Terror threat
Over the past three decades, the terrorism threat has evolved from the detonation of a bomb in the World Trade Center’s parking garage, to the use of jetliners as missiles against the epicenters of American power, to the transformation of a truck into a weapon of mass destruction against a crowd of civilians along France’s southern shore. While the U.S. counterterrorism budget has doubled since 9/11 to reach $16 billion, nearly half of this expenditure funds the Transportation Security Administration, despite the notable shift in the terrorism threat away from civil aviation and towards soft targets. With Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant proving profoundly agile and adaptive in the face of formidable countermeasures, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy remains stuck on the defensive, responding to evolving terrorist strategies, rather than anticipating and disrupting them.
Over the past three decades, the terrorism threat has evolved from the detonation of a bomb in the World Trade Center’s parking garage, to the use of jetliners as missiles against the epicenters of American power, to the transformation of a truck into a weapon of mass destruction against a crowd of civilians along France’s southern shore. While the U.S. counterterrorism budget has doubled since 9/11 to reach $16 billion, nearly half of this expenditure funds the Transportation Security Administration, despite the notable shift in the terrorism threat away from civil aviation and towards soft targets. With Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant proving profoundly agile and adaptive in the face of formidable countermeasures, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy remains stuck on the defensive, responding to evolving terrorist strategies, rather than anticipating and disrupting them.
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