstanding and resentment from the international community. More broadly, this approach seems more likely to generate a wider range of viable policy options for a threat target because it is so centered on its modifiable assets and weaknesses. BASE THRESHOLD FOR SEVERE THREAT Although this alternative assessment approach addresses many threat analysis deficiencies, it is admittedly a bit imprecise regarding the crucial issue of the base threshold for a threat to be considered severe, reflecting the widespread uncertainty about the exact point in the evolution of an emerging threat when one should respond (relevant here is Figure 3.1’s depiction of the movement from hostile attitudes to hostile actions toward enemies). To be sure, the first chapter identified that this book chooses to focus on whether or not it can have dire disruptive impacts not only on individuals and groups within the mass population, but also on stability of governments in affected states or on the functioning of authority structures in nonstate targets. But how vital do threatened interests have to be? How much of a disruptive capacity for a target does a threat source have to possess? How much vulnerability to a threat does a target have to exhibit? How great a probability has to exist that a threat will actually be carried out for a target? How large does the actual damage to a target of a carried-out threat have to be? Complexities Surrounding Calculating Base Threshold of Severe Threat One example of this quandary surrounds the currently debated question of the base threshold for American action to deal with emerging nuclear threat. Should the United States respond to a hostile state’s new nuclear initiative when foreign scientists are starting to think about launching a nuclear program, when an R&D complex (often deliberately dual-purpose) is built, when foreign weapon systems are being fabricated and tested, when finished end-items are beginning to be fielded, or when an offensive strike is imminent? The question about the base threshold for severe threat thus relates not only to the level of threat one considers important, but also to the timing of one’s response and to how blatant dangers have to be to justify such a response. Another instance illustrating this quandary is in dealing more generally with low-probability, high-impact threats. If the short-term likelihood of such a threat being carried out is low, the danger posed would seem to be not very severe; yet if the magnitude of damage resulting from the threat being carried out turned out to be high, the same danger might be judged to be extremely severe. So when threat assessment involves multiple indicators, and a danger ranks very high on some and

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very low on others, then determining its priority—or whether or not it exceeds some base threshold—can be problematic, calling for a probing evaluation of the overall threat picture. Part of the difficulty in determining a base threshold is related to the imprecise distinction between friction and threat. As political frictions between threat source and threat target intensify, at some point on an ascending slope the military forces that lurk in the background and constitute an implicit threat begin to be used more explicitly. The dividing line is very hard to delineate, as is determining just what constitutes a ‘‘threat’’ as opposed to merely friction, disagreement, conflicting goals, misunderstandings, resentments, or animosities. Schemes to Determine Base Threshold of Severe Threat When trying to find a base threshold for threat severity, some schemes have emerged that attempt to determine precisely how to prioritize different kinds of threats. For example, one approach25 utilizes a five-point scale to gauge the impact of loss of life or property, or interruption of facility or other asset use, potentially resulting from a threat: (1) extreme threat would involve substantial loss of life or irreparable, permanent, or prohibitively costly repair to a facility; (2) high threat would involve serious and costly damage to a facility, but with no loss of life; (3) medium threat would involve disruption to facility operations for a moderate period of time, repairs that would not result in significant loss of facility capability, and no loss of life; (4) low threat would involve some minor disruption to facility operations or capability and no loss of life; and (5) negligible threat would involve insignificant loss or damage to operations or budget and no loss of life. Although such fixed formulaic prioritization schemes are usually sound in suggesting how to measure personal and property damage for individuals and groups within the mass population, these schemes do not focus on how to measure exactly the extent to which a global threat can have dire disruptive impacts on stability of governments in affected states or on the functioning of authority structures in nonstate targets. It is precisely in calculating the potential of incoming threat to cause society-wide disruption within a target—fomenting instability and paralyzing key institutions—that the greatest subjectivity in distinguishing between major and minor consequences is still present. Similarly, ranking or weighting threat assessment elements is possible as a means to help prioritize dangers. One could rank all of threat assessment elements as equally important in determining threat severity or alternatively weight elements differently according to their relative importance, and one could have a high ranking on one element sufficient for severe threat or alternatively require high ratings in multiple elements—or even all elements—for severe threat. However, this book’s targetcentered threat assessment elements are highly intertwined, making it difficult to place one above the rest: for example, the capacity of a threat source to disrupt a target could affect both the probability of a threat being carried out and the magnitude of an actualized threat’s impact; and the importance of endangered assets within

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a target could affect the target’s anticipation of and preparation for a threat. Furthermore, situations differ in demanding more risk acceptance in some areas and less in others: for example, natural disasters that have a low probability of occurring in the short-run, but at the same time produce massive damage if they do materialize, often warrant consideration as severe threats.26 Role of Judgment in Estimating Base Threshold of Severe Threat Unfortunately, thus there is no way to circumvent completely the inevitable judgment—involving careful examination of cultural and historical context—in utilizing a target-centered approach to establish a base threshold for severe threat. The severity threshold for a particular threat target would largely depend on its core stress tolerance, leadership strength and political support (local and global), and the type of risks involved. This threshold could change significantly over time. While the analytical approach presented here does not completely resolve this important threshold issue, it would at least facilitate more fair and balanced comparison of the relative severity of different threats for a given target. In other words, one should be able to determine for a given target what the differences are between the severity of a threat it is currently facing and the severity of threat it has faced before—or between the severity of multiple threats one is facing at the same time—assuming beliefs in the target have not radically changed in the interim. Moreover, despite the absence of an exact universal threat severity standard, for allies that share similar values and frame of reference, meaningful comparisons of threat severity are possible. CONCLUSION As a means of addressing prevalent threat analysis deficiencies and improving the means of evaluating and prioritizing incoming post–Cold War threats, this book’s target-centered approach appears to hold great promise. In emphasizing vital interests and protection priorities, dangerous instigators and harmful events, vulnerability to damage or loss, probability of damage or loss, and magnitude of damage or loss, this approach comprehensively encompasses the full range of elements that threat targets would need to consider in judging the complete spectrum of dangers they are likely to face in today’s world. Although the approach presented here certainly does not completely eliminate subjectivity or imprecision in threat assessment, it seems decidedly preferable to the outmoded initiator-centered modes of analysis for evaluating post–Cold War global dangers.

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Recent Global Threat Cases This chapter provides a brief examination of four threat cases—the 2003 United States–Iraq War, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, the 2005 London Transport bombings, and the 2006 Mexico–United States illegal immigration tensions. The purpose of this exploration is to illustrate concretely the deficiencies of traditional threat analysis and responses, pointing to the need for this book’s alternative target-centered approach. The rationale for the case selection includes (1) the recency of the cases, as the selected incidents all occurred after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States so as to reflect ongoing security challenges; (2) the significance of the cases in terms of their domestic and international repercussions; and (3) the representation by the cases of a wide range of threat variations— the United States–Iraq War involves traditional state-initiated threat, the tsunami disaster involves nature-initiated threat, the London Transport bombings involve terrorist-initiated threat, and the Mexico–United States illegal immigration tensions involve undesired mass population threat. The newness of these cases means that some elements may still be in flux.1 Rather than attempting to elaborate on all the major ramifications surrounding selected incidents, the case summaries focus exclusively on evaluating threat targets’ threat analyses and threat responses. In each instance, faulty analysis—involving deficient threat identification, coverage, and assessment—led to inappropriate and ineffective policy responses to the perils. Furthermore, in all cases application of a different mode of threat evaluation appears to have had the potential to lead to more positive outcomes. All four cases incorporate both primary and secondary dangers, creating more complex challenges. Figure 6.1 summarizes the overall case comparison.

2003 UNITED STATES–IRAQ WAR This case involves perceived threat within a traditional state-to-state violent confrontation, with the United States preventively initiating countermeasures against Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime in Iraq. On March 19–20, 2003, the invasion of Iraq—called Operation Iraqi Freedom—commenced. Despite American claims that its coalition included 49 nations, the initial land coalition force consisted of about 200,000 Americans, 50,000 Britons, 2,000 Australians, and 200 Poles (Denmark and Spain helped in sea-based naval operations). The campaign reached a

Case Name 2003 United States– Iraq War

Threat Source Rogue State

Threat Target United States Government

Primary and Secondary Threats Iraq’s Alleged Possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Links to al-Qaeda Terrorists

Threat Response Perception of Danger Overanticipation by Preventive War Government of Threat due to Misidentifying Security Dangers

Benefit of Target-Centered Threat Assessment Revelation of Low Target Vulnerability to Damage

Local Insurgency and Violence Perceptual Vigilance 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster

2005 London Transport Bombings

Nature

Terrorists

People Living in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand

Infrastructure in England

Undersea Earthquake and Tidal Waves Devastating People and Property

Underanticipation by Government of Catastrophe due to Ineffective Warning

Spread of Lethal Infectious Disease

Perceptual Defense

United States Citizenry

Perceptual Defense

Overwhelming Social Services Underanticipation by Barriers to Entry Difficulty of Applying and Endangering Cultural Government of Influx due to Border Patrols Coercion to Reduce Target’s Identity Reliance in Increased Coercion Exposure to Danger Rise of Nativist Violence against Illegal Migrants

Figure 6.1 Comparing Recent Global Threat Cases

Highlighting Target’s Lack of Preparation for Incoming Danger

Disruption of Public Transport Underanticipation by Apprehension of Incompatibility of Facilities and Killing Government of Attacks due to Perpetrators Conciliation toward Commuters Conciliation toward Extremists Extremists with Target’s Core Values Paralysis of Overloaded Communication System

2006 Mexico–United Undocumented States Illegal Migrants Flooding Immigration Tensions across Border

Future Early Warning Systems

Perceptual Defense

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speedy conclusion, with the capital city Baghdad controlled on April 9, followed by the collapse of the Iraqi government, signified by the fall of Saddam Hussein’s stronghold Tikrit on April 15. On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared that major combat operations were over. In December 2003, after much searching, United States troops captured Saddam Hussein himself, a step of huge symbolic importance to both the American government and American citizens. Threat Analysis The perceived incoming threat prompting the American preventive response was that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction—possessing chemical weapons and making biological and nuclear weapons—and ties to the terrorist group al-Qaeda. President George W. Bush specifically feared that Saddam Hussein could provide these arms to terrorists for use against the United States.2 This threat framing focused on the threat source’s ominous capabilities and intentions without closely scrutinizing its actual capacity for severe disruption of the target, and this framing did not include a detailed and realistic appraisal of the target’s risk preparation or of the probability of risks actually occurring within the target—including the imminence of these risks—and the magnitude of their impact. Later on, however, when no weapons of mass destruction were found and no link to al-Qaeda could be confirmed, the goals of the American preventive action changed considerably. Implicit regional instability threats associated with an authoritarian hostile state led the United States to embrace a focus simply on bringing democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people to pave the way for peace and democratization of the Arab world.3 Classic moralistic black-and-white thinking was evident, ‘‘with the United States symbolizing ‘good’ and its enemies embodying ‘evil,’’’ associated with a ‘‘chasm of suspicion and hostility’’ between Westerners and Muslims.4 The enemy image linked to this cultural divide substantially impeded any chance for mutual understanding or sensitivity. Indeed, throughout the war skepticism has abounded about the American government’s underlying assumptions, especially the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Hussein and al-Qaeda: ‘‘there is broad agreement among U.S. foreign policy experts, as well as much of the American public and the international community, that the threat assessments that President George W. Bush and his administration used to justify the war against Iraq were greatly exaggerated, and on some dimensions wholly baseless.’’5 Despite fluctuations in observer reactions throughout the war, a marked disconnect emerged within the United States about the war between the perceptions of the general public and those of many so-called opinion leaders.6 International criticism of the war was widespread particularly from Europeans—who viewed Middle Eastern dangers quite differently from Americans 7 and generally did not see Iraq as an immediate threat—and from Russia, China, and the Arab League. Indeed, some critics viewed the United States rather than Iraq as the threat source, rejecting any justification for preventive attack.

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From the outset, American leaders overestimated the ease of coping with the perceived threat, anticipating that U.S. forces would be greeted by grateful cheering Iraqis: Overoptimism in the planning of the war—about how many troops were needed and what they were likely to face after a military victory—spawned several failures of the occupation phase. [U.S. Secretary of State Donald] Rumsfeld’s doctrine of using small, highly maneuverable forces plus overwheming aerial bombardment proved successful in achieving quick military victories (both in Afghanistan and in Iraq), but it contained a hidden overoptimism about what these same forces would face the day after victory. In the planning phase, officials played down potential postwar problems partially in order to garner support for launching the war.8

American military planners underestimated opposition groups’ postwar violence, American supply lines’ vulnerability, local guerrilla-style resistance’s potency, and overall reconstruction costs.9 The American military resisted any impulse to adopt new tactics to deal with the threat: The reasons for the missteps by U.S. troops [in the 2003 Iraq War] can be traced to an ingrained Pentagon tradition of training and fighting for conventional war, with well-plotted battle lines and an easily distinguished enemy. The U.S. force in Iraq was slow to recognize the emergence of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and it has been reluctant to adopt counterinsurgency tactics. Commanders trained in heavy artillery assaults bristled at the notion of exposing troops on street patrols, interacting with Iraqi citizens and gathering intelligence on likely insurgents.10

This overoptimism did not end when major fighting ceased: in May 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated, ‘‘I think we are on the verge of success here.’’11 To many analysts, ‘‘Iraq proves again, hard on the heels of Afghanistan, that the United States chronically underestimates the difficulties of nonmilitary aspects of foreign interventions and wildly inflates nonmilitary goals without committing the resources required to achieve them.’’12 Thus the American government exhibited an unusual combination of perceptual distortions of ongoing threat: (1) perceptual vigilance—reflecting a sharp religious divide between Christianity and Islam, demonization of the Iraqi regime, hypersensitivity to threat after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and massive and escalating capacity to retaliate; and (2) perceptual defense—reflecting overconfidence about the adequacy of the American military response to incoming threat. Soon after the United States achieved military victory over the initial threat represented by the Saddam Hussein regime, a secondary threat appeared. In the immediate aftermath of the war, ‘‘U.S. troops stood by helplessly, outnumbered and unprepared, as much of Iraq’s remaining physical, economic, and institutional infrastructure was systematically looted and sabotaged.’’13 Anarchic violence produced interruptions in basic social services (including power plants, oil pipelines,

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communication lines, water purification facilities, and bridges), thievery in many cities (particularly Baghdad), guerrilla insurgency, and suicide bombings. The sources of postwar insurgency included ‘‘the inexplicable lack of U.S. postwar planning,’’ ‘‘Iraq’s tradition of rule by those best able to seize power through violent struggle,’’ and jihadists’ choice to make Iraq ‘‘a major theater in their war against the United States.’’14 Many insurgent attacks have been aimed not at Iraqi security forces or at civilians, but rather at American and coalition troops;15 ‘‘the estimated 20,000 insurgents in Iraq appear determined to kill as many Americans as possible in hopes that a growing casualty count will prompt U.S. withdrawal,’’16 frighten Iraqis into refusing to cooperate with American forces, and ultimately serve ‘‘to perpetuate disorder and to prevent the establishment of a legitimate, democratic Iraqi government.’’17 The insurgents’ effectiveness has not depended on beating Americans on the battlefield; rather, they ‘‘win merely by making Iraq ungovernable.’’18 Over four years after the invasion, Iraq is as violent as ever,19 a pattern that not only has caused popular support for the war to wane in both Iraq and the United States, but also has perversely delayed the exit of occupying American troops from Iraq. Threat Response The American preventive military strategy in Operation Iraqi Freedom was designed to eliminate the perceived threat and be quick and surgically effective against designated targets, with minimum loss of American soldiers’ lives. The campaign involved a simultaneous launch of a massive air campaign and limited ground attack, with a key role for Special Operations troops: precision weaponry— including satellite-guided bombs and unmanned aerial vehicles—was supposed to wreak havoc unimpeded, aided by night missions, and nullify the capacity of the enemy to fight back. An initial phase of this campaign involved ‘‘shock and awe,’’ designed to reduce the enemy’s will to fight through a display of overwhelming force using superior technology. This parsimonious military strategy did succeed in defeating Iraq’s army and toppling the Saddam Hussein regime, but it decidedly failed to establish the stated goal of stable democratic order afterward: [F]rom the moment the war ended, Iraq fell into a deepening quagmire of chaos, criminality, insurgency, and terrorism, which, even in the months following the January 2005 elections, showed no prospect of ending anytime soon. During the period of occupational rule, Iraq became a black hole of instability and a justification for neighboring regimes that insisted their societies were not culturally suited or politically ready for democracy.20

The Americans have tried ‘‘getting Iraqis to take charge of their own affairs, whether by fighting insurgents or taking over government ministries,’’21 but this has proven to be painfully slow and difficult. The United States vainly hoped that the Iraq War ‘‘would set in motion a chain of events that would eventually democratize the

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entire region.’’22 Once threat management shifted from containing weapons of mass destruction and terrorism to promoting democracy and freedom, the chances of a successful purely military strategy declined precipitously. As a result, the United States has faced long-term uncertainty in managing regional threat, with ‘‘the choice between making things worse slowly or quickly’’—‘‘keeping U.S. troops in Iraq will only provoke fiercer and more widespread resistance, but withdrawing them too soon could spark a civil war.’’23 Indeed, the dangers have been deepening: Perhaps the most intriguing connection to be explored in this context is that between the war on terrorism and the crisis in Iraq. Although this connection had remained mainly a virtual product of the U.S. administration’s public relations campaign to gain public support for the war prior to the intervention, it has actually materialized in post-Saddam Iraq. The U.S.–led military intervention in and occupation of Iraq, as well as the ensuing armed resistance, has successfully intertwined Iraq with the war on terrorism. Although terrorist acts in postwar Iraq (politically motivated attacks intentionally directed against civilians and civilian objects, both local and foreign) have been coupled with and at times even overshadowed by acts of guerrilla warfare (attacks by insurgents against coalition forces and pro-coalition Iraqi security targets, such as the ‘‘new’’ Iraqi military and police), terrorism generated by conflict in Iraq remains a long-term security problem. The continuing presence of coalition forces in Iraq also has further motivated forces ready to employ terrorist means in the fight against the United States and its allies worldwide.24

For example, in April 2004, a closely spaced series of terrorist acts hitting Damascus, Syria, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Amman, Jordan, prompted Arab fears that ‘‘the war in Iraq is fueling the very kind of extremist it was supposed to curtail.’’25 The war seems to have bred a new generation of religious extremists, dangerously heightened sectarian tensions in the Islamic world, strengthened Iran’s hand in Iraq and in matters of nuclear diplomacy, and created the most serious threat to world’s oil supply since the OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] embargo—all the while undermining American authority in the region and straining the US military to the breaking point.26

American global credibility has dipped, at least in part due to its misperception of threat; and postwar reconstruction has proven to be a costly and difficult endeavor, with thousands of Americans killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, and staggering budgetary costs of the war now estimated in the trillions of dollars.27 2004 INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI DISASTER This case involves unintended threat emerging from a powerful force of nature aimed at Third World mass populations. On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean generated a tsunami with waves up to 30 feet high, hitting the coasts of 14 countries from Southeast Asia to northeastern

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Africa. Around 300,000 people lost their lives, with most deaths in Indonesia and major loss of life in India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Due to the wide geographical scope of the damage and the destruction of many resorts favored by rich Western tourists, the catastrophe garnered considerable media attention;28 ‘‘media coverage of disasters profoundly affects both public opinion and public policymaking in the latter stages of an emergency,’’ potentially educating those exposed and creating pressure for resource allocation to relieve the suffering.29 Consistent with the importance of vulnerability—target anticipation of and preparation for risks—in determining threat severity, when dealing with natural calamities one cannot measure danger as a function simply of the magnitude of the physical disruption: ‘‘disasters of equal force often produce unequal consequences’’ due to the nature of the affected area’s physical infrastructure, the population’s attitudes and practices, the region’s medical capabilities, and the effectiveness of indigenous disaster warning, management, and relief.30 Third World states generally are far less prepared than advanced industrial societies to deal with natural disasters,31 having far fewer resources to cope with them once they occur, and thus the death toll is usually considerably higher when natural calamities hit developing countries. The 2004 tsunami is the type of disaster to which security policy makers typically pay insufficient attention—‘‘a disaster that has a very low or unknown probability of occurring, but that if it does occur creates enormous losses.’’32 Anticipating and preparing adequately for this kind of threat when threat management resources are already stretched too thin thus poses a major challenge in developing states. Threat Analysis Despite a regular pattern of regional natural disasters, the actual occurrence of a tsunami of this magnitude caught both victims and onlookers by surprise. Nobody anticipated that the devastation would be anything like what ensued. Thus even with the high importance of endangered vital assets, the high vulnerability to damage, and the high magnitude of damage of actualized risks (due to the scope of past devastation), prevailing assumptions within threat targets about the low probability and imminence of such a huge disaster hitting them impeded preparedness for the ensuing devastation. The affected governments’ records of threat recognition and response were consequently dismal: ‘‘in the first few days after the tidal wave, outside powers as well as affected countries’ governments failed to grasp the disaster’s scale, and their responses were consequently slow.’’33 The few officials who suspected danger did not effectively disseminate disaster-related information. Although a regional tsunami early warning system might have saved thousands of lives, affected governments had not implemented such a system: even with the latest technology, pinpoint prediction of the direction and the magnitude of tsunamis has been difficult;34 even had such an early warning system existed, no standard operating procedures for evacuation were available. Unlike in other humanitarian emergencies where affected states may knowingly suppress or distort information,35 here ignorance prevailed, reinforced by national leaders’

