The Essence of Deterrence

... is consequence that is immediate, intense, and inescapable. 

The secret to deterrence is not persuasion but menace.

It is why garden variety thugs stay clear of the rough galute who is battle-scarred, twice their size, and armed to the teeth. They know intuitively that casual confrontation with this type is a bad bet, certain not to leave them feeling better than they started.

Nature teaches predator and prey to recognize each other and to make snap decisions about when to chance confrontation and when to slither away. These snap decisions happen instantly not because the decider is adept at evaluating comparative risk and reward but because he or she senses that a wrong call is fatal, hence not worth a gamble.

This is a visceral judgment rooted in the most basic instinct of all life: survival.

Academic literature reviews and arguments about deterrence tend to zero in on aspects of theoretical interest to armchair investigators. Some, like this (Tomlinson, below) do a creditable job of presenting theories to say why deterrence works under some circumstances but falls short on other occasions. What do they lack?

They lack that element of field truth that comes from being in harm’s way and directly witnessing what deters thug and crazy with equal consistency. 

Such studies also miss what H. L. Mencken long ago recognized as the value of certain measures that extend beyond mere deterrence (Nordquist, below). 

A lifelong cynic, Mencken harbored few illusions about human rascality and the need for keeping it in check through punitive action. 

However, Mencken had the perspicacity to discern that the harshest punishments society reserves for its worst villains have more than deterrent value. He speculated that their higher value is in delivering a social catharsis that restores public confidence in a world operating as it should, with some trace of justice or fairness still intact to reassure us that we have not descended into irreversible decline.

Perhaps, then, effective deterrence requires not only consequences but also a cathartic element which functions as an emetic to purge our society of its most lethal toxins.

Finally, for a tongue-in-cheek, four-panel distillation of deterrence in action, give a cartoonist a nod. Try this online search string: "Gary Larson + how nature says do not touch."

References: 

Nordquist, Richard. ""The Penalty of Death" by H.L. Mencken." ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/the-penalty-of-death-by-mencken-1690267.

Tomlinson, Kelli D. "An Examination of Deterrence Theory," Federal Probation, Vol. 80, No. 3, December 2016. 

https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/80_3_4_0.pdf

Thanksgiving as Loyalty Marker

A study of loyalty markers positions Thanksgiving under the category of Cohesive Rituals.

Who created this category, and what makes it significant in gauging loyalty? The first answer is easy: Victor Davis Hanson. The second is more involved. It has to do with social cohesion that helps gauge whether we feel more of a tie to a traditional loyalty, Loyalty A, or to a newer, competing loyalty, Loyalty X.

Think of Loyalty A as a default loyalty to such historically uncontested pillars of social support as family, country, church, and employer. By contrast, think of Loyalty X as something fresh that offers the allure of being different, exciting, perhaps radical. Loyalty X emits a siren call to lure away from Loyalty A, often with an ultimate goal of undermining A altogether.

In this context, celebrating Thanksgiving is definitely an A game. It reinforces bonds to previous generations that share values and rekindle gratitude. 

For Loyalty X, however, maybe Thanksgiving looks objectionable, if someone tries hard enough to make it so. What is Thanksgiving's unforgivable sin to Loyalty X adherents? 

Not invented here. 

They cannot own it or exact tribute from it. What, then, do they offer in place of cohesive rituals? 

Most often, it is credibility-enhancing displays. Think of the rationale behind a cult's or gang's insistence on a candidate performing some crime or ritual self-abasement as a precondition for acceptance -- a Loyalty X mainstay.

Both loyalty indicators (5 and 6) represent loyalty markers (whose origins appear in citations provided in the book, below):

Making It Count

So what? Whether comparing a society against an opposing movement or an employer against an internal, would-be saboteur, it pays to track the influence of loyalty markers that play to the advantage of one side over another. One way to do this is by assigning numerical values to capture how much each marker means to an employee. 

