Rethinking the Threat of Terrorism

In this blog, Susan Craig demonstrates the value of the Team A/Team B structured analytic technique, exploring some alternative thinking around the threat of domestic terrorism.

Terrorism is a threat that looms large in our collective conscience. For those of us who lived through 9/11, the images remain vivid. According to Gallup’s most recent Global Attitudes Survey, 72% of Americans still consider international terrorism to be a “critical threat” to our country. (The same percentage finds the spread of infectious diseases to be a critical threat – in the middle of a pandemic!) And the terror threat is no longer just abroad. Last week, 140 former national security officials penned a letter to Congress warning of an "exigent and growing threat" to our country from domestic extremists. In the wake of 9/11, our bureaucracy adapted, creating an entire Cabinet department. We continue to allocate significant resources to countering the threat. The Costs of War Project calculates that our country has spent $6.4 trillion waging the global war on terror since 9/11.

But reality does not match the perception of the terror threat. The odds of an American being killed by a terror attack in any given year is vanishingly small – about 1 in 3.5 million. This is far smaller than being killed by gun violence in our country. But also smaller than the chance of being killed by a dog or struck by lightning.

Given the vast mismatch between perception and reality, I challenged my international affairs students to participate in a Team A/Team B exercise, which requires them to make competing, equally compelling arguments around an issue in an effort to understand the dimensions of the debate. I had one side argue that the threat of terrorism is grave, while the other team had to argue that the threat of terrorism is overstated. While Team A (the “grave” team) focused on the growing threat of domestic terrorism, Team B (team “overstated”) argued that the threat did not match the resources we as a country afford it. Team A referenced the Intelligence Community’s recent assessment that domestic violent extremists pose an “elevated threat to the homeland” in 2021. Team B pointed to statistics that show that an average of six Americans have died from terrorism per year since 2001 and the ways in with Al Qaeda and ISIS have been diminished abroad.

As I prepared my class for this exercise, I reviewed the data and research on the topic. What I found was interesting.  While there is plenty of scholarship that supports both sides of the argument about the nature and extent of the threat posed by extremist groups overseas, I found nothing to bolster an argument that the domestic threat in the United States was overstated. There is plenty of recent analysis on how QAnon and other extremist groups threaten us from within in the wake of the January insurrection. I assumed there would be someone who would have made the opposite argument, that the domestic terror threat reached its pinnacle on January 6. I couldn’t find that someone.

But there’s plenty of evidence to support this argument.  Here are a few.

First, the Proud Boys are in disarray after it was revealed that their leader was an FBI informant. According to Michael Sherwin, the lead federal prosecutor for the capitol insurrection, the FBI is investigating over 400 rioters and will reportedly soon be bringing charges of sedition against some of them. Second, tech companies are under pressure to take some responsibility for their role in the spread of disinformation and hate. Their de-platforming of Trump led to a 73% drop in the spread of misinformation about election fraud. And the swift rebuke of Parler (the far-right alternative to Twitter) pushed the most incendiary rhetoric to the dark corners of the internet, where it belongs. These actions make the conversations harder to track and may allow the most fervent followers to radicalize further, but they also limit the exposure of a wider swath, depriving the message of the oxygen it needs to spread. Last, the disparate groups that converged on the Capitol on January 6 have very different agendas which range from white supremacy to forced celibacy, uncovering conspiratorial child sex rings to just doing whatever Trump tells them to do.

So, the leadership of these domestic extremist organizations is under pressure, their reach is diminished and their agendas divergent. Aren't those the same arguments we make for why we’ve defeated Al Qaeda and ISIS abroad? Why do we draw the opposite conclusion at home?

The Team A argument for why these domestic groups are threatening are they are well armed and well trained. This is a fair point. We have more guns than people in the United States and it’s clear that military veterans were disproportionately represented in the Capitol attack.

But I find it hard to believe that these groups can coalesce around an agenda, or even a target of their ire. While I certainly find the ideology abhorrent, radical Islamists do offer a way of life and an interpretation of sacred text. What do our domestic extremists have to offer? Some messianic trope about pornography and politicians? The dated and racist mythology that only whites are pure and deserving? These are not ideas that will attract a wide following in the United States. And they are hardly coherent, much less mutually reinforcing.

I am not saying that QAnon or the Proud Boys are not a threat. They certainly are, and it’s important that our policy apparatus adapts to focus more on the threats from within, just as we adapted post-9/11. An independent bipartisan commission could certainly help identify gaps in our understanding and our processes. But it is also likely to recommend more resources and bureaucracy. As we consider shifting our counterterrorism resources closer to home, it’s also worth considering how much the counterterrorism agenda costs us. The opportunity costs are tremendous.  What if, instead of shifting resources away from ISIS and towards the Boogaloo Boys, we altered our counterterrorism framework altogether? The root causes of both stem from misinformation, lack of opportunity, feelings of isolation, and a disgusting overabundance of firearms. What if we focused our collective attention and considerable resources on resolving these issues?

If we did so, my guess is Team A and Team B would find agreement: the threat of terrorism from both home and abroad would no longer be grave.

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