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pervasive perceptual defense reflecting the absence of identifiable enemies, recent sizable tsunamis, or substantial capacity to respond to cataclysmic natural disasters. Moreover, affected states had been distracted by other dangers: The terrorist assault on the US in September 2001 cost 3,000 lives and changed security priorities around the world; the tsunami killed 100 times as many people, showing that too little attention has been paid to building defences against non-military threats and prompting the question of whether it will at least change Asian governments’ security policies. For years, there has been considerable discussion in Asia, in the context of the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Regional Forum for example, concerning ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘non-traditional’’ security concepts. However, such discussions have had no discernible impact on states’ national security policies, which have remained overwhelmingly focused on providing internal security against separatism and political dissidence, and external security against perceived threats from other states.36

Natural disasters test the mettle of rapid deployment systems to respond quickly and effectively to unorthodox threats,37 and the states hit by the tsunami failed this test due to their more traditional security concerns. In the wake of the tsunami, the mass public within affected areas was mostly in a state of panic or shock, with little idea about what was actually transpiring. Few events leave people feeling more helpless and insecure than devastating natural calamities: despite widespread improvements in warning and disaster prevention,38 many feel more vulnerable than ever before to nature’s wrath.39 After the tsunami subsided, millions found themselves or their loved ones injured or destitute. Inadvertently people often end up ‘‘changing their environment to make it more prone to some disasters’’ and ‘‘behaving so as to make themselves more vulnerable to these hazards,’’ through overhabitation, overcultivation, and overdeforestation of flood-vulnerable land;40 within tsunami-affected areas, many people had earlier imprudently built or moved into homes and hotels in highly vulnerable coastal areas. After the tsunami threat was actualized and the direct damage to persons and property occurred, a secondary threat emerged involving the outbreak of disease epidemics, with children—who constituted over a third of the tsunami’s victims—a primary worry.41 Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations warned that ‘‘as many could die from disease—malaria and dengue fever, as well as typhoid and cholera—as from the tsunami itself.’’42 Societies affected by the tsunami lacked clean water (uncontaminated by sewage), fuel, food, medicine, and shelter, and their governments were unprepared to provide speedy and organized assistance. Only substantial health-related intervention from the international community kept this threat from mushrooming and generating a much larger loss of life at a time when the devastated populations lacked any capacity on their own to respond effectively. Threat Response When you consider the substantial monetary aid pledges from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Sweden, Spain, France, Canada, China, and

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South Korea, what occurred ‘‘was by far the most impressive international response ever to a natural disaster.’’43 By the end of December 2004 the United States government had launched substantial emergency relief efforts, including a sizable commitment of military forces (government military forces usually play a key role in natural disaster relief because the military can get self-sufficient units to the field quickly and has good communications and access to transport and heavy machinery).44 In the wake of the tsunami, the primary challenges related not to money, but rather to delivery logistics to the needy and to the lack of effective local infrastructure.45 However, natural disaster aid is usually transient: regardless of global relief efforts, after such disasters, affected Third World populations fatalistically understand that ‘‘the local people still do most of their own ‘relieving’ and reconstructing’’ as they have done for centuries before the advent of foreign aid.46 Outside assistance usually arrives suddenly in huge quantities and then ceases, leaving affected communities with difficult adjustment dilemmas47 and allowing short-term emergency needs to take precedence over long-term priorities.48 Such was certainly the case with the tsunami disaster, which generated vast unfulfilled long-run repair requirements: the costs of relief and rehabilitation have run into billions of dollars, and devastated coastal areas have taken years to reconstruct. The management of the natural disaster threat needs a major overhaul, as in the near future, ‘‘the lateness of the response, the lack of an early-warning system, the paucity of rapid-reaction units, and the absence of an overall relief coordinator all demand solutions.’’49 In the wake of the tsunami, as is typical of natural disasters, tensions emerged between broad humanitarian impulses and narrow self-interested foreign policy concerns. Optimistic observers harbored hopes that the sense of mutual vulnerability among affected areas might lead to not only cross-national cooperation in natural disaster management but also reconciliation between hostile communities, including Muslims and Buddhists in southern Thailand, Acehnese and the Jakarta government, and Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.50 However, cynics predicted that ‘‘no fundamental reordering of South and Southeast Asian states’ security priorities is likely’’ due to the ‘‘widespread inter-state suspicions, vested military and industrial interests, and the prevalent ethos of military modernisation’’ in the region.51 Following the tsunami, the pessimistic predictions proved prophetic, for affected states’ defense orientations have not undergone significant change. Thus even a totally devastating actualized regional threat could not jolt these state governments out of their parochial national security postures that classified traditional security dangers as far more worthy of attention and resources than natural disasters. This reluctance to abandon traditional security orientations applied to outside states providing relief as well as to those states directly affected by the disaster. Politicization of natural disaster aid is common because powerful onlooking states decide whether or not to intervene based more on their core national interests than on the scope of the devastation. Despite the massive humanitarian response, ‘‘governments of affected countries and local insurgent movements, as well as regional and extraregional powers engaged in relief efforts . . .have all sought political gain in the

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tsunami’s wake’’: for example, the United States ‘‘found an opportunity to improve its image amongst the population of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, at a time when the war on terrorism and the Iraqi debacle have left US credentials in the Muslim world at an all-time low’’; and the tsunami disaster afforded Japan, India, Australia, Singapore, and China a chance to flex their military muscles or subtly advance their diplomatic goals in the region.52 2005 LONDON TRANSPORT BOMBINGS This case involves the threat of violence initiated by a nonstate group against innocent civilians. On July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated suicide bombings struck London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour, on the same day that a summit of G8 (Group of Eight—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) leaders took place nearby and one day after London was selected as the venue for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Three bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other on three separate London Underground trains at different locations, and nearly an hour later a fourth bomb exploded on a London bus. The explosions killed 52 commuters plus the four terrorists—British-born Pakistani Muslims—who initiated the attacks, and they injured 700 people. Although former chief of London’s Metropolitan Police Sir John Stevens noted that ‘‘up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama bin Laden’s training camps,’’53 and al-Qaeda claimed responsibility after the bombings, no conclusive evidence has yet linked the violence to this terrorist group. This incident was the first suicide bombing ever carried out in Western Europe and the most devastating terrorist act in Britain since the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Threat Analysis Prior to the bombings, ‘‘the terrorists gave no warning, and the security services had not picked up any hint that an attack might take place (in fact the threat level had recently been downgraded from ‘severe general’ to ‘substantial’).’’54 Yet the terrorists had undoubtedly engaged in extensive intelligence gathering and preparation prior to their attacks. Despite some generic indications of danger, British government intelligence was decidedly not anticipating this particular kind of terrorist attack: three months before the bombings, the British Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded that suicide bombings were ‘‘unlikely’’ and that homegrown terrorists were ‘‘not an immediate threat.’’55 Thus the threat target’s recognition of a sizable magnitude of potential damage, high capacity of dangerous threat sources for disruption, reasonable vulnerability to such disruption, and great centrality to national interests could not overcome its low prevailing sense of the probability and imminence of danger. In a parallel fashion, regarding perceptual vigilance, tempering the awareness of a culturally different demonized foe and the capacity to retaliate was the absence of similar recent major terrorist attacks in the country.

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The immediate trigger for the bombings has not been definitively established, with possible causes including concerns about British foreign policy, seen as deliberately anti-Muslim and supporting the United States–Iraq War; economic disruption of Western business; or a simple demonstration of the continuing threat to Western lifestyle posed by transnational terrorism. However, one unmistakable underlying precipitant was a sense of complacency engendered by the long-standing British government policy of conciliation toward foreign-stimulated Islamist extremists: a million Muslims live in London, comprising an eighth of its population, and during the 1980s and 1990s ‘‘a hands-off government allowed London to become a haven for radicals and a center for calls to jihad.’’56 Prior to the London Transport bombings, this British leniency toward radical Muslim militants as long as they avoided violence in Britain—and specifically a long-standing British reluctance to extradite an Algerian militant who allegedly financed an attack on public transport in Paris in 1995—led to London being nicknamed ‘‘Londonistan’’:57 in his January 2006 trial ‘‘the radical cleric Abu Hamza claimed that between 1997 and 2000, members of MI5, the British domestic security service, effectively O.K.’d his frequent incitements to jihad, on one occasion telling him, ‘Well, it’s freedom of speech; you don’t have to worry as long as we don’t see blood on the streets.’’’58 This ‘‘covenant of security’’ between British authorities and leaders of Muslim communities has long been a ‘‘well-understood compromise’’ in which ‘‘there would be high levels of toleration in exchange for self-policing’’59 and no domestic violence. In a preventive quest for ‘‘draining the waters in which incorrigible Muslim extremists can so easily swim,’’ the British government allowed the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB)—representing the country’s major Muslim organizations (including radical ones)—‘‘to influence, or at least comment upon, policies both domestic and foreign’’; as a result, ‘‘the government has found that offering sops to the MCB ties them to policies. . . to which other citizens object,’’60 potentially emboldening internally disruptive elements and escalating social turmoil. Despite the widespread praise for the indomitable Londoners’ ‘‘blitz’’ spirit after the bombing, the sense of normalcy was illusory, as the attacks generated mass public fear and ‘‘an anxious state of mind’’:61 immediately after the bombings, the atmosphere was such that ‘‘backpacks attract nervous looks,’’ and ‘‘people try too hard not to catch the eyes of young men with brown skin.’’62 The common ‘‘sense of inevitability’’ among Londoners did ‘‘not mitigate the shock and outrage.’’63 While the London underground stations and lines are typically closed twice every three days following reports of something suspicious, ‘‘in the week after the July 7th atrocities, when every bag seemed to contain a bomb, there were an average of ten closures a day.’’64 The fact that the bombers were middle-class, educated British citizens increased the pervasive sense of uneasiness and in some ways served to ‘‘confirm observers’ worst fears’’:65 Two related questions haunt Britain, and Europe, in the wake of the London attacks. First, what is it that prompts a small minority of the continent’s Muslims to shift from discontent or personal frustration to active terror? And second, was the attack on

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London indeed an act of homegrown terror, or an atrocity initiated by people in some distant war zone who had a grudge against Britain? The Leeds arrests, while impressively swift and a credit to the police, have proved there is no easy answer to these questions. In an age of globalised ideologies, globalised communications and porous borders, there is no real distinction between domestic and foreign threats.66

Shortly after the bombings, 90 percent of Britons believed that terrorists would target London again within a year, and 59 percent believed that traveling in London had become more dangerous, though ‘‘any fear and anxiety whipped up by the bombings’’ dissipated quickly afterward.67 As a secondary threat after the London Transport bombings, a crumbling communication system compounded the disrupted transportation system. The attacks ‘‘caused cellphone networks across the city to be severely disrupted by thousands of panicked callers, hampering rescue efforts and exposing a serious flaw in emergency plans’’; minutes after the bombs exploded, ‘‘news agencies began reporting extreme congestion of major British cellphone networks as worried customers tried to contact relatives and friends’’: Vodafone’s mobile phone network (one of the largest British carriers) quickly hit capacity, causing a warning to avoid unnecessary use of cell phones, and British Telecom reported severe congestion of its traditional landline phone network.68 An extensive inquiry by the London Assembly found ‘‘severe shortcomings’’ in communication systems in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, including ‘‘the collapse of the mobile phone network, leaving millions baffled over the extent of the attacks, and a breakdown in radio communications which meant hospitals had no idea where ambulances were dropping off patients.’’69 This secondary threat could have proven to be lethal had there been a follow-up attack. Threat Response The London bombings generated military, political, economic, and social consequences. Militarily, for a time afterward, British security services remained on their highest state of alert, as the police were concerned that the terrorists would carry out another attack (as the Madrid train bombers had apparently planned to do a year before);70 and several states (including Canada, the United States, France, and Germany) raised their own terror alert status, especially for public transport. Politically, the principal opposition party praised Prime Minister Tony Blair’s statesmanship, and while ‘‘a few marginal voices have argued that the attack was payback for Iraq,’’ public opinion polls showed no increase in demands to withdraw British troops from the United States–Iraq War.71 Nonetheless, postbombing polls also indicated that most Britons supported new police powers to arrest people suspected of planning terrorist attacks, and the British government ‘‘has approved legislation facilitating a set of extra-judicial measures depriving such suspects of some civil liberties,’’ has more than doubled the proportion of intelligence resources devoted to terrorism since 2001, and ‘‘has dropped broad hints that it is stepping up surveillance and infiltration.’’72

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‘‘Let no one be in any doubt,’’ Prime Minister Tony Blair told the country a month after last July’s attacks. ‘‘The rules of the game are changing.’’ Britain has been adjusting its terror laws since the Blair government came to power in 1997. But Sept. 11, 2001, sparked calls for broad new government powers, and July 7, 2005, has created a consensus—a fragile one, but a consensus nonetheless—that even those are insufficient. The new rules Blair spoke of were to be found in a 12-point plan that included tighter enforcement of asylum and deportation, blacklists of extremist bookshops and bans on hard-line Islamist groups. . ..After the bombings, Blair warned that those who do not ‘‘share and support the values that sustain the British way of life,’’ or who incite hatred against Britain and its people, ‘‘have no place here.’’73

Economically, although the terrorists may have hoped to disrupt activities at one of the world’s financial centers, ‘‘in 24 hours the London stock market was back to its pre-bombing levels,’’ ‘‘world markets bounced back even faster,’’ and ‘‘all indications are that Britain will see a minimum drop in tourism and virtually none in trade.’’74 Socially, during the month after the attack, Scotland Yard reported a startling surge— a 600-percent increase compared to the same period a year before—in British ‘‘faith-hate’’ crimes toward Muslims.75 Protection of the London transport system faced major obstacles: Preparation and defence can go only so far. More than a million people were on the move in the rush hour, when the terrorists struck. Each day some 500,000 people commute to central London by bus and more than 2 million take the Tube. It is hard to protect such a system from attacks; and, when they happen, they disrupt millions of people’s lives.76

Already in place after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States were 6,000 closed-circuit cameras distributed widely across the London Underground (Tube) system,77 helping significantly in the apprehension—which occurred with remarkable haste in accordance with well-rehearsed emergency planning—of the perpetrators of the July 7 attacks. Future possibilities include random placement of covert security personnel on public transport and increased government vigilance of dangers, 78 but such methods face limits within democracies and may not ultimately improve protection against terrorists. 2006 MEXICO–UNITED STATES ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION TENSIONS This case involves a mass population threat affecting American citizens triggered without malice by illegal migrants—those lacking valid citizenship documents and violating the national immigration laws of the receiving state—crossing over the roughly 2,000-mile border to enter the United States from Mexico. In spring 2006, Americans’ sense of threat escalated dramatically: although ‘‘immigration has always polarized America,’’ the concern ‘‘reached a screaming pitch, fueled by talk-radio invective, mass protests by immigrants, and sometimes ugly debate over who deserves to be an American.’’79 Illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States,

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continually increasing in recent decades, now numbers around 400,000 every year; the illegal population increased from around 3 million people in 1986 to around 11 to 12 million people in 2006.80 In a broader context, the annual global illegal migration has been about 10 million to 30 million compared to about 100 million legal global migrants.81 Illegal migration to the entire industrialized world has sharply increased:82 for example, Western Europe has over 3 million illegal migrants, largely from Eastern Europe and Africa; and Japan now faces increased illegal migration from mainland China, the Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia. The Third World has rising illegal labor flows from Indonesia to Malaysia, Bangladesh to India, Nepal to Bhutan, China to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and parts of Africa to Ivory Coast, South Africa, and Nigeria.83 Mexico itself now faces huge illegal immigration—from Guatemala, China, Ecuador, Cuba, and Somalia—of people desperate to do jobs that Mexicans departing for the north no longer want.84 The precipitants of the world’s illegal migration are the increased restrictions on legal migration by both developed and developing nations since the 1970s; the growth in global markets, stimulating the development of migration networks; the removal of obstacles to migration due to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; and the emergence of transnational criminal groups—‘‘migration mafia’’—that ‘‘extract fees from would-be migrants (sometimes turning illegal migrants into bonded laborers) to arrange their transportation and employment abroad.’’85 With respect to illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States, a primary misconception is that it revolves entirely around economics: But I don’t think the immigration debate is about economics anyway. It’s about culture and it’s about fear. . ..Some academics. . .have warned that unchecked Latino immigration is bringing with it alien cultural values. . ..Maybe the real fear is more visceral than that. Maybe it’s that you don’t have to extrapolate immigration and fertility rates very far into the future to see an America in which minorities—Hispanic, African, and Asian American—are a majority.86

The illegal immigration into the United States is driven not only by poverty, unemployment, income disparities, and the interconnectedness of the Mexican and American economies, but also by the web of Mexican-American social and family connections and the cultural experience migrant Mexicans have living in the United States.87

Threat Analysis Illegal migrants are typically held responsible for any problems that emerge within countries they enter:88 overpopulation, land degradation, low wages, deteriorating public education and health care (including both soaring hospital costs and the spread of infectious diseases), overcrowded highways and prisons, official language erosion, public official corruption, foreign relations damage, or any downturn in the cherished comfortable lifestyles of the indigenous population. The international

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community’s hostility toward open borders has mushroomed in recent years—long gone is the humanitarian sentiment of Emma Lazarus’s famous poem ‘‘The New Colossus’’ inviting in the tired, poor, ‘‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’’; under globalization, the free movement of people across borders is viewed in a radically different—and more restrictive—way than free movement of goods, capital, and services.89 Unlike flows of transitory tourists, ‘‘the specter of the long term mass transfer of desperate (and frequently undesired) humans across state boundaries associates with a uniquely acute sense of peacetime threat to sovereignty in the current international system.’’90 Regarding illegal migrants from Mexico challenging American national identity, the American government did not adequately anticipate the persistence of the threat in the face of tightening coercive security measures. The United States Congress passed in 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act, mandating penalties for employers hiring illegal aliens, and in 2002 it moved the functions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Department of Homeland Security. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a primary explanation of American vulnerability was porous borders,91 yet despite substantial increases in American border security since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the flow of illegal migrants crossing the border continues unabated. Partially because ‘‘the official U.S. securitization of migration is set in a perplexing tangle of long borders, large-scale and welcomed labor migration, and sizable throngs of tourist and student visitors,’’92 restrictive measures used to contain this mass migration threat have had low payoffs. American public opinion has been visibly split on this issue, with sizable differences about core national interests between those open and closed to illegal immigration. Some Americans are content with the influx, citing economic benefits and characterizing illegal migrants as fine upstanding people who just want a chance to better their lives.93 These onlookers call those who enter ‘‘undocumented workers’’ willing to do the menial jobs American citizens no longer want to do themselves, and they remind fellow Americans of their own immigrant roots. In contrast, growing groups of American citizens—particularly residents of border states—have exhibited emotional xenophobia, fueled by high perceptual vigilance about an ethnically different depersonalized enemy, a recent history of massive illegal immigration, and a perceived high capacity to respond to the threat. In October 2005, a Border Security Alert warned that ‘‘al-Qaeda terrorists and Chinese nationals are infiltrating our country virtually anywhere they choose from Brownsville to San Diego’’;94 indeed, ‘‘a growing fear that has preoccupied both US and Mexican authorities is that the same groups, methods, and routes employed to smuggle migrants and drugs across the border can now be used to smuggle terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.’’95 A recent panic-inducing report warned that 103 million migrants might pour over the border over the next 20 years, constituting a full third of the American population. 96 Both Democratic and Republican politicians now appear to be ‘‘one-upping one another with draconian proposals and demagogic rhetoric’’ about illegal immigration. 97 Some observers have compared illegal migrant dangers to those posed by invading armies,98 with an

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emotional intensity parallel to that on abortion where ‘‘both sides [are] deeply entrenched, believing in their principles absolutely.’’99 In the end, many ‘‘Americans are frustrated and angry,’’ as ‘‘they know the system is broken’’ and ‘‘they want change.’’100 Widespread American fears target the impact of illegal migrants on day-to-day life. Focusing on personal security, the Center of Immigration Studies stated that ‘‘some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens’’:101 in 2005 alone, at least 270,000 illegal migrants spent time in local jails and state prisons within the United States.102 Illegal immigrants may have committed about 1 million sex crimes between 1999 and 2006.103 Accusations abound about illegal migrants’ debilitating health care impact: ‘‘what is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America’s finest emergency medical facilities, and caused hospital bankruptcies.’’104 Overall, the accusations comprise a devastating indictment of the severity of threat posed by a new kind of enemy: ‘‘illegal immigrants import deadly diseases, rampant crime and international terrorism; they live off welfare, destroy public schools and burden hospitals; what’s more, most haven’t even learned to speak English . . .they’re foot soldiers sent by the Mexican government to ‘reconquer’ the Southwest.’’105 Thus many Americans would rate high the magnitude, probability, and imminence of the threat target’s potential damage, due to growing illegal immigration flows; the threat target’s vulnerability to such damage, due to the length of the mutual border; the capacity of the risk sources to disrupt the threat target, due to the volume of illegal immigrants still crossing the border; and the centrality of risked assets to the threat target’s national interests, due to perceived cultural threat. A secondary threat involves these xenophobic fears stimulating among Americans violent rhetoric—and even violent acts—against those suspected of being illegal aliens.106 Nativism107 is at the root of this unrest—one challenge to cross-cultural tolerance is that illegal migrants may cause the greatest socioeconomic turmoil when they differ racially, ethnically, or religiously from the citizenry of the entered state. The nativist upsurge is ‘‘fueled by economic frustrations and national-security phobias, and inflamed by voices of hatred’’; this increasingly militant grassroots movement believes that private citizens must do ‘‘what the federal government refuses to do.’’108 A surprising intensity characterizes the nativist response to illegal immigrants from Mexico: Over the past decade, millions of Hispanic immigrants have bypassed traditional urban destinations and put down roots in the American heartland. With large groups of newcomers moving to some of the most homogeneous, tradition-steeped places in the country, a backlash was predictable. But no one could have foreseen the breadth and fury of the new nativism that has risen up from Middle America with an ominous roar.109

The volatile split within the American public about illegal immigration can cause each side to fall into a vicious action-reaction cycle escalating mutual extremism and antagonism and degrading national security.