All it takes to start comparing is to array the loyalty markers into a table, with columns on each side for capturing respective ratings for Loyalty A and Loyalty X. Borrowing a risk assessment methodology, a high rating shows as 0.9, medium as 0.5, and low as 0.1. Assigning numbers to qualitative ratings thus permits summing up totals to show which loyalty is scoring higher, overall, for a given individual exposed to both in the same milieu. This is how the table now looks as a loyalty ledger:

For a deeper understanding of loyalty markers and the role they play in first gauging and then countering slow-onset insider threats, I invite you to read Chapter 10 of this book:

Fun Fact: This book broadly distinguishes between sudden impact and rising tide (aka slow-onset) insider threats. The rising tide image inspired the subtitle and the cover image of a wave.

Bottom Line

Loyalty counts. So do cohesive rituals and all the markers that either reinforce desired loyalties or open the door to competing loyalties undermining the status quo.

Happy Thanksgiving. It matters.

Your Immediate Threat

 

Your immediate threat is not some vaguely drawn demon or cascading evil that remains years away from doing its worst -- eventually. Your immediate threat is what kills you first. The closer it gets, the more indisputable its intentions.

What prevents otherwise sentient beings from identifying such approaching threats? Some friends and colleagues marinated in the same brine of graduate work in homeland security through the Naval Postgraduate School recently traded observations on such matters while discussing at length the evils of the times. In the process of our iterative discourse, certain themes surfaced, including these:

1.  Popular fixation on distant, intractable dilemmas (at times reflexively characterized as "wicked problems" so frequently that the most blatant sign of wickedness has become wearing out this cliché). By concentrating on problems which may indeed be real but remain years or decades away from producing their apocalyptic impact, we fall into a trap that yields near term gain at a price.

The gain is bureaucratic insulation from accountability. In other words, the end of the world may eventually arrive according to whatever model projects its ETA, but as long as it does not get here on our watch, no one will hold us accountable for what we do about it. This liberation from consequences frees us to pursue prudent and wrongheaded strategies with equal gusto. And if we cloak our actions with popular, emotive resonance, there is seldom a penalty to face for wasting resources or getting it wrong. Such is the cost of doing business when one calls one's business saving the world.

The price for succumbing to such fixations extends beyond waste of resources. A big price is intentional narrowing of defensive focus to the point of losing the capacity to detect more deadly threats approaching obliquely, in flanking maneuvers. After all, an adversary bent on your destruction seldom neglects the value of surprise if he can catch you unawares and lower his risk by dealing a death blow while you are directing your attention elsewhere. 

2.  Diminished capacity to distinguish imminent threats to life from confected, outrage du jour that people styling themselves as victims rail against, whether their cause of the moment is some perceived social injustice or no longer having free meals at the company cafeteria.

3.  Loss of predator-resistant defenses. People now accustomed to having their stated preferences accommodated and their self-definitions validated see the world differently than their recent predecessors did. The latter had to fight. They grew up without expecting the world to go their way. The requirement to struggle, to compete, and to be ready to engage in combat for both advancement and survival imparted certain programming beneficial to defense. That programming included constant horizon scanning for predators and a premium on early threat detection, effective threat avoidance, and vigorous self-defense. When you have to fight for what you have, you optimize for keeping it and for thwarting attackers who contrive to take it away.

So What?

A distant threat becomes a disembodied abstraction, a topic more suited to debate than action. People obsessed exclusively with eventual and apocalyptic threats spend more energy talking about them and exploiting them for personal advantage than preparing to grapple with them on their own. Making this society's problem takes it off the My Problems list.

The net result is vulnerability that invites ruthless adversaries to strike such self-neutered targets. This situation favors those willing to slit throats over those programmed to see no fast-moving evil. And so, your greatest threat becomes whatever is willing and able to kill you first, because that threat will deny you the luxury of being around when the eventual threat comes to pass.

Perhaps Hilaire Belloc best captured the image of this kind of threat when observing,

"We sit by and watch the barbarian, we  tolerate him; in the long  stretches of peace  we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his  irreverence; his comic  inversion of our  old certitudes  and our fixed creeds  refreshes us; we  laugh. But as we laugh  we are watched by large and awful faces  from  beyond; and on these faces there is no smile."

