Customer Reviews

Estimating Terrorism Risk

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Since the tragic events of 9/11, a myth has developed that if just the right mixture of counter terrorism strategies can be found, the U.S. can be ensured against another terrorist attack on its soil. Although this is complete nonsense, it is a myth that is embraced by politicians of every stripe and, more frightening, by many in the federal government.
As a result, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to try to protect everywhere and everyone and so succeeds in not protecting anything. More seriously DHS is unable to allocate funds for emergency responses in the most vulnerable and likely terrorist targets. Indeed because it subscribes to the myth that the U.S. can be made invulnerable to terrorist attacks it does not appear to particularly interested in rational target identification, risk assessments, or creating resilience in those targets. This attitude is both foolish and dangerous.
The Rand Corporation created an aptly named unit: the Center for Terrorism Risk Management Policy (CTRMP) which has a number of functions, but in this monograph specifically attempts to advise DHS on how to first distinguish between more and less vulnerable urban targets and how to use probability theorems to assess risks to the most vulnerable targets. The CTRMP basis this monograph on the assumption that large urban areas will constitute on set of obvious terrorist targets. It is clear however that variances of the same methodology of target identification and risk assessment can be applied to other potential targets as well (i.e. thermal and hydro-electric power plants, petroleum refineries etc.). So if DHS would surprise everybody and actually adopt the CTRMP proposal would this really solve at least one thorny counter-terrorism issue? Well no it would not. There is no substitute rational thought and real knowledge of the types of terrorist enemies that the U.S. is threatened by and there is no evidence that DHS is particularly interested in knowing its terrorist enemies or thinking rationally about the threats those enemies pose.
This monograph is not an enjoyable read, but it is an important one. This reviewer would suggest reading it with Stephan Flynn's book "America the Vulnerable" ([...]) which goes into considerably more detail about the need to be able to have the resiliency to recover quickly from what must be inevitable terrorist attacks as well as natural disasters.