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Threat Response Devising effective responses to illegal migration is difficult in today’s world, as it highlights moral dilemmas that national government officials are loath to discuss. Indeed, these illegal migrants may be aided—or even enticed and facilitated—by private citizens, often relatives and friends eager to unite with loved ones or business people eager to hire willing workers. Illegal migrants perform unwanted yet vital menial tasks, as ‘‘most unauthorized immigrants concentrate in jobs that have long been abandoned by the country’s legal work force.’’ 110 American businesses— particularly those in agriculture, construction, domestic service, restaurants, resorts, and prostitution—have encouraged lax law enforcement toward illegal immigrants, who provide cheap labor and thus keep profits high and prices low of goods and services. On May 15, 2006, in a nationally televised address President George W. Bush called for major reforms to deal with illegal immigration: a dramatic increase in Border Patrol agents augmented by the U.S. National Guard, a temporary worker program allowing the orderly entry of foreign workers for a limited period of time, a push for stronger law enforcement banning employers from hiring illegal migrants, an option for illegal migrants in the United States to apply for citizenship after learning English and working in a job for several years, and an emphasis on ‘‘helping newcomers assimilate into our society, and embrace our common identity as Americans.’’111 In June 2006, the first group of 800 National Guard troops arrived in the border states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. The United States Border Patrol planned to hire about 6,000 new agents—making the total 18,000 by the end of 2008 (with a 167-percent increase in patrol hours between 1997 and 2005)—improving monitoring through surveillance cameras and sensors, building roads, and putting fencing along the border in order to prevent illegal border crossings.112 However, undesired security side effects could emerge: ‘‘a genuinely unintended consequence of the new border enforcement strategy has been a higher rate of permanent settlement among undocumented migrants in the United States,’’113 and ‘‘adding thousands of new Border Patrol agents has had the perverse effect of enriching smugglers more than deterring migrants, creating a more serious organized crime problem on the border.’’114 For those who see illegal immigration as a security threat, suggested responses go well beyond deploying military troops. Other ideas on the table include (1) building an impenetrable barrier along the Mexican border (a proposal exists to use advanced technology to construct a 700-mile-long wall for this purpose), (2) establishing a special police force to apprehend illegal aliens and expel them forcibly for as long as they keep coming back (a proposal exists to treat them as felons), and (3) reducing the American economy’s demand for illegal immigrant workers, requiring more concerted monitoring of this widespread employer practice (a proposal exists to use new penalties to eliminate business dependence on illegal labor). None of these, however, represents a direction substantially different in its fundamental thrust from existing ineffective policies.

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INSIGHTS REGARDING SPECIFIC THREAT ASSESSMENT ELEMENTS Utilizing the four discussed cases to address the five threat assessment elements— vital interests/protection priorities, dangerous instigators/harmful events, vulnerability to damage/loss, probability of damage/loss, and magnitude of damage/loss— reveals useful conceptual insights concerning what went wrong. The distortions and deficiencies highlighted in earlier chapters pose a wide assortment of roadblocks to success. In each case the decision makers involved were handicapped due to the absence of the kinds of analytical tools needed to confront and overcome effectively the challenges presented. Case Insights Regarding Vital Interests/Protection Priorities The four cases indicate a lack of thorough and balanced consideration by threat targets of the vital interests or protection priorities involving the importance of risked assets. In the Iraq case—after American objectives shifted from halting the alleged production of weapons of mass destruction and the link to al-Qaeda to spreading democracy to Iraq—a reassessment would have been helpful of whether or not the new goal was so crucial to core American interests that it warranted massive expenditure in lives and money, possibly resulting in a lowering of its security priority. In the tsunami case, a reassessment of the relevance of potential tsunami devastation to core values could have resulted in target states placing this issue as a higher priority than resources diverted to less important conventional internal and external security concerns. In the London Transport case, British government examination of the balance between protection against terrorist violence and civil rights and liberties of English citizens, as well as awareness of the incompatibility of conciliation toward internal extremists with its core values, could have led to a more coherent allocation of resources to maximize existing protection priorities. In the illegal immigration case, reassessing the nature of American core values by both companies employing illegal migrants and citizens viewing them as a cultural threat could have facilitated a more coherent and unified response. Because of this inadequate consideration of vital interests and protection priorities, each case involved a response to threat that turned out to be little more than a cosmetic ‘‘Band-Aid’’ solution to deal with profound underlying tensions. In the 2003 United States–Iraq War, the defeat of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein have not yet brought stability, prosperity, or democracy to that country, as impeding dramatic security improvement was the complete absence of democratic governance and civil society traditions in Iraq. In the 2004 tsunami disaster, the cries for an early warning system have neither resolved underlying deficiencies with emergency management infrastructure and evacuation planning nor overcome the obstacles of the dense population in exposed areas and lack of safe proximate evacuation zones. In the 2005 London Transport bombings, vulnerability in London to future terrorist violence remains largely unchanged from what it was at the time of the incident, with

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the challenges of the huge volume of commuters and multitude of vital assets in London still remaining. In the 2006 United States–Mexico illegal immigrant confrontation, the proposed remedies to the flood of illegal immigrants into the United States seem unlikely to stem the tide (and those already implemented have accomplished little), especially given the long, permeable border and vast economic inequality and cultural disparity between Mexico and the United States. In the end, in all the cases threat targets steadfastly refused to budge from their traditional security orientations and eschewed considering creative threat responses sharply differing from past strategies that might have more directly and effectively advanced core interests. The United States continued its tradition of military action to cope with the Iraqi threat and with illegal immigration pressures, states affected by the tsunami continued their downplaying of natural calamity dangers in the face of regional disaster, and the London police continued their standard operating procedures for detecting and apprehending terrorist activity. As the next chapter indicates, further refinement in the threat analysis process seems essential to change this pattern. Case Insights Regarding Dangerous Instigators/Harmful Events Moving to the dangerous instigators or harmful events involving the capacity of risk sources to disrupt targets, the cases highlight incomplete consideration of the dangers posed by these threat sources for the threat targets. In the United States–Iraq War case, there was unsystematic marshaling of evidence to show that the United States was a primary target of Iraq’s alleged hostile ambitions. In the tsunami case, once the incoming threat was recognized, there was not enough attention to which specific areas would be most likely hit by the tsunami. In the London Transport case, there was inadequate analysis about what targets within the city terrorists did and did not have the capability of hitting and incapacitating. Finally, in the United States– Mexico illegal immigration case, there was insufficient research on exactly what kinds of disruptions and gains illegal Mexican migrants have caused and are likely to cause in the future for American society. In evaluating the capacity of threat sources to disrupt threat targets, each case involved threat target misperception of—or insufficient attention to—incoming threat. In the Iraq War, American leaders thought that the Saddam Hussein regime had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, when apparently neither was true; a more probing and dispassionate look at the dangers emanating from Iraq to the West and the obstacles to reducing them by promoting democracy might have helped to remedy this limited view of threat. In the tsunami disaster, political leaders of affected states received little if any warning of the threat, and to address this security gap these leaders could have expanded the concept of incoming threat so to incorporate unorthodox kinds of security dangers and to integrate this kind of peril better into affected governments’ security agendas. In the London Transport bombings, despite the presence of sophisticated monitoring systems, there was no specific advance warning of the terrorist strike, and to minimize this deficiency British police could have focused intelligence more on looking into which members of the local

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Muslim community had received training that could be used in terrorist acts. In the illegal immigration confrontation, the American government did not anticipate that heightened security measures would do little to interdict the threat; embedding mass unsanctioned border crossings in more comprehensive threat analysis could have revealed tight linkages to security responses to such issues as covert arms and illicit drugs trafficking. Moreover, each case involved significant threat target differences of opinion about the nature of the threat within the affected governments, between the government and the people, or among different factions in the population. Although disagreement is fully expected within open democracies, these opinion differences highlight the controversies surrounding threat identification and prioritization in today’s world. In the 2003 United States–Iraq War, some within the American government and many American citizens disagreed with the prevailing government view that Iraq posed a sufficient threat to core interests to warrant the preventive invasion. In the 2004 tsunami disaster, the threshold for threat response was decidedly unclear, with differences evident between affected governments and their citizenry. In the 2005 London Transport bombings, the British government’s belief that its tolerance of Islamic extremists would spare its people from attack irritated many of its citizens. In the 2006 United States–Mexico immigration confrontation, citizens were emotionally divided about whether or not illegal migrants represent a threat to their country and their national identity. Case Insights Regarding Vulnerability to Damage/Loss Turning to vulnerability to damage or loss involving threat targets’ risk anticipation and preparation, a focus on American vulnerability to damage in the Iraq case could have revealed lower than anticipated target vulnerability and the inadequacy of the American government’s emphasis on the Iraq regime’s presumed capabilities and intentions. In contrast, a focus on Southeast Asian vulnerability to natural disasters in the tsunami case, on British vulnerability to terrorists in the London Transport case, and on American vulnerability to border penetration—including both border security gaps and alternative modes of entry circumventing existing security measures—in the illegal immigration case would have revealed higher than anticipated vulnerability. Threat target vulnerability to damage or loss would be relatively easy to gauge. The United States can judge more easily its own vulnerability and core interests than the general intentions and capabilities of its waves of illegal immigrants or of the Iraqi government, England can judge its vulnerability and core interests better than the intentions and capabilities of violent terrorists, and Southeast Asian states can judge their vulnerabilities and core interests more easily than the exact disruptive potential for each country of regional tsunamis. The post–Cold War ambiguity about threat sources makes threat target vulnerability a natural issue to scrutinize. A focus on threat target vulnerabilities could have generated substantial improvements in dealing with secondary threats. In the tsunami case, the result could have

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been operational early warning systems and evacuation contingency plans for affected populations, as well as local management of the secondary threat of postdisaster infectious disease spread. In the illegal immigration case, the result could have been preparation for internal socioeconomic disruption and the secondary threat of xenophobic nativist violence. In the London Transport case, the result could have been better readiness for possible disruption of the transportation system and the secondary threat of paralysis of the communication infrastructure. In the Iraq case, the result could have been better American preparation for possible weapons of mass destruction or terrorist attacks (more inexpensively than engaging in war), for prolonged military responses that might reduce internal and external credibility, and for the secondary threat of local insurgency, looting, and violence. While in the four cases preparation for the initial primary threats was often inadequate, that for the secondary threats was virtually nonexistent, as in many instances the secondary threat was not anticipated ahead of time at all. Overall, there was little recognition that threats addressed were embedded in a broader interactive threatcounterthreat cycle that had begun beforehand and would continue afterward. Case Insights Regarding Probability and Magnitude of Damage/Loss Finally, looking at threat targets’ probability and magnitude of damage or loss, in the Iraq case more attention to these concerns could have revealed that, even had intelligence verified the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the imminent potential for huge deliverable damage to the United States would have been small, and this revelation could have helped to reduce the exaggeration of threat associated with perceptual vigilance. In the tsunami case, even with the unpredictability in calculating the disaster’s imminence, a focus on the huge potential devastation to human lives and property could have helped decrease the complacency associated with perceptual defense. In the London Transport bombings case, even with the unprecedented nature of the disruption, considering carefully the potential for violent terrorists to wreak havoc in that city and bring its ability to function to a standstill might have helped to decrease the trust—associated with perceptual defense—in the ‘‘covenant of security’’ with the radical Muslim community as a means of maintaining public safety. In the illegal immigration case, even with the seeming inevitability of unsanctioned border crossings, greater awareness of the resulting divisive cultural tensions and overwhelmed social service impacts could have helped to challenge the government inaction associated with perceptual defense. Focusing on threat targets’ probability and magnitude of damage or loss would not appear to pose insuperable measurement problems. In terms of information requirements, emphasizing the probability of damage or loss could simply induce the threat targets—the United States, Great Britain, and Iraq—to take a much more rigorous look at their past experience with incoming dangers. As to magnitude of damage or loss, judging Iraq’s and illegal immigration’s impact on the United States, terrorism’s impact on London, and the tsunami’s impact on affected Southeast Asian

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states requires substantially less knowledge than judging the far more amorphous global level of dangers. Regardless of whether perceptual vigilance or perceptual defense was involved in threat perception, after threat actualization mass emotional fear and panic were evident within each threat target about the probability and magnitude of damage or loss. The alleged association between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction scared the American public in the wake of the 9/11 attack; the tsunami created absolute chaos, terror, and an abiding sense of helplessness among affected populations; the London Transport bombings sent shock waves through London commuters and their friends and relatives; and the rising flow of illegal migrants frightened many Americans that their very identity was in jeopardy of eradication. In other words, calm authoritative reassuring explanations of threat did little to foster more restrained reactions or more dispassionate analysis among those potentially affected. CONCLUSION These four cases highlight the value of this book’s alternative target-centered approach to threat assessment. The cases suggest the desirability of the targetcentered approach to threat avoiding (1) distortions involved in threat identification, as targets would need to collect less information that is easier for them to evaluate and thus be less prone to wildly inaccurate assessments; (2) inadequate coverage of post–Cold War dangers, as threat targets would utilize a broader notion of threat; and (3) misguided threat assessment, as threat targets would move from a focus on threat instigators to threat targets. However, when considering the defective decision making highlighted in each case, some might conclude inappropriately that all simply represent intelligence failures, and that—with improved threat information— there would be no need whatsoever to deviate from current modes of incoming threat analysis. In contrast, this book’s examination of existing deficiencies indicates that even possession of completely accurate intelligence would not have been sufficient to remedy them, for the threat targets involved were not focusing on those threat assessment elements necessary for proper prioritization of threat severity.

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Refining Threat-Related Decision Making The empirically evident flaws in recognizing dangers associated with the 2003 United States–Iraq War, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, the 2005 London Transport bombings, and the 2006 Mexico–United States illegal immigration confrontation highlight the need for greater attentiveness to several security issues, including hidden secondary threats, escalating threat-counterthreat cycles, ambiguous and divisive identification of dangers, panic associated with intense negative mass emotions, and cosmetic solutions to perceived peril. Augmenting this book’s targetcentered approach to gauging threat severity, this chapter identifies a variety of ways to refine the threat-related decision-making process. The purpose of these refinements is to increase the effectiveness of threat responses, as improving the relevant decisionmaking process is an essential prerequisite to forward progress in threat management. Advancing the cause of threat assessment faces overcoming so many hurdles— especially resistance within agencies responsible for such assessment against moving away from their standard operating procedures—that a multipronged effort appears essential. Three broad strategies appear important to improve threat targets’ decision making regarding threat. Figure 7.1 summarizes the general ways for threat targets to refine the threat analysis decision process: altering (1) the prevalent participant attitudes—divorcing threat assessment from emotional fear and hatred, (2) the type of information collected and disseminated during this assessment—refocusing intelligence to stimulate threat awareness, and (3) the means of resolving differences in interpretations during this assessment—utilizing multiple independent assessments to evaluate threat. DIVORCE THREAT ASSESSMENT FROM EMOTIONAL FEAR/ HATRED Looking first at attitudes prevalent among those in threat targets involved in threat-related policy making, we see there is a pressing need to shield threat assessment from control by the emotions surrounding fear: Fear is the biggest danger we face. Fear can erode confidence in our institutions, provoke us to overreact, tempt us to abandon our values . . ..We need to spend the next several years doing things very differently. We need to get more realistic about risk. We need to increase preparedness by educating and mobilizing all Americans to participate in homeland security.1

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Figure 7.1 Refining Threat-Related Decision Making

Given the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on increasing public fear, and given that the existence of fear is often a core reason for noticing threat, divorcing threat assessment from fear poses a real challenge. One big problem is that those tasked with threat assessment are frequently those most emotionally invested in the importance of incoming dangers. Another major hurdle here is that those who are most fearful find themselves to be trapped—they cannot escape from the dangers of worst-case thinking, cannot see threat as being at anything other than the highest level of severity, and cannot get to the point where they feel that a hostile party is no longer on the verge of undertaking highly dangerous and disruptive actions. In other words, threat assessment based on fear rarely exhibits any of the subtle interpretive gradations or responsiveness to changing circumstances necessary to undertake systematic prioritization of dangers. Similarly, policy makers within threat targets need to try to find ways to avoid hatebased emotions, as these can color and distort the way dangers are evaluated. It seems impossible to be motivated by wrath or revenge and maintain any ability to examine the severity of threat in a dispassionate evenhanded manner. Hate-based threat assessment is likely to be articulated in a predetermined non-evidence-sensitive manner, leading to rigid responses that automatically resist any form of compromise and

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demand complete eradication of an enemy. To improve fair assessment, public statements about enemy leaders and education about external threats cannot be filled with references to how vile the adversary really is or with taunting ‘‘bring it on’’ kinds of comments that could inadvertently infuriate otherwise passive foes. A critical facet of divorcing threat assessment from emotions is to undertake concerted efforts to avoid having blind faith play any role in evaluating the severity of threat. Trusting authority figures as to one’s state of personal safety usually works only as long as there are no detectable protection breaches, and in today’s insecure global environment this duration is usually not very long at all. In order for checks-and-balances to function within democratic threat targets, government threat assessment needs to rest more explicitly on hard evidence, and acceptance of the resulting severity analysis needs to rely more on the quality of such threat information than on the past track record or reputation of those assessing threat. Both the public at large—which needs to maintain a healthy skepticism about government threat claims—and government officials need improved training on how to evaluate threat in a balanced evidence-based manner. So within threat targets threat assessment should not be done primarily by narrow advocates of the importance of particular dangers (such as having an expert on global warming and an expert on terrorism). More generally, responsibilities for threat assessment should not primarily reside in the hands of those with extreme deference to authority, passionate attachment to causes, tunnel vision about certain issues, or limited ability or desire to fit dangers into a broad security context. Especially for the military establishment, a key corrective may be accepting the deficiencies of worst-case planning and moving away from the premise that ‘‘expecting and preparing for the severest possible contingencies provides the best defense of national interests,’’2 as worst-case scenarios often play on fear and hatred and can be highly dangerous when confused with reality. 3 This tendency can lead to the construction of Frankenstein threats and create a voracious appetite for portraying dangers in such an ominous way that they demand increased force structure. In that light, the biggest downside to continued worst-case thinking is waste—if defense officials greatly overprepare to meet a threat that really is not as bad as they think it is, then they are wasting time, money, and effort and thus are likely to be underprepared for other pressing threats. Since endangered threat targets legitimately want sufficient ‘‘overmatch’’ to ensure victory over a threat source and at the same time want to avoid excessive overmatch, and since the right readiness level is hard to ascertain, threat targets need special safeguards to differentiate paranoid worst-case planning from prudent threat assessment. The payoff from minimizing the intrusion of emotional fear and hatred into threat assessment is that the decision process has the potential to become more rational and more flexible in recognizing and adjusting to changes in threat severity over time. A threat target can improve its ability to understand exactly what provoked the threat source and thus what might be done in light of this provocation. Because extreme fear and hatred can create rigid blinders about incoming dangers that make them seem even more overwhelming, reigning in

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these emotions can ultimately create a calmer and more effective atmosphere for dealing with threat. REFOCUS INTELLIGENCE TO STIMULATE THREAT AWARENESS Turning to the information collection and dissemination informing threat-related decision making, threat targets’ intelligence needs to be refocused to stimulate better awareness of the full range of incoming dangers. So much discussion has taken place about intelligence collection in the post–Cold War global setting, but much of it emphasizes what geographical areas or unruly parties deserve attention rather than how to obtain the specific kinds of intelligence that are most likely to aid in sound target-centered threat assessment and severity prioritization. It seems important to examine the current understanding of a target’s threat exposure, to identify knowledge gaps and information requirements that need addressing, and then to attempt to acquire relevant information to fill these gaps.4 The changing dangers warrant a major intelligence shift among threat targets, illustrated by the transformation needs within the American government: The nation’s centralized intelligence organizations must adjust to the new challenges of post–Cold War globalization. What are the manifest threats to U.S. national security? What are the criteria for defining such threats? What are the best forms of intelligence collection and analysis to measure these threats? Who are the appropriate immediate consumers of a much more fragmented—and increasingly compartmentalized—analytical product? How does one integrate these increasingly diversified and compartmentalized assessments? The traditional priority assigned to capability analysis, deeply embedded in America’s intelligence-decision-making-political institutions nexus, looms as a major problem in coping with post–Cold War confusion.5

Stimulating and justifying this kind of major intelligence shift poses a truly massive challenge due primarily to widespread bureaucratic resistance to change within affected governments. Better facilitation within threat targets of sound long-range threat intelligence appears essential. Standard threat assessment practices usually emphasize immediate dangers, with preferences often situated in the ‘‘tomorrow-to-six-month’’ time period6 in a way that ignores long-range, high-impact, low-probability threats. Indeed, the fluid nature of information priorities in the long run poses a major challenge to those responsible for intelligence collection.7 The farther out in time one looks, the more uncertain (less evidence-based and more speculative) the outlook, and the more reluctant intelligence experts are to make any assertions; yet many threats that appear relatively benign in the short term could do lots of damage if left unchecked. One obstacle to long-range threat intelligence estimates is that the lower the threshold for warning, the higher the chances of capturing actual future threats, but also the higher the false alarm rate: a high false alarm rate can desensitize decision makers to warnings, whereas a low false alarm rate can cause decision makers to miss important future developments. A second obstacle to accurate long-range

