The last decade has seen extraordinary changes in the international security environment. Decades of Cold War assumptions and strategies have been overthrown, and new debates have emerged on how to explain and address today's more diverse and ambiguous risks. Yet much of the discussion on terrorism remains tied to images drawn from previous epochs.
Recent experience, from the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the World Trade Center, the federal building in Oklahoma City, and Khobar Towers to the use of chemical weapons in the Tokyo subway and Hamas suicide attacks in Israel, has galvanized public and expert attention, and reminds us that terrorism is capable of starkly affecting U.S. citizens and U.S. interests. It also suggests troubling new dimensions, including the potential for terrorist action on U.S. territory and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological.
The old image of a professional terrorist motivated by ideology or the desire for “national liberation,” operating according to a specific political agenda, armed with guns and bombs, and backed by overt state sponsors, has not quite disappeared. It has been augmented— some would say overtaken—by other forms of terrorism.
This new terrorism has different motives, different actors, different sponsors. Terrorists are organizing themselves in new, less hierarchical structures and using “amateurs” to a far greater extent than in the past. All of this renders much previous analysis of terrorism based on established groups obsolete, and complicates the task of intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism. (Byman, Daniel. 1999.)
The Air Force was concerned about understanding the current and future terrorist threat to deployed forces and vigorously addressing the problem of “force protection.” (Clutterbuck, Richard, 2002.)
Unlike many countries around the world, and unlike some of our allies, the United States has not faced an “existential” threat from........
