What Keeps the Homeland Security Enterprise Up at Night?

Over the past 22 years, everyday Americans have been able to sleep because those who work to prevent terrorism do not.  

The cadre of government civilians who have held the line is inspiring. But because they conduct their hours of watch in windowless buildings and without attention, most Americans go about our days without ever learning about them or the myriad dangers that stalk us.

Despite—and perhaps because of—these quiet successes, America is on the brink of a sea change in federal support and attention for the counterterrorism mission. An upcoming federal budget portends to slash prevention programming at the Department of Homeland Security, reallocate defense and intelligence priorities away from the counterterrorism mission, and jettison critical collection capabilities such as Section 702, which provides intelligence on activities of terrorist organizations, weapons of mass destruction, and malicious cyber actors.

For now, the homeland security enterprise is still on its watch.

Many thwarted plots never made the news cycle; the counterterrorism professional toils away to stop a plot from ever materializing. Americans sleep because the homeland security enterprise doesn’t.

As the director of an academic terrorism research center in the United States, I’d like to hope that the science behind the operations has played another quiet role in our safety. Pioneer scholars in the U.S. such as political scientist Martha Crenshaw, social psychologist Clark McCauley, and criminologist Gary LaFree cleared the path by developing the innovative analytical theories to help us assess exactly which parts of the “war on terror” had merit. And in the past twenty years, there has been a sharp increase in scholarly work on the nature of terrorist organizations, barriers to reporting suspicious activity, radicalization pathways, and prevention programming. This work too is done quietly; academics tend to publish in scholarly journals and not write op-eds. Still, academics in the homeland security enterprise also don’t sleep so other Americans can.

All of this – from the government operations and analysis to the peer-reviewed study in a counterterrorism journal – have sharpened focus on which extremist elements threaten us today. No longer do we fight an ill-defined “war on terrorism,” and we have also calibrated our focus to the most probable problems of tomorrow.  

The terrorism landscape is marked by uncertainty, complexity, and specific dangers. The known unknowns outlined by senior NCTC analysts in the Sentinel piece include lower barriers to technology acquisition, increasing tempos of State support for terrorism, transnational idea exchanges across English-speaking networks, and regional expansion of the extremist elements across the Middle East and Northern Africa.  

I mark this year’s passage of 9/11 with equal parts reverence and trepidation.

I am in awe of all the quiet success won by the government professionals who do their work without credit, and I am indebted to the faculty and students who devote their academic lives to the generation of new knowledge about counterterrorism and targeted violence prevention.

But this veneration is blighted by a gnawing worry. As these quiet government and academic accomplishments recede the palpable threat that we felt after 9/11/2001, so too do the resources and attention that have helped Americans sleep at night.

What keeps the homeland security enterprise up at night tonight then? A worry that other problems shift the nation’s focus and resources away from counterterrorism. There is a reason there hasn’t been another 9/11. We don’t want another dark day to remember.

Gina Scott Ligon, PhD, is Director of The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.