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intelligence estimates is the tendency simply to extrapolate current trends to the distant future, rather than to consider possible important right-angle turns and discontinuities: when defense analysts produce long-range ‘‘outside-the-box’’ threat projections, they run the risk of having Congress call their funding requests ‘‘creative writing’’ because they lack hard evidence, as it is hard to defend politically added capabilities to address hypothetical long-run threats rather than short-run threats pinpointed through documented intelligence. Several specific internal modifications in threat targets’ intelligence procedures seem appropriate to cope with post–Cold War threats. First, collection of raw intelligence from original sources needs to be more aggressive and more comprehensive, with an emphasis on risk taking relying on human rather than technical intelligence, in order to facilitate the best understanding of complex foreign dangers through ensuring the quality, currency, accuracy, completeness, and credibility of intelligence analysis. Such an effort would need to involve significant changes in recruitment and training of intelligence officials, with an emphasis on those able through language and history backgrounds to comprehend threats from societies quite different from Western targets. Second, intelligence needs to focus more on highlighting and shoring up areas of potential target vulnerability to existing threats; intelligence plays a critical role in identifying both areas of greatest threat exposure and those outsiders most likely to exploit these at-risk areas. So, for example, an intelligence analysis identifying a foreign threat should also identify what vital target assets are most vulnerable to this threat (ideally with recommendations about how to increase protection of these assets from this threat). Third, intelligence needs to reveal more explicitly though focused collection efforts the capacities of particular threat sources to launch threats against particular targets and the probability and magnitude of actualized risks for these targets from these sources. In other words, instead of generic analyses, intelligence estimates should include assessments of the differing probabilities and magnitudes of damage/loss posed by a given threat to differing targets. Beyond these internal modifications, a couple of external changes are important for threat targets’ intelligence assessment. First, intelligence sharing needs improvement among relevant government agencies within a country, and among allies across countries, despite the impediments of the ‘‘need to know’’ principle and compartmentalization. Because ‘‘collecting, analyzing, and acting on solid intelligence have become increasingly difficult,’’ there is a pressing ‘‘need to work hand-in-hand with other responsible nations’’ to gather vital threat information.8 Moreover, due to both the multiple targets usually affected by today’s threats, and ‘‘the globalization of threats, the fragmentation of national power centers, and the rise of transnational actors,’’ growth is essential in ‘‘complex intelligence institutions, alliances, partnerships, networks, coalitions, teams, and missions targeting global problems and serving a wider range of national and international consumers.’’9 Second, through much tighter threat assessment coordination than exists today, there needs to be greater realigning of collection and analysis of domestic intelligence to complement—and become more integrated with—that of foreign intelligence because of the increasingly blurred divide between internal and external threats. Many of today’s threat sources,

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such as members of transnational terrorist groups and criminal organizations, have penetrated national boundaries and enlisted support from local citizens in undertaking their violent subversive efforts. What should be done within threat targets about government dissemination of intelligence on incoming threats to the domestic public? Although the Homeland Security Advisory System exemplifies a first step for clear, credible, and effective public communication, a domestic warning system needs to cover more than terrorist threat and needs to have a much more explicit, transparent, and systematic basis for evaluating threat severity. Government-sponsored public diplomacy can help to facilitate smoothly this intelligence dissemination: Proponents argue that public diplomacy can play an important role in winning ‘‘hearts and minds.’’ The influence of public diplomacy through the media on public opinion may impact not only on the attitudes of populations and the actions of governments, but also on the actions of groups engaged in terrorist acts. Effective public diplomacy vis-a`-vis the media may help mobilize public opinion in other countries to pressure governments to take action against terrorism.10

Such public diplomacy would be credible to the public only if it avoided degenerating into a manipulative distorted propaganda operation. Citizens in a targeted democracy have a right to expect that their government does everything in its power to keep them aware and safe from threat, while accepting that complete protection is impossible. If threat alerts are too frequent, a government looks like it is not doing its job very well, and complacency could emerge concluding that alerts are meaningless; on the other hand, if threat alerts are too infrequent, the public may not know what to do when they occur. For the sake of security, the government cannot share everything it knows about incoming threat, as that would alert enemies, permit them to evade detection, and ultimately defeat government protection efforts; at the same time, highly effective government responses to threat may go underappreciated since they necessarily cannot be visible. In deciding whether or not government officials should let the public know about threats, a balance needs to exist between (1) the need to minimize the risk of public panic if the government informs the public about threat (the public may be able to do little to protect itself in any case) and (2) the need to minimize the risk of a highly vulnerable and unprepared public if the worst should happen. In today’s highly interpenetrated global setting, if a government tried to keep secret crucial information about ongoing threat, it would be likely to leak out anyway: ‘‘America’s pervasive and aggressive news media make it almost impossible to communicate threat information exclusively to thousands of recipients in government and law enforcement, who will then visibly increase security measures, without attracting some attention.’’11 Consequently, in a manner detrimental to threat target security, leaders who kept relevant intelligence quiet would as a result have egg on their faces and appropriately would be held accountable for any losses stemming from their concealment of existing dangers.

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The payoff from proper collection and dissemination of intelligence is that in the end there is a far greater likelihood of unambiguous and consensual recognition of threat within threat targets and their allies—an area of major deficiency identified in this book’s four cases—than there would be otherwise. Given the need within targeted democracies for domestic public and foreign ally support of government responses to threat—especially when those responses involve costly foreign interventions that may persist over long periods of time—this payoff is a crucial one. Many threat responses have ultimately failed because of sharp internal or external divisions—often the product of widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of key issues—that have undercut the credibility of leadership statements or actions pertaining to assessing ongoing dangers and thus have provided threat targets with the hope that ongoing initiatives would be quickly abandoned. UTILIZE MULTIPLE INDEPENDENT THREAT ASSESSMENTS Concluding with what is done within threat targets to resolve different interpretations during the threat-related decision-making process, we believe that a key way to assess threat more accurately, minimizing subjectivity and misperception, is to use multiple independent assessments by different groups from different organizations. Threat assessment generally improves when it moves from review by a single individual to that by diverse professionals from a wide spectrum of expertise.12 Considering the fierce debates among government officials—even among threat experts of comparable experience and ability—interpreting the same evidence differently, ideally this process would involve a mix of perceptual defense and perceptual vigilance perspectives to provide balance. Illustrating this approach is the American intelligence community regularly composing Red Teams of analysts whose purpose is to challenge the findings of other analysts and develop alternate explanations for what is being observed. Among the issues to be scrutinized by these multiple assessments would be (1) the quality of the threat information, looking specifically at the extent to which this information is both credible and corroborated; and (2) the quality of the threat assessment associated with this threat information, looking specifically at the extent to which this assessment is balanced, dispassionate, and inclusive of relevant considerations. In dealing with threats producing conflicting intelligence analyses or low-quality intelligence reports within a threat target, threat assessment is particularly challenging. Ideally, after surfacing opposing views, the threat assessment process would require that discussion take place isolating contrasting underlying assumptions (with evidence examined supporting each one), ultimately culminating in a common understanding of when, why, and how such differences are legitimate. In the process some interpretations may fall by the wayside, as their reliance on the predetermined biases of those advocating them—unjustified by hard evidence—would become apparent. The common understanding could reflect a nonhumiliating willingness on the part of many of those previously disagreeing that, although their perspective might have general validity, it might be prudent to yield to the views of others in a

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particular threat scenario, given the weight of overwhelming evidence when separated from personal or institutional political considerations. Over time, with enough discussion and enough concessions by everyone responsible for threat assessment, a flexible adaptive norm could develop in which all were prepared to consider changes in their threat assessment conclusions after carefully listening to the views and justifications of others. This ideal sequence of steps for dealing with conflicting intelligence analyses or low-quality intelligence reports is not commonplace, as leader manipulation, politicization of findings, or status differences among those responsible often intrude. To avoid these predictable intrusions, those involved in threat assessment need to be able to contradict the views of a superior without any fear of negative repercussions. If leaders really can place success in achieving national security goals above personal ambitions, then more fully implemented multiple independent threat assessments can dramatically improve prioritization of dangers. Within the United States, however, a cyclical pattern of success and failure has resulted from attempts undertaken so far to provide top leaders with multiple interpretations of evidence. The utility of such efforts apparently depends on the thinking style of the president and the National Security Council. Some leaders have been open and even eager to consider alternative viewpoints, whereas others have been quite unreceptive. Little benefit may emerge if each independent assessment simply reflects the predictable predispositions of a particular agency (such as the Defense Intelligence Agency amplifying the military threat more than the Central Intelligence Agency). Equally if not more problematic is the not infrequent predicament where leaders from various allied threat targets have gaping differences resulting from their threat assessments about which dangers are really significant. Resolving these differences is more difficult because (1) contrasting underlying assumptions may result from genuine value differences among the allies, (2) national security priorities would not allow each ally to share all of its classified threat information, and (3) there is rarely enough time for truly in-depth probing discussion to take place among multiple sovereign entities. Nonetheless, perhaps much more slowly and incrementally, discussion across threat targets of multiple independent threat assessments might lead to the willingness to acknowledge legitimate differences in such assessments and to adjust and accommodate accordingly in somewhat the same way as within a single threat target. To enhance the value of multiple independent threat assessments, considered threat scenarios should be refined so as to highlight differing assumptions and allow them to be fairly resolved. However, (1) these scenarios often have failed to capture effectively today’s subtle and elusive dangers; (2) those responsible for these scenarios usually assume that leaders accurately perceive threat, instead of considering possible threat misidentification; and (3) most scenarios have been deficient in anticipating the second-, third-, and fourth-order ripple effects of threat and responses to threat. On the surface it might seem as if a few improvements—such as embedding more variables in the scenarios, war gaming the threat assessment process itself, and engaging senior decision makers in scenario development—would easily remedy these problems. However, embedding more variables can befuddle

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even the best analysts, who may be unable to find ways of exploring the complex scenario space efficiently; war gaming the threat assessment process is decidedly outside of existing decision-making norms, and engaging senior decision makers in threat scenario creation is difficult because their time and attention span is so severely limited. So compromise is essential, trading analytically useful complexity for executive attention. Done properly, the payoff could be great from utilizing multiple threat assessments in response to a better set of threat scenarios. Most generally, analysts might be able to see challenges in a broader, more objective and multifaceted context that enhances understanding of dangers and appropriateness of responses. Better mutual respect and cooperation could emerge within threat targets across intelligence analysts and agencies responsible for threat assessment as well as across different threat targets. New dangers emerging might be easier to assimilate and respond to quickly using creative approaches deviating from the past pattern of responses. This process could expose key shortcomings in the ways analysts currently assess threat. CONCLUSION Together these three avenues for refining the threat analysis decision process support effective use of this book’s alternative target-centered threat assessment approach. Resisting the domination of emotional fear and hatred can help to keep threat assessment dispassionate and objective, transforming intelligence to match post–Cold War dangers through close monitoring of changes can help to keep threat assessment accurate and timely, and employing multiple independent threat assessments can help to challenge the dominance of any one interpretation of dangers and thus keep threat assessment more balanced and responsive. Having as a result a more evidence-based approach can significantly improve one’s ability to evaluate vital interests or protection priorities so as to address the importance of risked assets, dangerous instigators or harmful events so as to address the disruptive capacity of risk sources, vulnerability to damage or loss so as to address a target’s risk anticipation and preparation, probability of damage or loss so as to address the likelihood of risks occurring within a target, and the magnitude of damage or loss so as to address the impact of actualized risks on a threat target. Despite the threat assessment failure surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the recent evidence of threat misassessment, there has not been substantial improvement in the relevant decision-making process surrounding incoming global threats because a few overarching roadblocks have been noteworthy in preventing adjustment among threat targets: (1) a belief that the threats are self-evident (obvious to one’s citizens and one’s allies) and that attention ought to center exclusively on how to respond to them, (2) a tendency to project one’s own way of thinking onto enemies rather than to try to get into their mind-sets, (3) a deep and abiding bureaucratic inertia that supports continued use of past threat evaluation processes, and (4) a frequent politicization of the threat assessment process that resists opening up enemy labeling to outside scrutiny. Together these roadblocks provide convenient

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excuses for not altering threat assessment processes and for continuing to approach dangers in the same manner as was done during the Cold War. Threat targets’ use of the combination of the alternative threat assessment approach and the strategies for refining the threat-related decision process—divorcing assessment from emotional fear and hatred, refocusing intelligence to stimulate threat awareness, and utilizing multiple threat assessments—provides no guarantee of overcoming these roadblocks, which have persisted for years in many different settings and often are deeply entrenched in the operations of those involved with threat analysis. Many government threat analysts remain convinced that, even if threats have changed, the decision-making process for evaluating and responding to them is fundamentally sound; and even if outcomes of existing procedures are disappointing, it is difficult to demonstrate that the decision processes themselves—rather than something else—are at fault. However, this combination does provide hope for improving the ways policy makers discuss and decide what to do about incoming dangers, contributing directly to the threat management strategies proposed in the next chapter.

8

Target-Centered Global Threat Management Over a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, and over half a decade after the jolting 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States and its Western allies have still not managed to achieve needed transformation in threat assessment and threat management, and a thorough reevaluation of post–Cold War security policy seems ‘‘as distant as ever.’’1 Today the United States appears to be only marginally more secure2 than it was before 9/11. In many ways, ominous global threat sources seem at least temporarily to have gained the upper hand. The West is simply not prepared to manage today’s incoming dangers. Conventional military force is not effective against asymmetric threat: for example, massive NATO forces of tank armies, infantry divisions, tactical fighters, and warships bristling with coastal bombardment cannons can do little against insurgencies, cyber warfare, or biological attack. Yet over time the American government has persisted in holding an official position that ‘‘forces optimized for large-scale conventional war should be able to accomplish other tasks.’’3 New concepts of operation, capabilities, and force structure are needed to address these unorthodox threats along with global warming, natural disasters, pandemic disease, and unwanted mass migration. In facing new perils, the West is often crippled due to public demands for quick and decisive success and the ‘‘civilized’’ ethical norms under which the West feels obliged to operate. Indeed, ‘‘asymmetrical tactics are often conducted against states that have self-imposed constraints on their own concepts of strategy and warfighting.’’4 Western states prefer to fight relatively short and bloodless wars that do not require much sacrifice, increasing both their vulnerability to asymmetric tactics and their perceived lack of resolve; ‘‘the current sense of Western moral rectitude is setting up points of attack for the asymmetric adversary.’’5 Although the picture appears bleak, this chapter presents several viable targetcentered policy ideas for managing incoming threat in today’s global security setting—most broadly changing the general threat response orientation, more specifically improving counterthreat policies, and most specifically addressing the target-centered threat assessment elements—followed by a call for strategic transformation. The purpose of this discussion is to provide the tools necessary to move from predicting and analyzing to containing disruption, limiting both physical violence and psychological stress.

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CHANGE THREAT RESPONSE ORIENTATION The recommendations to change the general threat response orientation are to make threat management a function of threat assessment, acknowledge past threat management deficiencies, and analyze trade-offs among threat management approaches. Figure 8.1 summarizes these broad prescriptions. Although some of these ideas may seem self-evident, all in the recent past have encountered considerable resistance and in the current setting involve substantial discontinuities from current threat management practices. Make Threat Management a Function of Threat Assessment The primary purpose of sound threat assessment is to foster sound management of identified risks and, after the calculation of risk, to identify countermeasures to minimize ominous incoming threats.6 It appears vital for threat targets to utilize an approach that ‘‘links threats to priorities, and priorities to actions’’ taken to address existing dangers.7 In practice, the relationship between threat assessment and threat management has often been loose or backwards, with threat targets sometimes deciding how to respond to incoming dangers and then only afterward requesting threat assessments simply to justify predetermined courses of action.

Figure 8.1 Changing Threat Response Orientation

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In responding to a severe threat meriting high security priority, threat targets need to move quickly and decisively; since such perils may mutate over time, delayed responses may turn out to be inappropriate for ongoing circumstances. So targets need to minimize time lags and bureaucratic hoops between assessment and management. Responses tuned to specific dangers need to include both protective measures for endangered assets and specific means of undermining or thwarting the threat source’s ability to carry out the threat. The availability of preplanned sets of responses to anticipated threats would help to facilitate rapid effective responses by threat targets. After a threat target implements appropriate countermeasures, it may recognize a different mix of security strengths and weaknesses. This awareness could in turn lead to it to attempt to change this mix, altering both its threat assessment and future countermeasures against incoming threat. So threat assessment and threat management are highly interactive, with each needing sensitivity to changes in the other. Acknowledge Past Threat Management Deficiencies Especially given the recent post–Cold War pattern, a key facet of managing threat is to admit past management strategy failures in dealing with the transformed global security setting. Prior to any serious consideration of threat management options, a nondefensive willingness has to exist to acknowledge fully existing deficiencies, entailing a long and hard look at what has gone wrong in the past with threat management. This acknowledgement by threat targets needs to include such errors in judgment as those due to emotional obsession with enemies whose actual behavior does not warrant such attention, inadequate monitoring of changing threat over time, movement toward hostile action too quickly, inattention to key vulnerabilities, and use of ineffective counterthreat strategies. The resistance to this kind of private acknowledgement of mistakes runs deep. Complacency is common, undergirded by bureaucratic inertia, that whatever errors have emerged in threat assessment and management have been peripheral, random, and unrepresentative. Rejecting ‘‘historical patterns as unreliable indicators’’ in the post–Cold War context, many analysts developed such a strong belief in sudden, unpredicted, discontinuous events that they could not even trust intelligence to provide warning.8 Intelligence analysts routinely ignore public criticism due to detractors’ lack of access to highly confidential information upon which these analysts rely. Attempting to excuse shoddy past performance by a ‘‘we’re-doing-the-best-we-can’’ mentality seems unacceptable, as such rationalization may only delay the point where these officials would earnestly seek to correct existing problems. Indeed, the investigation of past misguided behavior needs to highlight not only what went wrong and why things went wrong, but also what in retrospect could have been done better to address incoming threat. Recent errors in assessing and managing dangers have followed certain predictable patterns, and studying these patterns carefully could yield fruitful ideas about new solutions to ongoing dangers. Given

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the rapid pace of change, the past is certainly not an ironclad guide to the present, but history does yield valuable clues about what not to do. Analyze Trade-Offs among Threat Management Approaches A basic choice in goals exists to improve threat management: should one take an ongoing incoming threat as a given and seek to improve the effectiveness of responses to it, or alternatively should one attempt to address underlying tensions between opposing parties and thus possibly alter both the nature of the threat and the chances it will be carried out? The first aim is more pragmatic and accepting of existing realities, while the second aim is more ambitious and harder to tackle in today’s anarchic world. The West has expressed its preference here, for its common response to threat has been ‘‘one of regaining and maintaining control, rather than addressing root causes.’’9 Although the choice between the two approaches is somewhat dependent on the particular circumstances, it appears in contrast that the second aim ought to be pursued first, with the first aim largely a fallback if attempts to defuse tension between opposing parties fail. When facing incoming global threat, all responses involve significant trade-offs: one could preventively retaliate with deterrence against the threat source (associating with perceptual vigilance), attempting to reduce a foe’s capabilities through coercive countermeasures such as interrupting supply lines or destroying military targets;10 one could passively stall and do nothing, waiting for the threat to escalate before taking action (associating with perceptual defense); or one could use appeasement aimed at promoting threat withdrawal, attempting to alter enemy leaders’ intentions through verbal persuasion, contingent promises, or remedies to conditions they view as frustrating.11 These three choices fall along a broad continuum encompassing complying with a threat source’s request: placating a threat source with alternative promises or rewards, ignoring a threat source’s request by not acting, or defying a threat source with a counterthreat of punishment.12 The potential for effective threat management differs markedly for offensive deterrent preemption, defensive stalling, and conciliatory appeasement. Threat preemption’s advantages are that early action against a threat can enhance effectiveness against it, lowering the security risk because an immature threat is unlikely to be harmful; but the disadvantages are that the earlier one takes action, the more fragmentary and ambiguous is one’s intelligence, and the greater is the political risks of a false alarm, sizable collateral damage, or reduced global legitimacy. Waiting for the threat to materialize is politically safer, but is tougher to do well and is more prone to fail because the options for interdicting the threat are narrower and harder to execute effectively. Appeasement opens the door to diplomatic settlement, but also runs the risk of spiraling demands from a target or imitative spread of demands to other potentially antagonistic parties. Many threat analysts artificially advocate exclusive reliance on either soft appeasement or hard deterrence approaches—arguing that the two inescapably undercut each other—when in reality the complex dangers in today’s global security setting often demand

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multifaceted complementary responses using every means available in a threat target’s arsenal. IMPROVE COUNTERTHREAT POLICIES In light of these changes in threat response orientation, specific suggestions emerge about improving counterthreat policies. Figure 8.2 presents these ideas for threat targets: formulating an overall security plan by developing an overarching counterthreat doctrine, reducing underlying tensions by lowering mutual hostility among enemies, forestalling spiraling friction by preventing escalating threat-counterthreat cycles, taking responsibility for dangers by promoting sensitive leadership and local accountability, and attending to areas of greatest peril by enhancing defense resources designed for unorthodox disruptions. Together these ideas can promote firm yet flexible, coherent, and integrated target-centered threat management. Develop Overarching Counterthreat Doctrine Perhaps the foundation of an effective integrated threat management strategy is the need for threat targets to formulate a coherent strategic counterthreat doctrine that articulates a meaningful vision for dealing with current global dangers. Unlike the Cold War’s nuclear mutual assured destruction doctrine, no overarching security doctrine has emerged for coping with the distinctive incoming threats in the transformed post–Cold War security setting, and this void needs filling. In particular, ‘‘we must avoid lurching from one nightmare scenario to another and instead formulate broad security strategies that estimate comparative risks and set priorities.’’13 The case-by-base mentality so common today is absolutely unacceptable in terms of effective threat management and seems doomed to produce tepid reactive responses to incoming threat. Within this doctrine, responses to identified dangers need to involve carefully specified goals—with the type, degree, and targets of action consistent with these objectives—guided by well-thought-out threat target core interests. It is very difficult to identify target priorities ‘‘amidst security challenges that have simultaneously fragmented and gone global.’’14 While it is common to view threat as a ‘‘force shaper,’’ with perceived threat dictating force capabilities,15 in contrast it is a country’s overall defensive strategy that should determine force configuration. Through a unified system, integrated threat management needs to be able to handle the challenge of a ‘‘shifting mix of security threats,’’ including ethnic conflict and militant nationalism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to states and nonstate groups, rogue states’ destabilizing activities, environmental degradation such as through global warming, transnational criminal and terrorist groups’ violence, pandemic diseases, and undesired mass migrations of people.16 Because of the tight interconnections among many of these dangers, considering them in isolation of one another would lead to ineffective piecemeal responses.