Another Possible Aim of Barbaric Attack

It is already fresh in murmur that one likely aim of the mass slaughter of defenseless Israeli citizens last weekend was to undermine Saudi Arabia’s impending rapprochement with Israel. The news that the Saudis put their planned deal on hold appears to bear testimony to some instrumental value the attackers realized from the carnage. 

What else? Is there a long game in which Hamas contrived to accumulate points? Consider: The terrorist playbook may accommodate a good deal of improvisation, but its individual plays tend to be limited to asymmetric options and geared to maximizing publicity through shock. There is one more factor to consider. 

In the Atrocity Olympics, points go on the scorecard for luring one’s opponent to sink to the same level by instigating reciprocal savagery. 

- - - - - - - - - 

As Dev Sol* showed the world when murdering unsuspecting police and other authorities in Turkey during the 1990s, terrorists perceive value in such actions because they (a) undermine public confidence in government’s ability to protect citizens, and (b) bait responding forces into brutal over reaction that ultimately costs the responder popular support and an erstwhile reputation as the good guy in a given conflict.  

The net result, and a strategic aim, is to heap reputational attack on top of a barbaric body count. And in the case of Hamas, that objective may appear worth the cost in loss of life and livelihood for Gaza-based Palestinians whose lot is already miserable and showing no signs of improving under an authoritarian Palestinian regime. In 15 years of autonomous rule sanctioned by Israel, that regime has delivered 70% unemployment amid unbridled railing against Israel and Israelis. In the calculation of Hamas leaders, what do they have to lose by sacrificing this abject population of unfortunates to a greater aim of striking a political and reputational blow against Israel, while basking in the publicized infamy attending the historic carnage they carried out?

This is by no means a rationalization or even a remotely justifiable objective for any civilized leadership to champion. But does it align with the agenda of barbarians? One has to wonder. 

* For an overview of Dev Sol's evolution over time, see https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/dev_sol.htm

Why Insight Matters

 Bottom Line Up Front: It's not so much that people don't know what they want; it's that people can't tell you what they want.

This was the epiphany that data scientist Howard Moskowitz realized after exhaustive surveys and focus groups and taste tests when he was trying to understand the secret behind how consumers choose spaghetti sauce. Malcolm Gladwell, in turn, immortalized this epiphany by showcasing it in a TED Talk that became so popular, it sometimes steals his own thunder when he attempts to promote his new projects. 

An enduring lesson to harvest from this epiphany is that social science research, which has never approached the precision of mathematics, must remain ever humble once recognizing its inherent limitations, no matter how impressive its methodology or presentation. Hence the need for continuing to question, to explore, and to examine alternative hypotheses -- rather than to succumb to the social sciences researcher's fatal flaw of presumptive omniscience.

Not only are there times when we don't know what we want. There are also times when we just cannot explain it.

Look here for Gladwell's talk, which has aged better than many:  https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce

The Untoward Event Matrix

 

In organizational life, bad things don't just happen. They tend to follow a pattern, especially over time. In seeking a means of categorizing these events on the path to doing something meaningful about managing them, it may avail to look at them through the prism of what I call the Untoward Event Matrix.

What It Is

This matrix represents a rough ordering of undesired events according to their impact and frequency of occurrence. Using this tool is akin to plotting things on a piece of graph paper to show their relative position. The exercise necessarily involves artificiality; yet it may prove illuminating in showing how the items plotted relate to each other. It may even offer visibility into where to invest energy and resources to reduce loss.

As a starting point, divide the matrix into quadrants, like this:

Now there are only four boxes to fill, going from the bottom up and then to the right:

LOW FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which seldom occur but hardly matter in terms of hurting the organization. A brief, occasional power outage or random, minor accident could fall into this category. 

HIGH FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which occur more often, to the point of becoming predictable. While their impact is also relatively low, such untoward events tend to raise eyebrows if they cause cumulative losses or disruptions whose impact could cross over from low to something more severe. Think of recurring graffiti, vandalism, and accidents or mugging that, over time, flag a given site as unsafe.

