NCJ Number
190654
Date Published
September 2001
Length
61 pages
Annotation
This report examines terrorist organizations and states, weapons of mass destruction, and current and future threats.
Abstract
The report claims that the threat to the United States homeland was not limited to terrorism per se, but rather the combination of threats posed by asymmetric warfare, covert attacks, proxy attacks, and what the United States normally labels terrorism. It also includes the threat posed by foreign and domestic extremist violence, regardless of whether attacks have a political motive. Accordingly, there are serious dangers in focusing attention on the historical threat posed by relatively limited attacks by small groups and individuals, rather than the much larger threats that can be posed by state-sponsored asymmetric warfare. Most foreign threats to the United States that involve the use of weapons of mass destruction are likely to emerge as a result of theater-driven conflicts and confrontations rather than simply antagonism toward the United States. The report discusses the need to make offense, deterrence, denial, defense, and retaliation part of homeland defense, and to link homeland defense to counterproliferation. It considers that the United States has done a good job of identifying potential attackers and the means they might use. However, it needs to improve its threat and risk assessments in terms of the ways in which it analyzes attackers and the ways in which they might use weapons of mass destruction. Notes, tables, figures