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Figure 8.2 Improving Counterthreat Policies

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Although anticipating incoming harm is sometimes labeled as a ‘‘passive outcome’’ rather than as an ‘‘active undertaking’’ (a phrase reserved for issuing offensive threats),17 such a strategic doctrine for managing threat should emphasize a proactive rather than a reactive approach, focusing not on simple warning that predicts future dangers, but rather on anticipation and preparation for the ensuing target consequences that identify ways to address and forestall or remedy potential perils, lowering their chances of occurring and minimizing their negative impacts if they did occur. Threat management is a means to achieve broader security ends, not an end in itself, and it is often a prerequisite to other security-enhancing measures, such as building up national resiliency or cross-national institutions promoting peace.18 For threat management strategies pertaining to the United States, which prides itself on its openness with an emphasis on civil rights and civil liberties and tolerance of diverse belief systems, it seems imprudent to develop any defense doctrine that advocated an ostrich-like isolationist approach to external dangers. More specifically, ‘‘as for creating a secure ‘fortress America’—even if this could be done without an intolerable inversion of precisely those freedoms and openness that define the country’s greatness—how could this be achieved for a nation with so many of its citizens working abroad, with so large a stake in the world, with so many vulnerable interests outside America, and with so many first-generation immigrants?’’19 If Americans were to ‘‘wall ourselves off from the rest of the world by making it all but impossible for foreigners to immigrate to our country legally and to visit for purposes of trade, tourism, and study,’’20 given global interdependence the result would probably not be increased protection from outside dangers, but rather dramatic escalation of internal and external threat. So counterthreat doctrine needs to be designed to operate effectively within a porous world. Indeed, threat management relying exclusively on self-reliance is likely to be ineffective in this age of globalization. Lower Mutual Hostility among Enemies With an overall security plan in place, having threat targets look at ways to reduce underlying tensions between contending parties appears to be a logical next step. One way to lower mutual hostility among enemies is for threat targets to attempt through diplomacy to highlight the often transitory nature of existing antagonisms and to promote attempts to find commonalities with foes. This admittedly idealistic approach emphasizes that animosity may be due to a particular situation, or to unacceptable actions, rather than to an adversary’s basic character. A challenge is to find ways though improved communication to distinguish between sharp international value differences and foreign threat, forestalling in the process any belief that minimizing danger requires global homogenization of beliefs. Despite the previously mentioned persistence of enemy images, under certain conditions such as a newly triggered threat, it may be possible ‘‘to inhibit the formation of the reciprocal images of the enemy by antagonistic groups, and to inhibit antagonists from resorting to

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violence as a way of responding to the fear and frustrations created by images of the enemy’’: Meanwhile, a hopeful consideration is that people can change with remarkable speed from enemies to friends, despite the apparent intractability of enemy images. This can occur when they decide that cooperation yields vastly greater benefits to both than antagonism. A most encouraging recent case in point is the rapid change in American perceptions of mainland China. According to public polls in the United States in 1976, three-quarters of the American public saw China as a hostile power. Only six years later, in 1982, the same percentage saw China as a friendly power and close ally, even though the Chinese leaders, like the Soviet ones, remained faithful to communism.21

Properly applied diplomacy can help to identify areas of potential future cooperation among current adversaries and promote incentives for reduction of their mutual distrust and threat. Providing the threat source with a face-saving way out of the current predicament— without having to carry out a threat—is often pivotally important in this regard.22 The threat target also needs to avoid countermeasures in response to threats that humiliate an opponent or degrade an opponent’s culture, leaving an enemy with no honorable options but to fight to the death against the threat target. Avoidance of overly provocative responses to perceived threat and being sensitive to an adversary’s prerequisites for compromise can in the end also serve to increase tolerance levels between foes so that extermination of the other party is no longer a key aim of either side. Furthermore, to respond to incoming threat effectively, a threat target should communicate with the threat source about why and how the target feels threatened and attempt to understand why the threat source has chosen to resort to threat: a threat target should try to minimize triggering enemy threat, and if the source appears to threaten out of fear, then the target ought to avoid counterthreats that might intensify these fears.23 Given that threat targets today often go beyond government structures, a need exists to communicate in such a way as to lower hostility with an enemy’s people as well as its leadership. Armed with this improved mutual communication and understanding, a critical way to lower mutual hostility within a threat predicament is to improve one’s ability to discriminate between an adversary’s offensive and defensive actions. This discrimination is admittedly extremely difficult in today’s global security environment, with difficulties in pinpointing a foe’s precise intentions, a rapidly changing offensivedefensive technology race, and increasing murkiness in separating offensive from defensive weaponry. However, a crucial aid in this discrimination might be for a threat target to ask itself every time a threat source acts if it is possible that the action could have reasonably been undertaken simply for protective purposes. As a component of this effort to foster constructive communication with enemies, perhaps the most important prerequisite for success is the credibility of the message. Adversaries locked in a mutually threatening predicament do not trust each other’s

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pronouncements and believe that most of what the other party says is simply an attempt to mislead or confuse so as to provide the opposing party with a strategic advantage. These foes also usually exhibit perceptual vigilance tendencies, in which through selective attention they hear and interpret only negative hostile messages as emanating from an opponent. So there is a lot of work to be done to break through this barrier and to have a credible discussion among enemies of the dysfunctionality and danger of perpetuating a volatile threatening atmosphere that could explode at any moment. Prevent Escalating Threat-Counterthreat Cycle With underlying mutual hostility minimized, it seems important for threat targets to forestall possibilities that contending parties exhibit the kinds of provocative behavior that lead to spiraling friction and tit-for-tat entrapment. Interactive dangers often are embedded in a seemingly unending, tightly woven, and multifaceted threat-counterthreat cycle: Actions taken by one nation to defend itself against threat are often seen as evidence of a threat by the citizens of another. This may lead to defensive preparations by the other nation, which, in turn, are seen as further evidence of threat by citizens of the first. Thus international tension may develop through a ‘‘circular process’’ . . .that produces a deepening sense of threat on both sides.24

Under these circumstances, vacillating interactive friction is highly likely to develop among parties with opposing interests, and if this interactive friction crosses a critical threshold, then a threat-counterthreat cycle may emerge, with violent warfare a likely outcome if left unmanaged. Although widespread in the current global security setting, this threat-counterthreat cycle is likely to emerge only in cases where anger and hatred promote imitative responses, and so it would be a concern more with intentional rather than unintentional threat; however, for all types of incoming threat, early action in response to belligerent, intimidating, or deeply destructive behavior appears absolutely critical here to prevent far-reaching mushrooming calamity. Determining whether one side is responding to an existing threat or instigating a new threat may depend completely on what time period one chooses to examine (for this reason the concept of ‘‘threat initiator’’ has little meaning). In today’s anarchic world, observers have little ability to pinpoint a clear aggressive initiator who launched a threat and a clear innocent victim who is the target of the threat. Preventive or preemptive actions can muddy these waters still further. Similarly, identifying threat vulnerabilities and their exploitation can operate in a cyclical pattern: a highly publicized vulnerability within a threat target may cause enemies to contemplate exploiting it; and, when the target’s intelligence apparatus learns what its enemies are discussing, the feedback loop is completed, seemingly confirming the target’s worst fears.25 The global prevalence of these cycles makes it difficult not only to

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obtain an accurate picture of existing threat, but also more broadly to get any meaningful sense of when a particular threat started or ended. A couple of prevalent trends intensify the ambiguity about aggressor and victim in this threat-counterthreat cycle. First, the presence of secondary threats—evident in the four case studies considered—can muddy the waters in this regard. Second, the presence of third parties can have a major impact, as frictions across boundaries are seldom purely bilateral in today’s globalized world, and there are lots of opportunity for involvement by regional neighbors and allies interconnecting with ongoing disputes; these third parties can either dampen or amplify negative interactions between a threat source and threat target, depending on the third parties’ motives, links to both sides, and willingness to commit resources. As a result, in managing an ongoing threat-counterthreat cycle, two policy options appear infeasible. First, utilizing international law—exemplified by the KelloggBriand Pact of 1928 outlawing all aggressive war—would usually be unable to produce unambiguous recognition of threat. Second, engaging in finger-pointing, trying to isolate who did what first and to apply negative sanctions or military coercion to the presumed guilty party, would similarly be futile because such an ‘‘eye-for-an-eye’’ retaliatory approach would usually be devoid of international legitimacy, with no way to demonstrate definitively that the whole threat sequence began due to a particular action by a particular instigator. What is crucial for threat targets to attempt to minimize in this threatcounterthreat cycle is the risk of an action-reaction pattern spiraling out of control (such as occurred in the 2006 hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah). Given the general failure of deterrence policies to dampen opponents’ aggression in a threatening environment, threat targets need to avoid responses that lead to escalation of an opponent’s threats, eschewing countermeasures that in any way overreact to an existing provocation. A cycle of increasing reciprocated hostility could easily lead to threat escalation and ultimately to massive bloodshed. The need for this threat target restraint arises not just from a prudent external concern about avoiding an out-of-control hostility spiral, but also from an internal self-interested strategic concern about avoiding ultimately being placed at a distinct disadvantage: because of their zeal for their cause and their willingness to die for it, enemies of the West know that it is ‘‘far likelier to break under the weight of terror than they are to break under the weight of counterterror.’’26 To make headway toward minimizing this risk of a trapping threat-counterthreat cycle, threat targets need to gain a much deeper understanding of how this threatcounterthreat cycle works in today’s global security environment. Specifically, it is important to identify (1) the points early in the cycle where the hostile entrapping interactive pattern can most likely be broken and (2) the pressures that keep opposing parties involved from being able to extricate themselves from this cycle even when one or both wish to do so. Use of this book’s target-centered threat assessment approach, which eliminates a focus on identifying and constraining threat initiators, could help in avoiding the pernicious threat-counterthreat cycle by emphasizing the most productive ways in which targets can respond to perceived dangers. Most

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broadly, what is needed is a concerted effort to defuse the tensions and antagonisms between contesting parties without emphasis on blame, and to find ways to establish a basis for stable interaction in the future. Promote Sensitive Leadership and Local Accountability With a lid placed on spiraling friction between contending parties, it seems important for threat targets to take ownership of their responsibilities for coping with global dangers. One of the key dimensions of effective threat management is who formulates and implements responses to threat and how such responsibilities are distributed. Although some analyses recommend exclusively top-down or bottom-up orientations, it appears that both approaches are essential to confront today’s ominous global threats. Improving threat management crucially depends on having quality leaders within threat targets who are sensitively receptive to recognizing and responding to changes in the fluid post–Cold War threats. A kind of leadership needs to emerge that assumes direct responsibility for dealing with incoming threat, explains threat clearly and convincingly to domestic citizens and international allies, and addresses in appropriate ways the most critical dangers. Leaders’ use of more transparency about threat assessment and its linkages with threat management can help to clear up prevailing confusions about incoming dangers, foster greater understanding of the ways for determining severe threat, mitigate widespread panic, and increase the likelihood of support from both foreign allies and domestic citizens. Such political leaders need to combine a thorough and balanced understanding of past successes and failures with attentiveness to transformations in imminent peril so as to be able to know when to rely on tried-and-true solutions and when to engage in creative efforts to discover alternative responses to global threats—ideally, ‘‘these threats demand a new vision of leadership in the twenty-first century—a vision that draws from the past but is not bound by outdated thinking.’’27 Leaders need to be adept at spotting, integrating, and addressing unorthodox as well as orthodox threats, ‘‘capable of lifting their eyes above the daily political and economic grind to sense the dangers and take evasive action.’’28 They should avoid looking at threat intelligence analysis with preconceived notions about what kinds of dangers they expect to see and to find important. To be effective in combating threat, leaders should not brush off—due to complacency or arrogance—repeated warnings about incoming threat from respected government officials, and they should not operate simply by jumping into the analysis themselves; yet at the same time, they should not too readily accept nutshell analysis from below or simply become slaves to the paralyzing dictates of bureaucracy, which tends to be an enormous, leaden, opaque, impenetrable mass. Perhaps most critically, they need to avoid succumbing to the temptation of politically manipulating enemy images and foreign threat to domestic citizens and foreign allies in ways unsupported by evidence. Unfortunately, this kind of quality leadership within threat targets is in scarce supply, as—with regard to responding to global dangers—‘‘there seems to be a real

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shortage of intelligent political leadership in most, if not all, of the leading democracies today.’’29 Across recent American administrations—Democrat and Republican alike—the individuals in the White House and the Cabinet have generally failed to provide effective leadership for rapid and effective threat management. Furthermore, in order to promote the emergence of such threat-sensitive leaders in government, the mass public needs to recognize their value and support them, and this would not necessarily always be the case for elected officials within Western democracies where other non-threat-related skills may be more admired. In response to this leadership vacuum, and indeed even if sound leadership leaders are available, bottom-up local responsibility is essential for threat target protection: ‘‘if improving homeland security requires that the U.S. government reconsider many of its assumptions and priorities, it also requires a population that acknowledges that security must become everyone’s business.’’30 The best way for any state to improve its responses to incoming threat is ‘‘to enlist all citizens through education and engagement’’ to assist in their own preparedness and response.31 Local responsibility is especially important today because post–Cold War threat often directly targets mass populations rather than regimes and because such threat can rip apart the fabric of society. The accountability and authority for civil defense should be placed at the lowest levels of government possible because it is at these levels that the greatest awareness of on-the-ground assets and vulnerabilities is present. This increased awareness of threat exposure can help local communities correct any misguided estimates by leaders of target vulnerabilities. Specifically in cases of transnational threat, ‘‘if local communities can be convinced to turn against those who perpetrate barbaric acts of violence,’’ then the chances increase that those within one’s borders who are working with foreign threat sources can be identified and rooted out.32 To some extent, there is already movement in the direction of local accountability within the United States: To address the threat posed by those who wish to harm the United States, critical infrastructure owners and operators are assessing their vulnerabilities and increasing their investment in security. State and municipal governments across the country continue to take important steps to identify and assess the protection of key assets and services within their jurisdictions. Federal departments and agencies are working closely with industry to take stock of key assets and facilitate protective actions, while improving the timely exchange of important security related information.33

This includes enhancing the intelligence capabilities of local police, who know their territory, may be ethnically closer to the communities served, are more aware of local changes, and seem more acceptable to local community leaders.34 Sponsored educational initiatives can help to spur local communities away from attending only to immediate visible dangers and toward thinking about longerterm perils (such as global warming) not so evident in their immediate surroundings. Such education also needs to foster understanding of the differences between threats to individual security and societally disruptive threats that affect the ability of the

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entire threat target—including existing authorities and essential infrastructure—to continue to function. This new understanding would assist localities in setting reasonable achievable protection goals—‘‘what is required is that everyday citizens develop both the maturity to live with the risk of future attacks and the willingness to invest in reasonable measures to mitigate that risk.’’35 Fostering local responsibility for protection against dangers within threat targets requires considerable cooperation between the public and private sectors. Such cooperation could prove quite beneficial for societal protection, as ‘‘public-private collaboration could, over time, assure that the technologies that provide ever more efficient infrastructure services also keep pace with the need to enhance public safety and security.’’36 In addition to facilitation through government incentives, greater information sharing should help build trust between the public and private sectors in their security-enhancing efforts.37 While in this mode private corporations should incorporate explicitly reduction of foreign threat vulnerability in efficiency maximization; it is crucial that national governments not place vital infrastructure protection exclusively in the hands of the private sector and instead develop workable frameworks for public-private partnerships to advance security goals.38 However, since making local municipalities responsible for civil defense has the potential to create a large differential between the best and worst protected parts of a threat target, a central authority would need to determine minimally acceptable levels of protection for everyone as part of its security policy. Specifically, within states the central government should provide oversight and be responsible for (1) issuing national policy, but to the minimum extent possible, (2) coordinating efforts among municipalities, (3) allocating resources among them, and (4) undertaking national-level civil defense functions that are—and must remain—outside the capabilities of municipalities. With this approach, national and local authorities can work together productively to provide overall protection for a threat target. Enhance Defense Resources for Unorthodox Disruptions With responsibility for incoming dangers assumed by political leaders and private citizens alike, it seems important for threat targets to concentrate their protective efforts on the areas—especially unorthodox threat sources and threat styles—of greatest peril. The allocation of defense resources decidedly needs substantial change from its current pattern. The emphasis on military superiority and advanced warfighting capabilities is likely to decline as irregular warfare becomes more pervasive, and, in particular, ongoing American investment in conventional capabilities seems unlikely to ‘‘be used at anything approaching full stretch because countries will go to considerable lengths to avoid this kind of engagement.’’39 However, policy makers cannot afford to wait for such an evolutionary development—security officials need to alter the mix of defense expenditures long before tangible changes in global threat force them to do so. In particular, the United States needs to adapt and modernize its armed forces to cope with new kinds of incoming threat.40 While in order to stay at least one step

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ahead of foes, there has been some pressure for the services to transform, this is a difficult task given military shortsightedness, narrow-mindedness, predispositions against fanciful thinking, and intellectual complacency. Because a diverse array of threats is emerging both from rogue states and from transnational terrorist, criminal, and insurgency groups, in reallocating finite defense resources it is important to balance coverage and effectiveness, safeguarding against spreading them over such a wide range of challenges that they become overly thin and ultimately fruitless. Complementing the earlier idealist recommendations on lowering mutual hostility, threat targets thus need to include in their defense resource allocation more hard-nosed countermeasures against incoming dangers. Despite the problems faced by deterrence after the Cold War, these counterthreat strategies should include improving military strength and readiness so as to be able to eliminate or at least contain the most virulent threat sources, with the realization that escalating strength can sometimes deter and sometimes provoke incoming threat. However, instead of escalating conventional military strength, there should be greater attention to countermeasures—involving Special Operations, counterinsurgency and proinsurgency, counterproliferation, linguists, information operations, and irregular warfare—most attuned to today’s severe incoming dangers. Possessing such credible counterthreat strategies, undergirded by some level of past success, can help at least occasionally both to dissuade enemies from carrying out their threats and to prevent costly wars from occurring.41 Given the transforming nature of incoming threat—involving delicate cultural and religious issues and other dangers quite different from foreign military attack—the military should not bear on its own the primary burden of threat response. Although in theory it might make sense to off-load some responsibilities for threat management from military troops to civilian institutions, so far these institutions do not generally have the requisite capabilities of speed, reliable logistics and communication, and ready access to transport and relevant technology. Nonetheless, to address threat, military force should be used with great reluctance, as a last resort when all other alternatives—diplomatic, informational, and economic—have been exhausted. In situations where such force is used, threat targets need to integrate and harmonize military and nonmilitary strategies rather than keeping them separate and disconnected, with careful monitoring essential to ensure that they are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually undercutting. ADDRESS GLOBAL THREAT ASSESSMENT ELEMENTS In light of these ways of improving counterthreat policies, some specialized avenues are evident for threat targets to address each element of this book’s alternative threat assessment approach. Figure 8.3 highlights the remedies associated with each of the five threat assessment elements: identify and protect key assets, use coalition-based sanctions against threat sources, employ early warning and effective follow-up procedures, demonstrate steadfast resistance to threat, and minimize physical and psychological devastation. Together these ideas underscore the

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Figure 8.3 Addressing Threat Assessment Elements