LOW FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

These are game-changers that are focusing events because, although statistically rare, their severe impact makes a devastating mark on the organization. Think in terms of a 9/11 attack or massacre at the workplace.

HIGH FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

Such events represent a theoretical worst case scenario, because they combine the severity of the previous category with a high incidence of occurrence. If, instead of being rare, such events become commonplace, they create an unsurvivable situation. Consequently, in the real world of corporate life, such conditions are more abstract than realistic. Why? The people in charge realize that they face a simple dilemma: fix or die. In other words, if they cannot drive down the frequency of high impact events to being rare, hence low frequency, they cease to remain in business.

Depiction

This is how the situation looks in practice, after consulting the organization's own incident reports to see how untoward events tend to array across this matrix over time:

Whence the Data?

In the corporate world, as in large public sector and nonprofit organizations, it behooves management to monitor untoward events, the better to limit losses and to gauge what insurance to seek out as a means of transferring risk. Accordingly, some office in the organization takes on the responsibility of tracking incidents, typically with the aid of an incident reporting system. Data from such incident reports, in turn, inform the distribution of events (aka incidents) captured broadly in the foregoing matrix.

What Happens Next?

Once management discerns the emerging pattern showing the frequency and impact of untoward events, competent managers begin to do what they do best: prioritize.

First, they attack the biggest, most immediate challenge, the big X representing the high impact/low frequency event that just befell the organization or threatens to surface in the near future. Certain possibilities soon confront them: 

(A) This event has reached catastrophic proportions and is requiring a no-holds-barred, all-hands-on-deck response; 

(B) The worst impact of the event is over, leaving management to clean up, restore operations, and learn lessons to apply in reducing future impacts of a similar event; or 

(C) The likelihood or severity of the event taking place has diminished to the point of making it a non-issue, leaving no budget or executive support for pursuing it further.

Shifting Focus

Under the circumstances, once the most urgent priority, the big X, goes away, lesser priorities get a promotion. Accordingly, those resources once tasked with resolving the big X now shift, as shown here:

Why? 

It is the nature of humans and their organizations to harness their capabilities to those challenges deemed important, or perhaps urgent. Failing that, they default to tackling the challenges at hand. Consequently, organizational focus now turns to untoward events that may be of lesser impact yet remain of sufficiently high frequency to open the door to the possibility that, if neglected, they could eventually cross over into one of the two high impact quadrants of the matrix.

Defender Predicament

It now becomes the defender's dilemma to at once address the high frequency/low impact events while keeping in reserve some capacity to handle potential high impact events that will most likely be rare. Why? The unchecked arrival of those high impact events, especially if allowed to also become high frequency, might be fatal to the organization.

Conclusion

This is only one way of using the untoward event matrix to apprehend ambient risk and contrive plans for where to focus resources available for mitigation and prevention. A seasoned manager with corporate experience will no doubt find more. Why? Because bad things don't just happen, and good managers don't wait to be surprised by them.

Beware the Reformatted Expert

 

Reformatted experts are mediocre at best, otherwise inept.

Two forces conspire to saturate any given field with drive-thru pretenders who hasten to recast their past experience and dubious credentials as just the particular expertise your dilemma demands. Those forces are commoditization and desperation. Like most fields, security is as vulnerable to these reformatted experts as any other endeavor that pays.

Case in Point

Take nuclear surety, for example. Before the sudden end of the Cold War, the nuclear surety field provided steady employment for specialists at Sandia National Laboratories and wherever else there was a robust market for such expertise. How did these experts react to the prospect of being made redundant as the early 1990s ushered in a so-called peace dividend? They reformatted. Many shifted gears and reformatted as experts in critical infrastructure protection.

As critical infrastructure protection lost traction and the promise of indefinite funding, what other reformatting oppportunities arose? One of them was Y2K, which offered the failed promise of years of employment in unraveling knots in anticipated computing catastrophes that never quite came to pass. Other, more promising reformatting targets, however, eventually surfaced.

