30 Years and Counting

By Brian Michael Jenkins

Brian Jenkins is a senior adviser to the president of RAND.

RAND's research on terrorism formally began in 1972. Two bloody terrorist incidents that year—the Japanese Red Army attack on passengers at the Lod Airport in Israel and the seizure of Israeli athletes by Black September terrorists at the Munich Olympics—signaled dramatically to the world that a new mode of warfare had begun. Reacting to this new threat, President Nixon created the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. In turn, the committee commissioned RAND to examine the phenomenon and how it might affect American security interests.

Having been present at the initiation of RAND's research on terrorism 30 years ago, I now have an opportunity for review and reflection, as well as for pointing out some of the unanticipated consequences of our endeavor.

We thought then that terrorism reflected a unique confluence of political events and technological developments that made it likely to increase and become increasingly international, but we had only a dim notion of terrorism's spectacular future. Anyone at the beginning of the 1970s who forecast that terrorists would blow up jumbo jets in midair with all of their passengers on board, kidnap a head of state, run a boat filled with explosives aground on a crowded beach, set off a bomb weighing several tons in the heart of London's financial district, release nerve gas in a subway at rush hour, unleash biological weapons, hold a city hostage with a stolen or improvised nuclear weapon, or crash hijacked airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center would have been dismissed as a novelist. Yet all of these events were perpetrated, attempted, or threatened.

One of our first tasks in 1972 was to construct a chronology of terrorist incidents to provide an empirical foundation for the subject of our research. The selection of entries for inclusion in the chronology required us to define terrorism.

We concluded that an act of terrorism was first of all a crime in the classic sense, like murder or kidnapping, but with political motives. We also recognized that terrorism contained a psychological component: It was aimed at the people watching. The identities of the victims of the attack often were secondary or irrelevant to the terrorists' objective of spreading fear and alarm or gaining concessions. The separation between the victim of the violence and the target of the intended psychological effect was the hallmark of terrorism. This definition offered useful distinctions between terrorism and ordinary crime, other forms of armed conflict, or the acts of psychotic individuals.

We defined international terrorism as encompassing those acts in which the terrorists crossed national frontiers to carry out attacks—or attacked foreign targets at home, such as embassies or international lines of commerce, as in airline hijackings. Defining international terrorism was a necessary prerequisite for mobilizing international support against terrorism and could be viewed as a noble effort to extend the international rule of law and the conventions governing war.

These definitions enabled us to initiate a long-term analysis of terrorism that RAND has continued to the present day. In the early years, the annual chronologies illustrated trends in terrorist tactics, targets, motives, lethality, and other developments, which in turn provided useful information about various countermeasures. Successive chronologies showed that physical security measures worked: The frequency of terrorist attacks declined where targets were hardened. But then terrorists merely shifted their sights to other, softer targets. Over time, the lethality of terrorist attacks gradually increased as terrorists motivated by ethnic hatred or religious fanaticism revealed themselves to be demonstrably less constrained and more inclined to carry out large-scale indiscriminate attacks. All these conclusions, now common knowledge, came out of the simple quantitative analysis made possible by the assembled data.

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AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage speaks at a memorial ceremony on Sept. 6, 1972, for 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team slain by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games.
RAND examined the history of embassy takeovers, a terrorist tactic that declined as embassies became better protected and governments became more resistant to terrorist demands, more skillful in negotiating with terrorists holding hostages, and more willing to use force when negotiations failed. RAND also developed a more sophisticated mathematical basis for assessing the risk posed by car bombs, which was used in developing new design and construction criteria for U.S. embassies.

Amid growing concerns about the possibility of nuclear terrorism in the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Energy and Sandia Laboratories asked RAND to analyze the motives and capabilities of potential adversaries of U.S. nuclear programs. Fortunately for society, we did not have a rich history of serious events of nuclear terrorism to examine. Instead, we looked at the combinations of motives and capabilities displayed in analogous events: the most ambitious terrorist at-tacks, wartime commando raids, high-value heists, incidents of industrial sabotage, and the careers of mad bombers. These analog case studies provided useful insights and suggested a strategy: Nuclear security systems should strive to compel attackers to possess a combination of dedication, know-how, and resources not previously seen outside of national wartime efforts. The Department of Energy later credited RAND with having designed the threat upon which its security programs were based.

Today, U.S. and other world leaders describe terrorism as "war." We must examine the requirements of force protection and the utility of military force to counter terrorism and to preempt the use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists or state actors. In addition to military force or the threat of force, the United States has employed sophisticated diplomacy and the manipulation of political and economic payoffs to combat terrorism.

Yet our current arsenal seems inadequate. We must develop new and more effective diplomatic tools and unconventional ways to combat terrorism. We need to understand better the underlying conflicts that give rise to terrorism and to exploit in a systematic fashion the experiences gained in managing and resolving conflicts that have led to terrorism in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Kosovo. We also need to do a better job of integrating counterterrorism strategy with other aspects of U.S. strategy.

There is still much to be learned.

30 Years and Counting

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