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availability of practical steps to manage the challenges posed by incoming global threat. Identify and Protect Key Assets Looking first at vital interests or protection priorities, to address the importance of risked assets within a threat target, the target should carefully identify and monitor critical facilities and shield or hide key structures and leaders. Taking into account core values, the identification of key risked assets can be tricky and doing so forces a society to undertake a careful self-examination to determine what is really most crucial for its survival and the preservation of its way of life. Identifying and monitoring such assets within democracies has to occur within the prevailing consensus about the balance between the security need for surveillance and the individual right to privacy, for otherwise even the most effective monitoring can unintentionally engender destabilizing internal turmoil. Hiding the whereabouts of leaders or vital structures is also difficult in open societies, as it inevitably requires a certain level of nondisclosure and even deception. When shielding a society’s leadership, there needs to be care taken that the populous at large does not feel neglected and exposed to threat in the context of the safeguards protecting elite personnel. Use Coalition-Based Sanctions against Threat Sources Turning to dangerous instigators or harmful events, to address the disruptive capacity of risk sources, a threat target should attempt to isolate the threat sources diplomatically, militarily, or economically through a variety of multilaterally applied positive and negative sanctions42 and build where possible a coalition of those opposed to the threat sources and supportive of the threat target, as cooperative arrangements integrating the planning and implementation of security policies by allied states help to deal effectively with diffuse contemporary security threats.43 In today’s interdependent world, such a multilateral approach would be generally more legitimate in garnering approval and more effective in containing disruptions than unilateral action, although multilateralism should never be enunciated as a fixed formula or absolute requirement for dealing with incoming dangers. As a tool to address this threat assessment element a threat target needs to engage in considerable persuasion efforts to get other potential threat targets to recognize the severity of the threat, emphasizing the breadth of the dangers posed and the legitimacy of countermeasures in the form of these sanctions. These persuasion efforts would be quite similar regardless of whether the dangers issued from intentional human sources or unintentional natural sources, although due to the unconstrained scope of their impact enlisting help from allies would be even more central when dealing with unintended dangers such as pandemic disease, global warming, and natural disasters. If the resulting coalition is weak or unwilling to commit the necessary resources to enforce the sanctions against the

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threat source—or members of the coalition feel coerced by a threat target to participate—then the effort will fail. Employ Early Warning and Effective Follow-up Procedures As to vulnerability to damage or loss, to address a threat target’s risk anticipation and preparation, the target should develop sensitive and accurate early warning systems with well-established follow-up procedures and implement contingency plans for evacuation of those potentially in danger. Many analysts contend that ‘‘the primary objective of state-conducted intelligence is to contribute to warning,’’ necessary to ward off threat, seize an opportunity, or more generally provide the necessary lead time to formulate responses.44 However, this thrust needs to overcome a few challenges. First, early warning systems—particularly when aimed at the mass public—should be transmitted in a way that minimizes the ensuing panic and that includes well-thought-out directives about what parties receiving the warning should do afterward, including highly feasible contingency plans for evacuation; early warning is a necessary but not sufficient approach to managing threat, and many societies today have the tragic combination of decent early warning systems with a complete inability to guide people to undertake truly effective responses after receiving a warning. Second, although any early warning system requires effective continuous monitoring to determine how dangers are changing, many kinds of subtle threats are quite difficult to monitor, and so within democracies a reexamination needs to occur about the balance between these monitoring needs and the demands from civil liberties and ‘‘right-to-privacy’’ advocates. Third, better understanding is essential of a classic warning paradox—warning is successful when it prevents the actualization of an existing threat or the occurrence of a future threat, making the warning seem false—so that reasonable expectations emerge about how to evaluate existing warning systems. Demonstrate Steadfast Resistance to Threat Moving to the probability of damage or loss, to address the likelihood of risks occurring within a threat target, the target should dissuade threat sources from carrying out expressed threats by finding ways to show them that their actions would be futile or would backfire and by making clear to these sources the negative consequences if the sources decided to go through with their threat (for unintended threats, there may be no way to reduce significantly the probability of their occurrences). To accomplish these ends, a threat target may need to engage in various forms of deterrence and highlight its own civil defenses against foreign intrusion, mass resiliency, resistance to change, and capacity to retaliate. Providing clarification to a threat source—of the long-term pernicious consequences of carrying out a threat—might help, but only if this communication is credible and more sensitive to the threat source’s core interests and values than to the threat target’s interests and values. As part of this effort, a threat target should come up with alternative options—other than carrying out the threat—that might address the threat source’s concerns.

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Minimize Physical and Psychological Devastation Finally, concluding with the magnitude of damage or loss, to address the impact of actualized risks on a threat target, the target should prepare its population psychologically for the scope of the devastation and formulate realistic postdisruption recovery plans. Several challenges surround this response. Members of a target society need to understand that, even with the best efforts undertaken, people, structures, and property may not be fully protected from highly disruptive consequences emanating from a threat source, so there needs to be care to prevent expectations from becoming too high. Following the premise that forewarned is forearmed, this psychological awareness of the possible impact can allow people to do what they can to minimize the impact of the damage on them individually and collectively. Once this is done, more coherent thinking can occur about recovery plans after such a disruption, with affected people more motivated to spend the time and effort to try as far as possible to restore everything to be as close as possible to the way it was prior to the disruption. In some cases, full recovery may not be possible because of the scope of the devastation.

THE NEED FOR STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATION Strategic transformation—reexamining reliance on traditional modes of security and moving to endorse new concepts of protection—is vital to confront incoming threat. The enemies of the West are shrewd, resourceful, innovative, adaptive, and ruthless, and analyzing them using outmoded lenses or confronting them by staying within habitual military comfort zones is a prescription for strategic failure. Recent mistakes in identifying, covering, assessing, and responding to foreign dangers have had devastating consequences. Figure 8.4 identifies the conditions under which misassessing and mismanaging incoming threat have their most deadly outcomes— when such deficiencies produce rising violence and societal instability, eroding civil society, growing cynicism and distrust, spreading foreign policy failure, and degraded value of security prioritization. Existing dangers may escalate and become a lot more difficult to manage at a later point in time, with tensions arising among befuddled allies, and full-scale bloody warfare can often directly result from a spiraling threat-counterthreat cycle. The current defense focus is misplaced, paying more attention to defeating enemies than to assessing and managing underlying threats. Threat targets in the West often utilize a one-dimensional system for dealing with incoming dangers, emphasizing that they reflect irrational and groundless animosities, are constant or invariably increasing over time, or are containable only through punishing, crippling, or removing from power those who initiate them. Unruly threat sources recognize this belief and similarly believe the West will never view them as anything other than a primitive scourge that needs to be eradicated. This blunt static black-andwhite mode of dealing with foreign threat has not been working, and the longer it persists, the more the dangers will thrive.

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Figure 8.4 When Is Misassessing/Mismanaging Threat Most Deadly?

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To address ongoing deficiencies, this book’s target-centered threat assessment and management approach indicates that an alternative does exist for more accurately judging the constantly changing severity of incoming global threats and more appropriately responding to severe threats once they emerge. Given the difficulty of determining responsibility for issuing threats, security analysis needs to move away from an exclusive focus on identifying initiators and gauging their capabilities and intentions toward an emphasis on threat target needs—incorporating the full range of dangers including those not intended or not from human sources— designed to increase protection of those vulnerable. By focusing more on what a threat target cares about, a lot could be done to improve its security relative to incoming dangers. Those responsible for assessment and management within threat targets need to be more open to new ideas, instead of emphasizing traditional types of threat and relying on standard operating procedures to discern and address incoming dangers. These responsible officials need greater sensitivity to changes in threat, including new sources and styles; it thus can be vital for a threat target to step back and undertake a probing continuous examination of the changing levels of danger posed by its foes (to the degree permitted by available information). In this effort, threats related to cultural and religious differences, involving asymmetric threat and desperate determination by threat sources, deserve special scrutiny. Threat analysts also need to attend to the transformation in the international security context, incorporating more unpredictability, changing norms, and a clash between integration spurred on by spreading globalization, democratization, and technology45 and fragmentation spurred on by growing alienated splinter groups that reject dominant global values. While their ability to respond should not affect their assessment of threat severity, threat targets should concentrate on what they can alter about the risks—especially working on lowering their own vulnerabilities—and accept the risk dimensions that are beyond their control or nearly impossible to change (such as are often present in non-human-initiated threats). This means that, compared to current expenditures, the likelihood is that proportionally a greater chunk of security resources will be expended within a target and correspondingly a smaller chunk will be expended within areas of foreign initiation. Figure 8.5 displays the conditions under which, using even the best response options available, incoming threat would be most difficult to manage: if a threat target focuses on assigning blame to the threat source, exhibits extreme reactions to a massive devastating incoming threat, encounters sharp differences in threat recognition, is insensitive to threat source motivations and reactions, has poor communication with the threat source, is intolerant of threat source values, has a history of hostility and carnage with the threat source, and feels trapped with no honorable exit from a hostile action-reaction cycle with the threat source. Of all of these trying circumstances, the current security setting impedes most definitive threat recognition and precise surgical neutralization of threat sources: ‘‘the more warfare becomes intermingled with normal civilian activity, whether as militias rather than regular forces, international criminal networks developing their own armies, or military

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Figure 8.5 When Is Managing Incoming Threat Most Difficult?

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intelligence being gathered using commercially available systems, the more difficult it is to respond by conventional military means.’’46 For the toughest threats not readily subject to change, such as dealing with passionate terrorists, ruthless wily dictators, or extreme violent religious fundamentalists, considerable creativity and ‘‘out-of-the-box’’ thinking are absolutely essential. The potential specter of future threat is both complex and ominous: The permutations of enemies and modes of warfare are endless: terrorists might gain access to WMD [weapons of mass destruction], renegade states might plant bombs in public places, a mischievous hacker might insinuate himself into the computer networks of a country’s military establishment, while drug cartels might arm themselves for pitched battles. Governments require a set of capabilities that can provide the flexibility and versatility to cope with this wide range of contingencies.47

One of the biggest problems with current modes of threat management is that a separate special arsenal of responses is not fully developed for this most intractable set of security challenges. Indeed, although these dangers are often dismissed as being not modifiable using a reasonable expenditure of resources, those responsible for managing threat cannot afford to dismiss them, treat them as marginal or transitory, or place them on the back burner for later attention. As a result, it is urgently necessary that a set of detailed protocols be developed and refined for dealing with the most severe threats that resist all conventional management approaches. To restore public confidence in the ability of those in authority to manage incoming dangers, people need to be able to witness a concerted effort in this regard, one that keeps pace with the ever-changing set of most elusive foreign threats. More specifically, a flexible and versatile toolbox of approaches needs to become available utilizing both positive and negative incentives to confront an enemy on all fronts simultaneously: seek to deny it financial support and safe havens; pressure third parties not to support it; create a generally inhospitable environment for it; conduct aggressive intelligence operations against it; take action to disrupt its operations as much as possible, especially apprehending leaders and key operatives; visibly harden security to deny its objectives by making it physically much more difficult to achieve its goals; showcase one’s victories against it; and mount one’s own strategic communication campaigns. Although existing enemies of the West are extremely clever and resilient and adjust quickly to changing circumstances and new countermeasures, this integrated approach to containing incoming threat appears to provide the best chance for containing unruly violent international activity, or at least delaying or reducing the frequency or intensity of violent disruptions resulting from foreign threat. Although ‘‘direct evidence supporting the proposition that threats are an effective tool of international influence is sparse,’’48 and threats of force encounter major obstacles to achieving security ends in today’s world, facing incoming threat appears to be a persistent feature of international anarchy. For those tasked with defense within threat targets, there is no way to duck the challenge, and they should intensify

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nimble attempts to find ways to discern and defuse ominous dangers before they materialize. Left inappropriately assessed, international threat could become so severe that even reluctant parties would be forced too late out of their traditional practices to flail about desperately for new ways of framing existing dangers. If, in contrast, those responsible are willing early on to consider seriously alternative approaches to assessing and managing threat, then hope exists of preventing an uncontrolled global descent into fear, hatred, and—ultimately—chaos.

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. David L. Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3. 2. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post–Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 112. 3. Raymond Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 3. 4. David G. Haglund, ‘‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Threat Perceptions,’’ Comparative Strategy 24 (January 2005): 3. 5. For a realist view that sees global threats as indisputable, see Anthony Lake, Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2000); for a postmodern view that sees enemy creation as simply a distorted narrative, see Rodney Barker, Making Enemies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and for a constructivist view that sees threat entirely as socially constructed, see Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities. Those scholars holding these radically different perspectives seem largely intolerant of one another and generally do not acknowledge the value or legitimacy of each other’s perspectives on threat. 6. James T. Turner and Michael G. Gelles, Threat Assessment: A Risk Management Approach (New York: Haworth Press, 2003), 2. 7. Ibid., xiv. 8. Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis, 4. 9. Klaus Knorr, ‘‘Threat Perception,’’ in Historical Dimensions of National Security Problems, ed. Klaus Knorr, 78 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976). 10. See Brian L. Job, ed., The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992).

CHAPTER 2 1. Brian Michael Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), 151. 2. Robert Mandel, The Changing Face of National Security: A Conceptual Analysis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 30; an astute early formulation of this trend is found in Andrew M. Scott, The Revolution in Statecraft: Informal Penetration (New York: Random House, 1965).

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3. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 104. 4. Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), 208. 5. Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 197. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Scott B. MacDonald, ‘‘The New ‘Bad Guys’: Exploring the Parameters of the Violent New World Order,’’ in Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder, ed. Max G. Manwaring, 52–53 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 9. Walter Laqueur, ‘‘Postmodern Terrorism,’’ Foreign Affairs 75 (September/October 1996): 28. 10. Louise L. Shelley, ‘‘Transnational Organized Crime: An Imminent Threat to the Nation-State?,’’ Journal of International Affairs 48 (Winter 1995): 488–89. 11. Gregory F. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43; see also Gwyn Prins, Threats without Enemies: Facing Environmental Insecurity (London: Earthscan, 1993); and Dan Caldwell and Robert E. Williams, Jr., Seeking Security in an Insecure World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 10. 12. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information, 43–45. 13. For a discussion of the security threat posed by natural disasters, see, for example, Robert Mandel, ‘‘Security and Natural Disasters,’’ Journal of Conflict Studies 22 (Fall 2002): 118–43; and Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21–30. For a discussion of the security threat posed by disease, see, for example, Elke Krahmann, ed., New Threats and New Actors in International Security (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chaps. 6–7; Robert Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), chap. 8; and Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, chap. 6. 14. See, for example, G. Ted Constantine, Intelligence Support to Humanitarian-Disaster Relief Operations (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1995), 3, 4. 15. David Alexander, Natural Disasters (London: UCL Press, 1993), 1. 16. Janet N. Abramovitz, ‘‘Unnatural Disasters,’’ 12 World Watch (July/August 1999): 31. 17. Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground, 73–74; and S. Jay Olshansky, Bruce Carnes, Richard G. Rogers, and Len Smith, ‘‘Infectious Diseases—New and Ancient Threats to World Health,’’ Population Bulletin 52 (July 1997): 2–3. 18. Brad Knickerbocker, ‘‘Could Global Warming Cause War?’’ Christian Science Monitor (April 19, 2007): 2. See also Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 164–67; Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 92–93; and Sean Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 317–21. 19. Knickerbocker, ‘‘Could Global Warming Cause War?,’’ 2. 20. Ibid. 21. Posner, Catastrophe, 246. 22. Robert Harvey, Global Disorder: America and the Threat of World Conflict (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), xiii. 23. Ibid., 91.

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24. Rod Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007), 1. 25. Phil Williams, ‘‘New Context, Smart Enemies,’’ in Non-State Threats and Future Wars, ed. Robert J. Bunker, viii, x (Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003). 26. Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, 6. 27. Ibid., 17. 28. See Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground. 29. George J. Tenet (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency), ‘‘Introductory Remarks,’’ National Defense University U-2 Conference, September 17, 1998, Washington, D.C. 30. Raphael F. Perl, International Terrorism: Threat, Policy, and Response (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 2007), 3, 4; and Robert Mandel, ‘‘Fighting Fire with Fire: Privatizing Counterterrorism,’’ in Defeating Terrorism: Shaping the New Security Environment, eds. Russell D. Howard and Reid L. Sawyer, 62–73 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). 31. Scott B. MacDonald, Dancing on a Volcano: The Latin American Drug Trade (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1988), 5; and Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground, 23. 32. Stephen E. Flynn, ‘‘The Brittle Superpower,’’ in Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response: How Private Action Can Reduce Public Vulnerability, eds. Philip E. Auerswald, Lewis M. Branscomb, Todd M. La Porte, and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan, 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 33. Harvey, Global Disorder, 196. 34. Rogers, Losing Control, 85–86. 35. Lawrence J. Korb and Robert O. Boorstin, Integrated Power: A National Security Strategy for the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2005), 1. 36. Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 241–42. 37. John D. Negroponte, Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Washington, DC: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2006), 10. 38. Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 3; see also Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, 14–16. 39. Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 239–40. 40. Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, 12–13. 41. Elke Krahmann, ‘‘From State to Non-State Actors: The Emergence of Security Governance,’’ in New Threats and New Actors in International Security, ed. Krahmann, 7. 42. Lewis M. Branscomb, ‘‘Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructure in the Twenty-First Century,’’ in Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response, eds. Auerswald, Branscomb, La Porte, and Michel-Kerjan, 19. 43. Neil Munro, ‘‘The Pentagon’s New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl Harbor,’’ Washington Post, July 16, 1995, p. C3. 44. ‘‘Clinton Girds U.S. for Terrorism War,’’ USA Today, May 22, 1998, p. 1. 45. Rogers, Losing Control, 119. 46. Philip E. Auerswald, Lewis M. Branscomb, Todd M. La Porte, and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan, ‘‘Leadership: Who Will Act? Integrating Public and Private Interests to Make a Safer World,’’ in Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response, eds. Auerswald, Branscomb, La Porte, and Michel-Kerjan, 491.

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47. Lake, Nightmares, x–xi. 48. Max G. Manwaring and Courtney E. Prisk, ‘‘The Umbrella of Legitimacy,’’ in Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder, ed. Max G. Manwaring, 90 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 49. Zeev Maoz, Paradoxes of War (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 327. 50. Mikhail A. Alexseev, Without Warning: Threat Assessment, Intelligence, and Global Struggle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 262. 51. Ibid., 262–63. 52. Rogers, Losing Control, 101. 53. Dean G. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ in International Behavior: A Social-Psychological Analysis, ed. Herbert C. Kelman, 405 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965). 54. Buzan, People, States and Fear, 140. 55. Anthony H. Cordesman, Strategic Threats and National Missile Defenses: Defending the U.S. Homeland (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001). 56. National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, 2002). 57. Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 5. 58. Rob de Wijk, ‘‘The Limits of Military Power,’’ Washington Quarterly 25 (Winter 2002): 80–81. 59. Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 247. 60. Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 174–75. 61. de Wijk, ‘‘The Limits of Military Power,’’ 75, 82. 62. Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, 1. 63. Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 170. 64. Branscomb, ‘‘Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructure in the Twenty-First Century,’’ 20. 65. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 157–58. 66. See, for example, Clark Kent Ervin, Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 210–11; Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 33; Negroponte, Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 4; and Perl, International Terrorism, 4. 67. Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 41. 68. Ervin, Open Target, 24–25. 69. Posner, Catastrophe, 171. 70. Williams, ‘‘New Context, Smart Enemies,’’ viii. 71. National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, 2006).

CHAPTER 3 1. Barker, Making Enemies, 2, 74–75. 2. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 91. 3. Albert F. Eldridge, Images of Conflict (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 148. 4. Knorr, ‘‘Threat Perception,’’ 113.

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5. For an alternative conceptualization, see Barker, Making Enemies, 38. 6. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 148–49; see also Barker, chap. 8. 7. Stephen Chan, Out of Evil: New International Politics and Old Doctrines of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), ix. 8. Richard K. Herrman and Michael P. Fischerkeller, ‘‘Beyond the Enemy Image and Spiral Model: Cognitive-Strategic Research after the Cold War,’’ International Organization 49 (Summer 1995): 428. 9. For a detailed discussion of humiliation and enemy images, see Evelin Lindner, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006). 10. For an early general discussion of this issue, see Leo Postman and Jerome S. Bruner, ‘‘Perception Under Stress,’’ Psychological Review 55 (November 1948): 314–23. 11. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ 395–96. 12. Thomas W. Milburn and Kenneth H. Watman, On the Nature of Threat: A Social Psychological Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1981), 86–87. 13. Charles Lockhart, The Efficacy of Threats in International Interaction Strategies (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1971), 6. 14. Jerome D. Frank, Sanity and Survival: Psychological Aspects of War and Peace (New York: Random House, 1967), 124. 15. David J. Finlay, Ole R. Holsti, and Richard R. Fagen, Enemies in Politics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 21, 23. 16. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 53. 17. Barry R. Schneider, ‘‘Deterring International Rivals from War and Escalation,’’ in Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and Their Strategic Cultures, eds. Barry R. Schneider and Jerrold M. Post, 1 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: United States Air Force Counterproliferation Center, 2003). 18. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 146. 19. Ralph K. White, Nobody Wanted War: Misperception in Vietnam and Other Wars (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1970), 312–13. 20. John Mueller, ‘‘Is There Still a Terrorist Threat? The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy,’’ Foreign Affairs 85 (September/October 2006): 2–8. 21. Alexseev, Without Warning, 26. 22. Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 23. Finlay, Holsti, and Fagen, Enemies in Politics, 6–22; and Arthur Gladstone, ‘‘The Conception of the Enemy,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (June 1959): 132–37. 24. Barker, Making Enemies, 8. 25. Jerome D. Frank and Andrei Y. Melville, ‘‘The Image of the Enemy and the Process of Change,’’ in Breakthrough—Emerging New Thinking: Soviet and Western Challenges Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War, eds. Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman, 201–3 (New York: Walker and Company, 1988). 26. Morton Deutsch and Richard Krauss, ‘‘The Effects on Threat Upon Interpersonal Bargaining,’’ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 61 (1960): 189. 27. Raymond L. Garthoff, ‘‘On Estimating and Imputing Intentions,’’ International Security 2 (Winter 1978): 22–24.

