CIAO DATE: 01/02

Analytic Models and Policy Prescription: Understanding Recent Innovation in U.S. Counterterrorism

The threat of terrorism has received enormous attention in the last decade. Anxieties ran particularly high at the turn of the millennium, which fortunately passed without a major terrorist incident. Virtually all states expend some resources to combat terrorism. The policies, programs, and operations that governments undertake to meet this challenge are known collectively as counterterrorism. Although this term is only a few decades old, the practice of counterterrorism is as old as terrorism itself. Like terrorism, counterterrorism is easily recognized, even if its boundaries are somewhat imprecise.

Something new and interesting has been occurring in the practice of counterterrorism in the United States since the mid-1990s. The federal government has embarked on a concerted national effort to prepare the country for acts of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD). 1 This effort, known as domestic preparedness, involves the creation of multiple new programs that: provide specialized training and equipment to various response personnel, sponsor new research and development projects, collect information on potential threats, and aim to improve the coordination and organization of governmental efforts. U.S. counterterrorism budgets increased rapidly in the late 1990s, but no sector has grown faster than the domestic preparedness program, whose budget rose from essentially zero dollars in 1995 to approximately $1.4 billion of the $8.4 billion total federal counterterrorism budget by fiscal 2000 (see Table 1).

In the late 1990s, the government established more than a dozen new federal offices to address various aspects of the domestic preparedness mission. 2 Many of the activities carried out under the rubric of domestic preparedness are related to other well-established government functions - such as emergency management, hazardous materials response, public health administration, and military WMD defense. Domestic preparedness, however, is wholly new as a distinct element of governmental counterterrorism programs, not just in the United States but also worldwide. No other state has ever had a domestic preparedness program like the one now being developed in the United States. 3

Aside from its newness, the U.S. domestic preparedness program is noteworthy for at least two other reasons. First, implementation of the program is extremely complex, and effective response involves a wide range of technical requirements. A goal of the U.S. domestic program, therefore, is to enhance those operational capabilities that are important to the task of responding to WMD terrorism but are deficient in their current form. This task is hard in part because of the uncertainties inherent in the threat assessment that motivates the program, and in part because of the analytic problem of understanding the relationship between genuine technical requirements and existing but deficient capabilities. Yet the most serious challenge to the implementation of the U.S. domestic preparedness program arises from the fact that even though the program originated and is funded at the federal level, the objectives of the program cannot be achieved solely by pursuing improvements at that level. U.S capabilities relevant to a WMD response are distributed widely and unevenly throughout an extraordinarily complex latticework of functionally organized agencies; levels of government (federal, state, county, and local); and public, private, and nongovernmental actors. 4

Second, there is a debate over whether or not the United States needs a domestic preparedness program at all. Even though the specific policy significance of this debate appears to be diminishing (official Washington seems to have decided that a large-scale program to counter the threat of WMD terrorism is necessary), the debate is nonetheless interesting as a case study of the ways in which different analytic models influence policy outcomes. The rationale for the U.S. domestic preparedness program is not obvious, especially to those who have spent their careers thinking about the problem of terrorism. Aside from a few marginal cases with little potential for anything close to mass destruction, only one significant terrorist attack has involved WMD: the release of a nerve agent by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo in the Tokyo subway in March 1995. 5 Terrorism has been extensively studied since the 1960s. Studies of terrorism reveal two interesting facts. First, terrorists generally do not try to kill as many people as they can. Second, terrorists are generally tactical conservatives content with conventional weaponry, mainly guns and explosives. Given these facts, many terrorism analysts have been puzzled by, and critical of, the U.S. decision to invest more than $1 billion per year in domestic WMD preparedness.

Thus there is a discrepancy between the expectation of specialists on terrorism and the policy outcome of the U.S. domestic preparedness program. The most common explanation for such a discrepancy is that policymakers are behaving illogically, either out of ignorance or because they harbor ulterior motives (i.e., personal or institutional interests). 6 Explanations of this sort are particularly favored by terrorism specialists. 7

In this paper I argue that there is another explanation for the discrepancy: The policy outcome resulted from a mode of analysis that the substantive specialists do not perform. Put differently and more generally, a policy prescription that is illogical according to one analytic model of a problem may be perfectly logical according to another. 8 The substantive experts on terrorism adhere to an analytic model known as, for lack of a better term, ieterrorism studies.ls Its hallmark is a focus on the practice and especially the practitioners of terrorism. In social-psychological terms, terrorism studies is an iinternalln approach to prediction because it focuses on the ihconstituents of the specific problemlt rather than on the broad distribution of possible outcomes. 9 Thus, using terrorism studies as one's analytical model, it is hard to find a rational explanation for the origin of the U.S. domestic preparedness program. The U.S. domestic preparedness program is readily explained, however, if one makes the intellectual step of adopting an inexternalll analytic approach to the problem of WMD terrorism. This involves conceiving of WMD terrorism not as the action of a particular subset of society (i.e., terrorists), but as one particular kind of risk among many facing a nation. 10 Assessing terrorism as risk involves evaluating its probability and consequence: abstract attributes that can be usefully compared and are possessed, in one way or another, by all forms of injury that could befall a nation. 11 Terrorism experts, like many highly specialized professionals, are decidedly uncomfortable thinking about the subject of their studies in the context of every other problem facing society, which explains in part their skepticism of the U.S. domestic preparedness program.

The article develops this argument in two main sections. The first surveys key insights of the terrorism studies literature, focusing particularly on those related to the prospects of WMD terrorism and specifying the ways in which terrorism studies is, and is not, relevant to policy. The second examines terrorism through a distinct analytic model of ifrisk management,le and assesses in qualitative terms the problem of WMD terrorism in a manner unlike the assessment reached though the terrorism studies model. This section also describes some of the problems of applying the risk management model to national security threats like WMD terrorism.