Cyber security became a safe landing zone for reformatters in need of a cachet and a paycheck. Business continuity also availed for those who needed to transfer their erstwhile employment in business resumption or continuity of government into a province that showed better potential as a salary continuation plan.

Where Else

School and workplace violence proved equally popular reformatting targets for run-of-the-mill generalists, particularly for those whose trumpeted expertise extended no further than repackaging conventional wisdom. After all, this field regenerates popular interest with every school shooting or rampage killing. Practitioners eking out a modest living dispensing security platitudes can hardly pass up the chance to garner free publicity and new clients if they reformat as experts who know just how to address such threats. Never mind that their nostrums tend to be borrowed, unoriginal, and unburdened by success. If they reformat as experts and surface at an hour of need, someone, somewhere will be willing to engage them.

Insider Arena

Another field to now experience saturation by reformatted experts is insider threat defense. The cyber security crowd, in particular, finds this arena particularly attractive as a platform for selling its wares. So do vendors of security products and services who can manage to recast whatever they have to sell as uniquely tailored to addressing insider threats. Whether it is an invasive technology or a training program, reformatted, drive-thru insider threat experts lose no time promoting their wares and assuring the market that it cannot survive without them. Yesterday, they were auditors, guard force services, or computer security specialists. Today they reformat as insider threat experts.

Emerging Pattern

The pattern evident from these foregoing examples is clear. An old market fades or fails to sustain the mouths it was expected to feed indefinitely, hence desperation beginning to surface. Meanwhile, genuine experts in an emerging field begin to attract notice and to command an innovator's profit. Soon, the desperate onlookers notice. Consequently, they rush into this new, promising field, reformatting themselves as experts in an area they barely acknowledged yesterday. Now the commoditization effect takes place.

What was once unique and responsive to an under served market now becomes a commodity. Any field absorbing a great influx of entrants begins to lose its cachet. With a horde of reformatted, if dubious, "experts" crowding the market, the emerging field eventually begins to look over saturated with mediocrities. Conventional wisdom becomes the only wisdom on tap, and unoriginal reformatters soon suffocate the remaining innovators, crowding them out and shouting them down, with little regard for results attained. The market itself changes. Prices drop, as does quality. Reformatters reshape it, dumbing it down and lowering expectations.

The net result? Reformatted experts may still offer some value, to the extent that platitude and truism are often rooted in common sense. And common sense beats unbridled folly. But when the ultimate test comes and their offerings disappoint, the superficiality of their reformatting comes to the surface -- at somebody else's expense, hence this warning against instant experts of the reformatted variety.

Name Selection and Self-Sabotage

 

People may call themselves anything they please, although they cannot guarantee that the rest of the world will honor, tolerate, or even temper the snickering that outlandish name selections inspire. The aspirational world and the real world seldom align to suit every taste.

What happens when name selection verges into self-sabotage? Nothing good.

Witness the smug ignorance of subliterate parents who sentence their heirs to a lifetime of derision by christening them with first names and spelling them atrociously to boot. The resulting atrocities are not so much first names for innocent offspring as banners for their parents to wave as their expression of parental personality. Culturally, the net result is to proclaim to the world that the parent is a self-absorbed underachiever so starved of merit as to have to resort to branding a newborn with something atrocious enough to gain attention for the parent.

Examples abound, but why draw unnecessary attention to them to further torment the poor souls who had no say in their own mislabeling?

A Different Story

Team names take on a different character. Ostensibly, much thought goes into naming them to either honor a role model or evoke the winning spirit that the team aspires to emulate. Take the historical selection of “Redskins” as emblematic of the most celebrated warrior and leadership virtues that found an early admirer in George Washington. 