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28. Robert Mandel, ‘‘What Are We Protecting?,’’ Armed Forces & Society 22 (Spring 1996): 344. 29. Barker, Making Enemies, 119–20. 30. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 153. 31. Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 175. 32. L.K. Samuels, ‘‘Terrorism, Global Warming and Fear,’’ June 14, 2007, http://www .lewrockwell.com/orig7/samuels4.html. 33. Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 153. 34. Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1997), 84. 35. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 147.

CHAPTER 4 1. Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 37. 2. See White, Nobody Wanted War; and Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 3. See Robert A. LeVine and Donald T. Campbell, Ethnocentrism: Theories of Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes, and Group Behavior (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972); Keen, Faces of the Enemy, 17; and Jerome D. Frank and Andrei Y. Melville, ‘‘The Image of the Enemy and the Process of Change,’’ in Breakthrough—Emerging New Thinking: Soviet and Western Challenges Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War, eds. Gromyko and Hellman, 199 (New York: Walker and Company, 1988). 4. See Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis, 177, 181, 187–188; and Robert Jervis, ‘‘Perceiving and Coping with Threat,’’ in Psychology and Deterrence, eds. Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, 15 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 5. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 372–378. 6. Buzan, People, States and Fear, 141. 7. Milburn and Watman, On the Nature of Threat, 83, 87. 8. Buzan, People, States and Fear, 115. 9. Ibid., 140–41. 10. Garthoff, ‘‘On Estimating and Imputing Intentions,’’ 22. 11. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ 400–2. 12. Knorr, ‘‘Threat Perception,’’ 113. 13. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 374. 14. Knorr, ‘‘Threat Perception,’’ 113. 15. Frank and Melville, ‘‘The Image of the Enemy,’’ 199; and White, Nobody Wanted War, 310. 16. Lawrence LeShan, The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness (Chicago: Noble Press, 1992), 30. 17. Keen, Faces of the Enemy, 10, 24, 44, 60, 86. 18. Robert Mandel, Security, Strategy, and the Quest for Bloodless War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), chap. 3; and Keen, Faces of the Enemy, 72. 19. Lockhart, The Efficacy of Threats in International Interaction Strategies, 7–8. 20. Jervis, ‘‘Perceiving and Coping with Threat,’’ 13.

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21. Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 56. 22. Amy B. Zegart, ‘‘September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of U.S. Intelligence Agencies,’’ International Security 29 (Spring 2005): 90. 23. Jeffrey R. Cooper, Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005), 5. 24. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone, 246; Zegart, ‘‘September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of U.S. Intelligence Agencies,’’ 79. 25. Lake, Nightmares, x–xi. 26. Samuels, ‘‘Terrorism, Global Warming and Fear.’’ 27. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information, 180. 28. Krahmann, ‘‘From State to Non-State Actors,’’ 7. 29. Toffler and Toffler, War and Anti-War, 122. 30. Anthony H. Cordesman, Lessons of Post Cold War Conflict: Middle Eastern Lessons and Perspectives (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies monograph, 2004), iv. 31. Buzan, People, States and Fear, 116–17. 32. ‘‘Agile Military, Clumsy Structure,’’ Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 4, 1993, p. 6B. 33. Alexseev, Without Warning, 189–91. 34. See discussion in Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis, 4. 35. See discussion in Schweller, Unanswered Threats, 1–21. 36. For the original articulation of this position, see J. David Singer, ‘‘Threat Perception and the Armament-Tension Dilemma,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (March 1958): 94; and for one of many recent applications, see Haglund, ‘‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Threat Perceptions,’’ 5. 37. Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 18–19. 38. Alexseev, Without Warning, 24–25. 39. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 151. 40. For fallacies surrounding enemy intentions estimates during the Cold War, see Garthoff, ‘‘On Estimating and Imputing Intentions’’; and for post–Cold War fallacies in enemy intentions estimates, see Robert Mandel, ‘‘On Estimating Post–Cold War Enemy Intentions,’’ paper prepared for presentation at the annual national meeting of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, March 26–29, 2008. 41. Laura Neack, Elusive Security: States First, People Last (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 77. 42. Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 10. 43. Press, Calculating Credibility, 1, 6. 44. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ 402; and Garthoff, ‘‘On Estimating and Imputing Intentions,’’ 24. 45. Jervis, ‘‘Perceiving and Coping with Threat,’’ 14; and Mark M. Lowenthal, ‘‘The Burdensome Concept of Failure,’’ in Intelligence: Policy and Process, eds. Alfred C. Maurer, et al., 49 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985). 46. Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. 47. See, for example, Mueller, ‘‘Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?,’’ 2–8. 48. Ervin, Open Target, 207–8.

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49. Shawn Reese, Homeland Security Advisory System: Possible Issues for Congressional Oversight (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 2007), 5. 50. Reese, Homeland Security Advisory System, 5–16; and Kay, Global Security in the TwentyFirst Century, 240. 51. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 147. 52. Ibid., 150. 53. Ibid., 148.

CHAPTER 5 1. Posner, Catastrophe, 139. 2. See Robert A. Fein and Bryan Vossekuil, Protective Intelligence and Threat Assessment Investigations: A Guide for State and Local Law Enforcement Officials (Washington, DC: United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 1998). 3. Turner and Gelles, Threat Assessment, 1. 4. Rousseau, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities, 188. 5. See, for example, James F. Broder, Risk Analysis and the Security Survey (Boston: Butterworth Publishers, 1984), chap. 1. 6. For theft insurance, risk assessment heavily emphasizes target vulnerability (presence or absence of a safe neighborhood and security systems) rather than just looking at the capabilities and intentions of criminal groups operating in the area; and for contagious disease outbreaks, risk assessment heavily emphasizes the susceptibility of each potential victim (presence or absence of overall health and immunities) rather than just looking at the potential lethality and spread rate of the infection. 7. A brief note seems useful on the distinctions among the interrelated concepts of threat severity, threat credibility, and threat effectiveness: threat severity, which constitutes the focus on this study’s alternative threat assessment approach and is the broadest of the three concepts, represents the overall degree of danger a threat poses to a threat target, incorporating risked vital interests or assets within threat targets, dangerous instigators or harmful events’ capacity to disrupt threat targets, target vulnerability to damage or loss, and the probability and magnitude of target damage or loss; in contrast, threat credibility represents the likelihood of a threat source carrying out an issued threat, and threat effectiveness represents the likelihood of a threat producing the result its source intended. 8. Posner, Catastrophe, 174. 9. Milburn and Watman, On the Nature of Threat, 9. 10. Colonel Joel Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Assistance, September 2005), 5. 11. Mandel, The Changing Face of National Security, 29–30. 12. Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, 7. 13. Milburn and Watman, On the Nature of Threat, 77. 14. Ervin, Open Target, 214. 15. Ibid., 224. 16. Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, 7. 17. See, for example, Buzan, People, States and Fear, 113–14. 18. Ervin, Open Target, 27–158; and Auerswald, Branscomb, La Porte, and Michel-Kerjan, ‘‘Leadership,’’ 486.

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19. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 151–52. 20. Lake, Nightmares, 283. 21. Robert M. Clark, Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004), 165–73. 22. Milburn and Watman, On the Nature of Threat, 17; and Press, Calculating Credibility, 3. 23. Posner, Catastrophe, 10. 24. Clark, Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004), 187. 25. Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, 5. 26. Posner, Catastrophe, 6.

CHAPTER 6 1. In most of these cases, the threat involved had no unambiguous ending point, and thus dangers have continued to evolve over time. 2. Mark Sandalow, ‘‘Record Shows Bush Shifting on Iraq War: President’s Rationale for the Invasion Continues to Evolve,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2004, p. A1. 3. ‘‘Iraq, Three Years On: Resolve, But No Solution,’’ The Economist 378 (March 18, 2006): 29. 4. Paul T. McCartney, ‘‘American Nationalism and U.S. Foreign Policy from September 11 to the Iraq War,’’ Political Science Quarterly 119 (Fall 2004): 408; and Susan Page, ‘‘Poll of Several Countries Finds ‘Complete Misperceptions’’’ USA Today, June 23, 2006, p. 7. 5. Chaim Kaufman, ‘‘Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,’’ International Security 29 (Summer 2004): 5. 6. Jennifer Harper, ‘‘Public Ignores Iraq War Naysayers,’’ Washington Times, November 24, 2005, p. A01. 7. Dalia Dassa Kaye, ‘‘Bound to Cooperate? Transatlantic Policy in the Middle East,’’ Washington Quarterly 27 (Winter 2003–2004): 179–95. 8. Dominic D.P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 201. 9. Ibid., 206–7. 10. Stephen J. Hedges, ‘‘U.S. Using Wrong Tactics: Fighting in Iraq Likely to Stay at Same Level,’’ Chicago Tribune, June 17, 2006. 11. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., ‘‘How to Win in Iraq,’’ Foreign Affairs 84 (September/ October 2005): 88. 12. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ‘‘Now for the Hard Part,’’ in From Victory to Success: Afterwar Policy in Iraq, 51 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003). 13. Larry Diamond, ‘‘What Went Wrong in Iraq’’ Foreign Affairs 83 (September/October 2004): 36. 14. Krepinevich, ‘‘How to Win in Iraq,’’ 89. 15. United States Government Accountability Office, Rebuilding Iraq: Stabilization, Reconstruction, and Financing Challenges (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006), 6. 16. Pamela M. Prah, ‘‘The War in Iraq: Is the United States Winning?,’’ CQ Researcher 15 (October 21, 2005): 885. 17. Krepinevich, ‘‘How to Win in Iraq,’’ 90. 18. ‘‘Iraq at War with Itself,’’ The Economist 378 (March 4, 2006): 9.

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19. ‘‘Iraq: Murder Is Certain,’’ The Economist 378 (March 4, 2006): 49. 20. Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 279. 21. Dexter Filkins, ‘‘Suddenly, It’s ‘America Who?’’’ New York Times, February 6, 2005, section 4, p. 1. 22. Christopher Preble, ‘‘After Victory: Toward a New Military Posture in the Persian Gulf,’’ Policy Analysis, no. 477 (June 10, 2003): 12. 23. James Dobbins, ‘‘Iraq: Winning the Unwinnable War,’’ Foreign Affairs 84 (January/ February 2005): 16. 24. Ekaterina Stepanova, ‘‘War and Peace Building,’’ Washington Quarterly 27 (Autumn 2004): 130. 25. Neil MacFarquhar, ‘‘As Terrorist Strike Arab Targets, Escalation Fears Arise,’’ New York Times, April 30, 2004, p. 13. 26. ‘‘Three Years and Counting,’’ Nation 282 (March 27, 2006): 3. 27. Ibid. 28. Tim Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security: Asia’s 9/11?,’’ Survival 47 (Spring 2005): 123; and ‘‘The Tsunami: Asia’s Devastation,’’ The Economist 374 (January 1, 2005): 9. 29. Andrew S. Natsios, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Humanitarian Relief in Complex Emergencies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 125, 138–139. 30. Constantine, Intelligence Support to Humanitarian-Disaster Relief Operations, 3; and Morris Davis and Steven Thomas Seitz, ‘‘Disasters and Governments,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 26 (September 1982): 547–68. 31. Charles H.V. Ebert, ‘‘Consequences of Disasters for Developing Nations,’’ in Violent Forces of Nature, ed. Robert H. Maybury, 287 (Mount Airy, MD: Lomond Publications, 1986). 32. Richard A. Posner, ‘‘The Probability of Catastrophe,’’ Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, January 4, 2005, p. A12. 33. Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security,’’ 124. 34. Quirin Schlermeier, ‘‘Tsunamis: A Long-Term Threat,’’ Nature 433 (January 6, 2005): 4; and C. Lomnitz and S. Nilsen-Hofseth, ‘‘The Indian Ocean Disaster: Tsunami Physics and Early Warning Dilemmas,’’ Eos 86 (February 15, 2005): 65–76. 35. Ian Burton, Robert W. Kates, and Gilbert F. White, The Environment as Hazard, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 1993): 212–13. 36. Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security,’’ 128–29. 37. Natsios, U. S. Foreign Policy and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and Kimberly A. Maynard, Healing Communities in Conflict: International Assistance in Complex Emergencies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 38. Burton, Kates, and White, The Environment as Hazard, 25. 39. Mandel, ‘‘Security and Natural Disasters,’’ 118. 40. Anders Wijkman and Lloyd Timberlake, Natural Disasters: Acts of God or Acts of Man? (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1988), 11; and Gilbert F. White, ‘‘Natural Hazards Research: Concepts, Methods, and Policy Implications,’’ in Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global, ed. Gilbert F. White, 10–13 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 41. ‘‘The World’s Response: More Generous than Thou,’’ The Economist 374 (January 8, 2005): 27. 42. ‘‘The Cruel Sea,’’ The Economist 374 (January 1, 2005): 16. 43. Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security,’’ 125.

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44. Wijkman and Timberlake, Natural Disasters, 111. 45. ‘‘After the Deluge,’’ The Economist 374 (January 6, 2005): 24–25. 46. Wijkman and Timberlake, Natural Disasters, 112; and Frederick C. Cuny, Disasters and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 86. 47. Alexander, Natural Disasters, 502. 48. Cuny, Disasters and Development, 90. 49. ‘‘The World’s Response: More Generous than Thou,’’ 27; and ‘‘The Cruel Sea,’’ 17–18. 50. ‘‘The Cruel Sea,’’ 18; and Mandel, ‘‘Security and Natural Disasters,’’ 118–43. 51. Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security,’’ 127–28, 129; and ‘‘The Tsunami: Asia’s Devastation,’’ 9. 52. Huxley, ‘‘The Tsunami and Security,’’ 124, 125. 53. Nile Gardiner and James Phillips, ‘‘The London Bombings: How the U.S. and the U.K. Should Respond,’’ Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, no. 1871 (July 21, 2005): 5. 54. ‘‘After the Bombs: How Four Suicide Attacks by British Citizens Have Changed Britain,’’ The Economist 376 (July 16, 2005): 52. 55. Philip Johnston, ‘‘Suicide Bombings ‘Unlikely,’ Experts Said,’’ Daily Telegraph (London), July 1, 2006, p. 6. 56. Christopher Caldwell, ‘‘After Londonistan,’’ New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2006, p. 42. 57. ‘‘In Europe’s Midst: Four Young British Muslims Became Zealots, and the Zealots Became Suicide-Bombers,’’ The Economist 376 (July 16, 2005): 13–14; Caldwell, ‘‘After Londonistan,’’ 46; and Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, ‘‘In London, Islamic Radicals Found a Haven,’’ Washington Post, July 10, 2005, p. A1. 58. Caldwell, ‘‘After Londonistan,’’ 46. 59. Michael Clarke, ‘‘The Contract with Muslims Must Not Be Torn Up,’’ Guardian (London), July 6, 2006, p. 27. 60. ‘‘The Enemy Within: What Turns a Man into a Terrorist, and What Can Be Done about It?,’’ The Economist 376 (July 16, 2005, p. 25. 61. ‘‘After the Bombs,’’ 52. 62. Ibid. 63. ‘‘Revulsion and Resolve: The Need for Extra Vigilance after the London Terrorist Outrages of 7/7,’’ Times (London), July 8, 2005, p. 23. 64. ‘‘Terrorism: Learning to Live with It,’’ The Economist 376 (July 30, 2005): 50. 65. Glen M. Segell, ‘‘Terrorism: London Public Transport—July 7, 2005,’’ Strategic Insights I, no. 8 (August 2005), http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2005/Aug/segellAug05.asp. 66. ‘‘The Enemy Within,’’ 24. 67. ‘‘Terrorism: Learning to Live with It,’’ 49. 68. Sarah Staples, ‘‘Panicked Callers Overwhelm Cellphone Network: Land Lines Congested as Family, Friends Use Traditional Phones to Contact Loved Ones,’’ Gazette (Montreal), July 8, 2005, p. A4. 69. Mark Townsend and Cordelia O’Neill, ‘‘Mobile Phone Collapse Makes 7 July Terror Attacks Worse,’’ Observer (Farringdon, London), June 4, 2006, p. 5. 70. ‘‘After the Bombs,’’ 52. 71. Ibid., 53. 72. Caldwell, ‘‘After Londonistan,’’ 43; and ‘‘After the Bombs,’’ 53. 73. Caldwell, ‘‘After Londonistan,’’ 42.

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74. Fareed Zakaria, ‘‘How We Can Prevail,’’ Newsweek, July 18, 2005, p. 38. 75. Alan Cowell, ‘‘Faith-Hate on Rise in U.K.: Crime Surge Since Attacks Tests Policies,’’ International Herald-Tribune, August 4, 2005, p. 1. 76. ‘‘The Attack on London: Murder in the Rush Hour,’’ The Economist 376 (July 9, 2005): 48. 77. ‘‘The Attack on London,’’ 47–48. 78. ‘‘Revulsion and Resolve, 23. 79. John M. Broder, ‘‘Immigration, From a Simmer to a Scream,’’ New York Times, May 21, 2006, p. 1. 80. ‘‘Mexico’s Northern Border: Dangerous Desert, Breached Border,’’ The Economist 374 (January 9, 2005): 37; Alan Nathan, ‘‘A Wall and Legalization: Coming Together and Defending U.S. Borders,’’ Washington Times, April 12, 2006, p. A19; and Lawrence Downes, ‘‘The Terrible, Horrible Urgent National Disaster that Immigration Isn’t,’’ New York Times (online version only) (June 20, 2006), http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/opinion/21talkingpoints.html. 81. Michael Renner, Fighting for Survival (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 103–4. 82. Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 7–8. 83. Ibid., 8. 84. Ginger Thompson, ‘‘Mexico Worries about Its Own Southern Border,’’ New York Times, June 18, 2006, p. 1. 85. Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis, 5, 8. 86. Eugene Robinson, ‘‘Can You Say, ‘Bienvenidos’?,’’ Washington Post, June 27, 2006, p. A21. 87. Douglas S. Massey and Kristin E. Espinosa, ‘‘What Is Driving Mexico–U.S. Migration? A Theoretical, Empirical, and Policy Analysis,’’ American Journal of Sociology 102 (January 1997): 989–90. 88. Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground, chap. 5. 89. David Henderson, ‘‘International Migration: Appraising Current Policies,’’ International Affairs 70 (1994): 93–110. 90. Robert Mandel, ‘‘Perceived Security Threat and the Global Refugee Crisis,’’ Armed Forces & Society 24 (Fall 1997): 77–78. 91. John Tirman, ‘‘The Movement of People and the Security of States,’’ in The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11, ed. John Tirman, 2 (New York: The New Press, 2004). 92. Ibid., 7. 93. ‘‘The New Nativism,’’ Nation 283 (August 28/September 4, 2006): 5. 94. Downes, ‘‘The Terrible, Horrible Urgent National Disaster that Immigration Isn’t.’’ 95. Peter Andreas, ‘‘Politics on Edge: Managing the US–Mexico Border,’’ Current History 105 (February 2006): 66; and Mark Krikorian, ‘‘Keeping Terror Out: Immigration Policy and Asymmetric Warfare,’’ National Interest (Spring 2004): 78. 96. Robert Rector, ‘‘Senate Immigration Bill Would Allow 100 Million New Legal Immigrants over the Next Twenty Years,’’ Heritage Foundation WebMemo, no. 1076 (May 15, 2006): 1. 97. ‘‘The New Nativism,’’ 5. 98. Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, ‘‘Must It Be the Rest Against the West?,’’ Atlantic Monthly 274 (December 1994): 69. 99. Broder, ‘‘Immigration, From a Simmer to a Scream,’’ 1; and ‘‘Fixing the American Dream,’’ The Economist 373 (December 11, 2004): 34. 100. Tamar Jocoby, ‘‘Law and Borders,’’ Weekly Standard 10 (February 28, 2006): 29.

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101. Heather Mac Donald, ‘‘Crime & the Illegal Alien: The Fallout from Crippled Immigration Enforcement,’’ Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder (June 2004): 1. 102. Julia Preston, ‘‘New Scrutiny of Illegal Immigrants in Minor Crimes,’’ New York Times, June 20, 2006, p. A1. 103. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States (Atlanta, GA: Violent Crimes Institute, 2006). 104. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, ‘‘Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,’’ Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 10 (Spring 2005): 6. 105. Daphne Eviatar, ‘‘Nightly Nativism,’’ Nation 283 (August 28/September 4, 2006): 18. 106. Bill Berkowitz, ‘‘Nativists Declare Open Season on Undocumented Immigrants,’’ May 4, 2006, http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20748. 107. Leonard Zeskind, ‘‘The New Nativism: The Alarming Overlap between White Nationalists and Mainstream Anti-Immigrant Forces,’’ American Prospect 16 (November 2005): A15. 108. ‘‘The New Nativism,’’ 5. 109. Ibid. 110. Demetrios G. Papademetriou, ‘‘Migration,’’ Foreign Policy no. 109 (Winter 1997): 22. 111. Jim Rutenberg, David S. Cloud, and Carl Hulse, ‘‘The Immigration Debate: The Overview—President Calls for Compromise on Immigration,’’ New York Times, May 16, 2006, p. A1. 112. Randal C. Archibold, ‘‘Guard Troops Set to Begin Mission on Mexican Border,’’ New York Times, June 18, 2006, p. 16; and Sylvia Moreno and Ann Scott Tyson, ‘‘Bringing in Guard Raises Concerns of Militarization,’’ Washington Post, May 16, 2006, p. A08. 113. Wayne A. Cornelius, ‘‘Death at the Border: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Control Policy,’’ Population and Development Review 27 (December 2001): 668. 114. Andreas, ‘‘Politics on Edge,’’ 67.

