About the Homeland Security Program
Research in the Homeland Security Program supports numerous governmental agencies at the federal, state and local levels and entities in the private sector. That support includes work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice, and other agencies charged with preventing and mitigating the effects of terrorist activity within U.S. borders, as well as improving preparedness, response, and recovery from natural disasters. Projects in this program include national preparedness, critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, emergency management, terrorism risk management, security cost-benefit analyses, border security, enhanced capabilities for responders, domestic threat assessments, domestic intelligence, and manpower and training.
Featured Event
Policy Analysis Techniques for Homeland Security Professionals: Nov. 16–20, 2009
RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment is offering a five-day course on advanced policy analysis techniques relevant to current and emerging challenges in the fields of risk management and program planning for homeland security. Through presentations, small working groups, Q&A sessions, and an end-of-program tabletop exercise, the course will provide attendees with a nuanced discussion of risk assessment, risk management, programmatic evaluation, and future-threat forecasting and horizon scanning.
Course Details Registration Form and Brochure Maps and Directions
New Ideas in Homeland Security: A RAND Occasional Paper Series
Understanding Why Terrorist Operations Succeed or Fail
Understanding why terrorist attacks succeed and fail is important for homeland security and counterterrorism planning. Focusing attention on a small set of practical relationships will help guide analysis of why past terrorist operations went as they did and identify opportunities to shape the outcomes of future operations.
Full Document
Assessment Framework Can Help Security Planners Decide Which Hypothetical Threats To Worry About
Concerns about the panpoply of possible terrorist attacks are central to the design of security efforts to protect both individual targets and the nation overall. Two questions can be posed to assess the novelty and ease of execution of emerging threats, allowing security planners to both learn from new threats and prioritize.
Full Document
Is It Time to Rethink U.S. Entry and Exit Processes?
Meeting mandated standards for managing individual travelers' entry and exit at U.S. borders has been a longstanding difficulty for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. border protection apparatus. This paper examines related policies and procedures critical to their success.
Full Document
Balancing Prevention and Mitigation Approaches to an Uncertain Terrorist Threat
While traditional terrorism-prevention measures seek to prevent all damage by stopping attacks completely, the author recommends also adopting measures that seek to prevent only some of the damage from attacks, but that do so predictably across the many different ways in which they might occur, drawing examples from aviation security policy.
Full DocumentResearch Brief
The Problem of Measuring Emergency Preparedness: How Reliable Should Our Response Systems Be?
Decisionmakers today largely assess emergency preparedness and homeland security "in the rear view mirror," looking at performance in actual events and responding to perceived failures. While real-world experience is important, better ways to assess preparedness prospectively will lead to better choices as to how and where to strengthen it.
Full DocumentResearch Brief
Selected Homeland Security News and Publications
More Support Is Needed to Integrate Nongovernmental Agencies in Human Recovery from Disasters
Changing emergency planning rules to make nongovernmental organizations a key component of recovery efforts could get them involved earlier and speed the full recovery of communities after disaster strikes.
Full DocumentNews Release
Social Science Approach to Counterterrorism Addresses Why Terrorism Arises and Declines
This report from an interdisciplinary project to survey and integrate the scholarly social-science literature relevant to counterterrorism answers questions related to why some individuals become terrorists, how terrorists generate public support, how terrorist organizations make decisions, and why individuals disengage.
Full Document
on Facebook
on Twitter
on YouTube
Top