CHAPTER 7 1. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 153. 2. Lockhart, The Efficacy of Threats in International Interaction Strategies, 8. 3. Knorr, ‘‘Threat Perception,’’ 116. 4. Clark, Intelligence Analysis, 18, 143–47. 5. Alexseev, Without Warning, 260. 6. Lincoln P. Bloomfield, ‘‘Short Order Futures: Short-Range Forecasting in Foreign Affairs,’’ in Forecasting in International Relations: Theory, Methods, Problems, Prospects, ed. Nazli Choucri and Thomas W. Robinson, 281 (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1978). 7. Clark, Intelligence Analysis, 150. 8. Negroponte, Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24–25. 9. Alexseev, Without Warning, 264. 10. Perl, International Terrorism, 13, 37–28. 11. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 150. 12. Turner and Gelles, Threat Assessment, 3.

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CHAPTER 8 1. Harvey, Global Disorder, 8. 2. Ervin, Open Target, 207. 3. Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs (New York: International Institute of Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper #318, Oxford University Press, 1998), 73; and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1996), 1. 4. Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 219; Mandel, Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground, 8–10; and Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory, 116–19. 5. Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare, 9–12, 18; see also Mandel, Security, Strategy, and the Quest for Bloodless War. 6. Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, 4. 7. Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 16. 8. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 148. 9. Rogers, Losing Control, 102. 10. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ 395. 11. Ibid. 12. Russell J. Leng and Hugh G. Wheeler, ‘‘Influence Strategies, Success, and War,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 23 (December 1979): 656, 657. 13. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 162. 14. Alexseev, Without Warning, 264. 15. Colonel Daniel Smith, Marcus Corbin, and Christopher Hellman, Reforging the Sword: Forces for a 21st Century Security Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2001), 55. 16. Alexseev, Without Warning, 261. 17. David A. Baldwin, ‘‘Thinking about Threats,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 15 (March 1971): 71–78; and Cohen, Threat Perception in International Crisis, 4. 18. Mandel, The Changing Face of National Security, 21–22. 19. Harvey, Global Disorder, 90–91. 20. Ervin, Open Target, 215. 21. Frank and Melville, ‘‘The Image of the Enemy,’’ 203–4. 22. Milburn and Watman, On the Nature of Threat, 133. 23. Ibid., 132. 24. Pruitt, ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action,’’ 396. 25. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 152. 26. Ervin, Open Target, 210. 27. Barack Obama, ‘‘Renewing American Leadership,’’ Foreign Affairs 86 (July/August 2007): 4. 28. Harvey, Global Disorder, 456. 29. Geoffrey Howe, former British Foreign Secretary, quoted in Harvey, Global Disorder, xv. 30. Flynn, ‘‘The Brittle Superpower,’’ 32. 31. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 156–58. 32. Kay, Global Security in the Twenty-First Century, 249. 33. Leson, Assessing and Managing the Terrorism Threat, 3. 34. Jenkins, Unconquerable Nation, 166. 35. Flynn, ‘‘The Brittle Superpower,’’ 26. 36. Branscomb, ‘‘Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructure in the Twenty-First Century,’’ 24.

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37. Lewis M. Branscomb and Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan, ‘‘Public-Private Collaboration on a National and International Scale,’’ in Auerswald, Branscomb, La Porte, and Michel-Kerjan, Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response, 397–99. 38. Flynn, ‘‘The Brittle Superpower,’’ 26. 39. Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs, 75. 40. Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 29. 41. Press, Calculating Credibility, 1. 42. Perl, International Terrorism, 11–14. 43. Caldwell and Williams, Seeking Security in an Insecure World, 178–81. 44. Thomas G. Belden, ‘‘Indications, Warning, and Crisis Operations,’’ International Studies Quarterly 21 (March 1977): 181; and Arie Ofri, ‘‘Crisis and Opportunity Forecasting,’’ Orbis 27 (Winter 1983): 821. 45. Korb and Boorstin, Integrated Power, 1. 46. Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs, 77. 47. Ibid., 76–77. 48. James W. Davis, Jr., Threats and Promises: The Pursuit of International Influence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1.

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Frank, Jerome D., and Andrei Y. Melville, ‘‘The Image of the Enemy and the Process of Change.’’ In Breakthrough—Emerging New Thinking: Soviet and Western Challenges Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War, edited by Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman. New York: Walker and Company, 1988. Freedman, Lawrence. The Revolution in Strategic Affairs. New York: International Institute of Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper #318, Oxford University Press, April 1998. Garthoff, Raymond L. ‘‘On Estimating and Imputing Intentions.’’ International Security 2 (Winter 1978). Gerges, Fawaz A. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Gladstone, Arthur. ‘‘The Conception of the Enemy.’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (June 1959). Haglund, David G. ‘‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Threat Perceptions.’’ Comparative Strategy 24 (January 2005). Hammes, Colonel Thomas X. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. St. Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004. Harvey, Robert. Global Disorder: America and the Threat of World Conflict. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. Jenkins, Brian Michael. Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006. Jervis, Robert. ‘‘Perceiving and Coping with Threat.’’ In Psychology and Deterrence, edited by Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Job, Brian L., ed. The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992. Kay, Sean. Global Security in the Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Keen, Sam. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Knorr, Klaus. ‘‘Threat Perception.’’ In Historical Dimensions of National Security Problems, edited by Klaus Knorr. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976. Korb, Lawrence J., and Robert O. Boorstin. Integrated Power: A National Security Strategy for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, June 2005. Krahmann, Elke, ed. New Threats and New Actors in International Security. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lake, Anthony. Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2000. Lindner, Evelin. Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006. Lockhart, Charles. The Efficacy of Threats in International Interaction Strategies. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1971. Mandel, Robert. Deadly Transfers and the Global Playground. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999. Manwaring, Max G., ed. Gray Area Phenomena: Confronting the New World Disorder. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Milburn, Thomas W., and Kenneth H. Watman. On the Nature of Threat: A Social Psychological Analysis. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1981.

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Mueller, John. ‘‘Is There Still a Terrorist Threat? The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy.’’ Foreign Affairs 85 (September/October 2006). Posner, Richard A. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Press, Daryl G. Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pruitt, Dean G. ‘‘Definition of the Situation as a Determinant of International Action.’’ In International Behavior: A Social-Psychological Analysis, edited by Herbert C. Kelman. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Rogers, Paul. Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Rousseau, David L. Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Schneider, Barry R., and Jerrold M. Post. Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and Their Strategic Cultures. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: United States Air Force Counterproliferation Center, July 2003. Schweller, Randall L. Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Scott, Andrew M. The Revolution in Statecraft: Informal Penetration. New York: Random House, 1965. Singer, J. David. ‘‘Threat Perception and the Armament-Tension Dilemma.’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (March 1958). Thornton, Rod. Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007. Toffler, Alvin, and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War. New York: Warner Books, 1993. Treverton, Gregory F. Reshaping National Intelligence in an Age of Information. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Turner, James T., and Michael G. Gelles. Threat Assessment: A Risk Management Approach. New York: Haworth Press, 2003. Van Creveld, Martin. The Transformation of War. New York: The Free Press, 1991. Zegart, Amy B. ‘‘September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of U.S. Intelligence Agencies.’’ International Security 29 (Spring 2005).

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Index

Accountability, need for local, 105, 110, 111–12. See also Leadership, need for sensitive; Responsibility for threat management Action-reaction cycle. See Threat-counterthreat cycle AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), 13. See also SARS; Disease Allies, 57–58, 60, 67, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 109, 110, 115–16 Al-Qaida, 25, 34, 42, 70, 77, 82, 85, 86, 89. See also Islamic extremism; Religion; Terrorism Anarchy, 11, 16, 20–21, 41, 44, 57, 71–72, 108 Appeasement, in response to threat, 101, 103–4 Archenemy, 28, 32 Arms transfers, covert, 15–16, 24 Asymmetric threat, 15, 23–24, 58, 100, 119 Automobile accidents, 9 Bathtub drownings, 9 Black-and-white thinking, 41, 70, 117 ‘‘Black hole’’ states, 16 Blind faith, 2, 91, 92

Bloodless war, 100 Burden sharing, 60 Bureaucratic inertia, 43, 62, 98, 102, 110 Capabilities of instigators, role in threat assessment, 47, 49–50, 58, 70, 87. See also Intentions of instigators Casualty sensitivity, 18 China: potential threat, 40, 50, 82; perception of threat, 42 Civil defense, 105, 111, 112, 116 Coalitions. See Allies Cold War threat, distinguished from post– Cold War threat, 12 Conciliation, in response to threat, 101, 103–4 Counterthreat doctrine, 104–6 Credibility: of one’s own actions, 73, 118; of outside threat, 61, 91, 94, 95, 96, 105, 107–8 Crime, 9, 83 Criminal organizations, transnational: links to other disruptive forces, 16; threat sources, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 22, 50, 81, 84, 95, 104, 113, 119 Crisis, foreign policy, 29 Cultural imperialism, 21

144

INDEX

Cyber-warfare, 15, 19, 46, 49, 50, 100, 113. See also Internet Damage. See Magnitude of damage/loss; Probability of damage/loss Dangerous instigators/harmful events, as an element of target-centered threat assessment, 58–59, 86–87, 98, 115–16. See also Target-centered threat assessment ‘‘Deadly transfers,’’ 15–16 Defense resources, allocation to manage threat, 112–13 Defensive versus offensive weaponry, 107 Democracy, 18, 21, 39, 40, 42, 47, 57, 60, 70, 72–73, 80, 85, 92, 96, 111, 116, 119 Demonization of enemies, 29, 32, 33, 37, 42, 44, 77. See also Fear; Hatred; Hysteria Dependence, external (to manage threat), 60, 75–76. See also Globalization Deterrence of threats, 9, 12, 23–24, 62, 101, 103–4, 109, 113, 116 Diplomacy: general discussion, 106–8, 113, 115; public diplomacy, 95 Disasters, natural, 2, 8, 9, 13–14, 35–36, 64, 73–77, 87, 100, 115 Disease, 2, 8, 9, 13–14, 15, 35–36, 50, 75, 83, 88, 100, 104, 115 Drug running, illicit, 15–16, 50, 82 Early warning systems, 74, 93, 95, 106, 114, 116. See also Monitoring; Perceptual vigilance Emotional responses to threat. See Fear; Hatred; Hysteria Enemies: classification of enemies, 34–36; costs and benefits of enemy focus, 36– 37; intolerance of enemies, 32–34, 35, 42, 120; political/economic/cultural enemies, 35; proximate versus distant enemies, 34–35, 44; state versus nonstate enemies, 34; zeal of enemies, 15, 23–24, 34, 58–59, 61. See also Enemy images Enemy images: blacktop, 33; general discussion, 9, 28–40, 70, 106–7; manipulation, 38–39; origins, 28–31; resistance to change, 31–32

Errors, need to acknowledge, 101, 102 Ethnic antagonisms, 18, 29, 34, 41, 43–44, 83, 104 Ethnocentrism, 41. See also Xenophobia ‘‘Eye-for-an-eye’’ approach to threat, 109 Failed/failing states, 14, 16–17. See also Third World Fear: divorcing threat management from fear, 90–93; general discussion, 18, 25, 26, 28–29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 42, 45, 46, 63, 78–79, 81, 82– 83, 89, 102, 107. See also Hatred; Hysteria Finger-pointing about threat, 109, 120 ‘‘Fortress America,’’ 106 Friction, distinguished from threat, 66, 104 Globalization, 20–21, 44, 93, 119 Global warming, 2, 8, 14, 34, 35–36, 46, 100, 104, 115 ‘‘Guns-butter’’ trade-off, 37 Harmful events. See Dangerous instigators/harmful events Hazardous materials, 15 Hatred: divorcing threat management from hatred, 90–93; general discussion, 28– 29, 30, 35, 36, 38, 45, 80, 83, 102. See also Fear; Hysteria Homeland security, 25, 82 Homeland Security Advisory System, 51– 52, 95 Humanitarian emergencies, 74–75 Human rights, 16, 57 Human security impact of threat, 17 Human trafficking, 2, 13, 15 Hysteria, 36, 37, 38, 52, 75, 79, 80, 82–83, 89, 90, 95, 110, 116, 118. See also Fear; Hatred Inertia, 43, 62, 98, 102, 110 ‘‘Informal penetration,’’ 11 Information warfare. See Cyber-warfare Instigators of threat. See Dangerous instigators/harmful events Intelligence: hostile intelligence as a threat,

INDEX

50; intelligence gaps pertaining to threat management, 23, 38–39, 44–45, 46, 61, 89, 93, 102; intelligence solutions pertaining to threat management, 22, 79, 91, 93–96, 110, 111, 121 Intentions of instigators, role in threat assessment, 49–50, 58, 70, 87, 103. See also Capabilities of instigators Interdependence. See Allies; Dependence, external; Globalization International law, limitations of, 109 Internet, as a threat tool, 17. See also Cyber-warfare Intolerance: of ambiguity, 41; of enemies, 32–34, 35, 42, 120. See also Unpredictability surrounding threat Iraq War (2003), 10, 68–73, 78, 79, 85, 86, 87, 88–89 Iran, as a rogue state, 12, 34, 50. See also Rogue states Irrationality. See Rationality Irregular warfare, 105, 112, 113 Islamic extremism, 4, 14, 34, 42, 45–46, 47, 72, 73, 78. See also al-Qaida; Religion Israel, 43, 50, 109 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 109 Leadership, need for sensitive, 105, 110– 11. See also Accountability, need for local Leaks pertaining to threat, 95 London transport bombings (2005), 10, 77–80, 85, 86–87, 88–89 Loss. See Magnitude of damage/loss; Probability of damage/loss Low-intensity conflict. See Irregular warfare Magnitude of damage/loss, as an element of target-centered threat assessment, 62– 63, 88–89, 94, 98, 117. See also Probability of damage/loss; Target-centered threat assessment Management of threat, 3, 10, 100–122 Mexico–United States illegal immigration tensions (2006), 10, 80–84, 85, 86, 87, 88–89

145

Migration, undesired, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 35– 36, 50, 80–84, 85, 86, 87, 88–89, 100, 104 Military leaders, attitudes about threat, 46– 47, 105, 113 Military responses to threat, need to integrate with nonmilitary responses, 105, 113 Missile defense, 40, 42, 50, 56 Monitoring, inadequacies related to threat, 102, 115, 116. See also Early warning systems; Perceptual vigilance Moral relativism, 21, 44 National interest. See Vital interests/protection priorities Nationalism, 14, 20, 29, 104 Nativism, 83. See also Migration, undesired NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 100. See also Allies; United States; Western approaches to threat Natural disasters. See Disasters, natural ‘‘Need to know’’ principle, 94 Nemesis, 28, 32 North Korea, as a rogue state, 12, 34, 50. See also Rogue states Nuclear weapons: general nuclear threat, 2, 63, 65; nuclear accidents, 9, 13, 14, 35– 36, 50; nuclear proliferation, 14, 15. See also Weapons of mass destruction Offensive versus defensive weaponry, 107 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 68–69, 72 Panic. See Hysteria Patriot Act, 25 Perceptual defense, 43–44, 71, 75, 88, 96, 103. See also Perceptual vigilance; Wishful thinking Perceptual vigilance, 42–44, 71, 77, 82, 88, 96, 103, 108. See also Early warning systems; Monitoring; Perceptual defense; Worst-case thinking Politicization of threat assessment, 38–39, 95, 98, 110 Preventive attack, 68, 70, 72, 108

146

INDEX

Probability of damage/loss, as an element of target-centered threat assessment, 61– 62, 88–89, 94, 98, 116. See also Magnitude of damage/loss; Target-centered threat assessment Projection, 41, 98 Propaganda about threat, 38–39, 95, 98, 110 Protection. See Vital interests/protection priorities Public opinion: manipulation of public opinion by government, 38–39, 95, 98, 110; public confidence in government protection against threat, 18–19, 96; public influence on government threat perception, 39; public right to know about threat, 3, 92, 95–96; public sacrifice of civil liberties due to threat, 25, 26, 60, 79, 116 Public-private collaboration, 112 Punic Wars, 33 Rapid deployment systems, 75 Rationality, 24, 29, 34, 36, 42, 47, 92, 117, 118. See also Fear; Hatred; Hysteria Religion, in relation to threat, 18, 29, 34, 43–44, 47, 83, 113, 119, 121 Reputation for resolve, 50 Responsibility for threat management, 2, 6, 7, 8, 95, 110–12. See also Leadership, need for sensitive; Accountability, need for local Revenge, 91, 109. See also Hatred Rich-poor gap, as security threat, 16. See also Third World Rogue states: links to other disruptive forces, 16; threat sources, 2, 4, 11–12, 15, 18, 22, 104, 113, 121 ‘‘Rules of the game,’’ 21–22, 41, 80 Sanctions against threat, 115–16 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 13. See also AIDS; Disease Selective attention, 31, 41, 43, 108 Self-fulfilling prophecy, 31, 40, 41 Severity of threat: base threshold for determining severe threat, 65–67, 112;

general discussion, 91, 92, 93, 101, 115, 121; protocols related to the most severe threats, 121 Sources of threat, 3, 8, 11–14, 56, 92, 103, 107, 113, 115–16. See also Targets of threat Sovereignty, 20–21, 57, 82, 97 Special operations, 105, 113 Stalling in response to threat, 101, 103–4 Stereotypes, 38–39, 44. See also Ethnocentrism Strategic transformation, 47, 100, 117–22 Subjectivity in judging threat, 50–52, 54, 62, 64, 66, 67 Suicide, 9 Surprise, 29, 34, 74, 77 Syria, 42 Taiwan, 42 Target-centered threat assessment: benefits of target-centered threat assessment, 63– 65, 89, 109, 119; general discussion, 9– 10, 27, 28, 48, 54–67, 100–122; intertwined nature of target-centered threat assessment elements, 66–67 Targets of threat, 3, 12, 17–20, 32, 92, 99, 107, 108, 111, 114. See also Sources of threat Technology: dangers of advanced technology, 17, 18; impact of technology on threat, 34, 44, 119; technology requirements to respond to threat, 113; technology race as a threat, 107 Terrorism: general discussion, 2, 4, 14, 32, 53, 70; links to other disruptive forces, 16; 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, 4–5, 6, 8, 23, 24–27, 34, 68, 75, 82, 91, 100; threat sources, 11–12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 26, 34, 45–46, 50, 64, 77– 80, 82–83, 85, 88–89, 95, 104, 113, 121; war on terrorism, 25, 77 Third parties, role in threat management, 109 Third World: subversion of global rules of the game, 21–22; susceptibility of Third World to threat, 73–77, 81; threat from the Third World, 14, 16–17

INDEX

Threat: case examples of recent threat, 68– 89; challenge posed by threat, 1–10, 13, 35, 56, 61, 63, 88; controversy surrounding meaning of threat, 2–5, 22– 23, 41–47, 89; deficiencies of prevailing threat focus, 4, 8, 9, 14, 41–53, 89, 116; distinctiveness of post–Cold War threat, 11–27; management of threat, 3, 10, 90–99, 100–122; severity of threat, 65– 67, 91, 92, 93, 101, 112, 115, 121; sources of threat, 3, 8, 11–14, 56, 92, 103, 107, 113, 115–16; target-centered threat assessment, 9–10, 27, 28, 48, 54– 67, 100–122; targets of threat, 3, 12, 17–20, 32, 92, 99, 107, 108, 111, 114; unpredictability surrounding threat, 21–23, 26, 34, 35, 37, 43–44, 44–46, 60, 95 Threat-counterthreat cycle, 3, 28, 35, 36, 37, 42, 51, 83, 88, 90, 104, 105, 108– 10, 117, 119, 120 ‘‘Threats without threateners,’’ 13, 59 Time lags, 100, 101 Time pressure, 29–30, 61 Transparency in threat assessment, value of, 110 Trust, 40, 43, 88, 112 Tsunami disaster (2004), 10, 73–77, 85, 86, 87–88, 88–89 United Nations, 14, 20, 50, 75 United States: perception of threat, 1, 14, 43, 100; responsibility for threat management, 2, 6, 7, 60, 111. See also NATO; Western approaches to threat Unpredictability surrounding threat, 21–23, 26, 34, 35, 37, 43–44, 44–46, 60, 95

147

Vigilance. See Early warning systems; Monitoring; Perceptual vigilance Vital interests/protection priorities, as an element of target-centered threat assessment, 56–58, 85–86, 98, 115. See also Target-centered threat assessment Vulnerability to damage/loss, as an element of target-centered threat assessment, 59– 61, 87–88, 98, 116. See also Target-centered threat assessment Vulnerability of societies and individuals, 17, 18, 19–20, 20–21, 27, 32, 39, 41, 47, 64–65, 71, 74–76, 80, 82, 83, 94, 95, 102, 108, 111–12, 119 Warning. See Early warning systems Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 17, 25, 45–46, 70, 73, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 100, 104, 121. See also Nuclear weapons Western approaches to threat: limits and weaknesses of Western approaches to threat, 16, 27, 52, 100, 109; Western perceptions of threat, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19– 20, 21–22, 34, 46–47, 103. See also NATO; United States Wishful thinking, 19, 25, 42, 71. See also Perceptual defense; Worst-case thinking World War II, 33 Worst-case thinking, 25, 26, 42, 43, 91, 92. See also Perceptual vigilance; Wishful thinking World Health Organization (WHO), 75. See also AIDS; Disease; SARS Xenophobia, 82, 83. See also Ethnocentrism; Fear; Hysteria Zeal/will of enemies, 15, 23–24, 34, 58– 59, 61

About the Author ROBERT MANDEL is Chair and Professor of International Affairs at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of numerous books and articles related to international security and conflict issues. He has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency and has testified before the United States Congress.