André Billeaudeaux, himself a veteran and mature social scientist, has made this case for the Native American Guardians Association, time and time again. Witness such deep dives into the genesis and perpetuation of that name, not as the pejorative some low-resolution thinkers suggest in activist screeds, but as a source of pride:

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

https://personalliberty.com/the-d-day-inspired-fight-goes-on-americas-soul-depends-on-modern-redskins-redmen-and-patriots-to-stand-up-like-the-greatest-generation/

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/creating_americas_soul_e_pluribus_unum_and_native_identity_.html

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

Add, finally, two clips of André's interviews on this theme: 

https://youtu.be/FS339W2P-kY?si=6OvuGXg1DELoJ2jh 

and

https://youtu.be/st2wGk141Bc?feature=shared

What's In a Name?

From the standpoints of self-preservation and self-sabotage, Commander Billeaudeaux supplies us this compelling answer: everything.

Terrorism, Extremism, and Crime

In the modern lexicon of societal atrocities, overlapping definitions may avail for some agencies while only confusing the citizens who pay taxes and find themselves just as dead whether felled by terrorist, extremist, or criminal. What are the distinctions anyway, especially if one seeks a basic grasp of where these terms get applied to villains and villainies that are the hallmark of equal-opportunity cutthroats? 

Consider this diagram that draws out distinctions while drawing an oval over areas of overlap:

Crime and fear of crime are the most familiar. As Steven Lab has told us [1], they have bedeviled society to the point of becoming an irremovable thread of the social fabric (my formulation, not Lab's). 

Terrorism, although a more modern term in its circulation, nevertheless traces to a long pedigree that, in its essence, differs from crime in what Boaz Ganor highlights as its political objective  [2]. 

What of extremism, a barbarism of bureaucratic utility to those seeking to affix a pejorative label on transgressions that may not qualify as terrorism, yet command insufficient notice (and funding) if allowed to languish as a sapling made invisible in a forest of crime? 

It helps to wrestle these cranky definitions to a mat of logical distinctions if one sees them in a certain light. In this framing, crime becomes a prohibited act, or even the neglect of a necessary act. Crime's manifestations may well approach infinity, which means sometimes they will no doubt share features with less pervasive horrors like terrorism and extremism.

As for distinguishing the isms, it may avail to regard terrorism as an act, which typically targets noncombatants and always furthers a political objective. By contrast, think of extremism as a measure of intensity. How so? Definitions of extremism, murky at best and often an affront to tautology, characterize this as a state of being "extreme," hence presumptively imbalanced or radically succumbing to some polarized position that would defy reason and invite danger. Invariably, the label is subjective. [3] "Extremism" as such is a term easier to brandish against opponents than to define with objective precision. But if one absorbs it into one's lexicon in the interest of remaining au courant, one may grudgingly do so under the foregoing characterization.

Overlap

Terrorism, extremism, and crime overlap when terrorists, extremists, and criminals use violence. Do the perpetrators define themselves by one of these labels? Maybe. Maybe not. More likely, government agencies reacting to their attacks apply whichever label yields the greatest advantage in thwarting the attackers. Experience suggests that violence is the sine qua non for terrorists; otherwise, their actions would raise no eyebrows and attract few adherents. 

Criminals have more diversity in their ranks. Since their aim is more geared to realizing a personal benefit than to advancing a cause, criminals retain the flexibility to play to their strengths. Thus, a world-class embezzler is unlikely to resort to violent crime. As a rule, fraud and nonviolent crime pay better and pose less of a penalty if caught and sentenced.

Who are extremists? People who are passionate or zealous to a fault? If this is their only failing, then it is difficult to brand them as dangerous -- unless they begin to pose a danger to society that translates to a threat of violence. An extreme lover of puns is a bore and a nuisance. An extreme lover of puns who insists on reciting his favorites to an audience held hostage at gunpoint is quite another creature. Perhaps he now qualifies as the "extremist" for which the term was intended. Add to his hostage-taking a political objective interspersed between his puns, and does he now qualify for promotion to "terrorist"?

The answer, a default for any seasoned consultant: It depends.

Notes:

[1] S. Lab, Crime Prevention: Approaches, Practices, and Evaluations, 3rd Edition (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, 1997) pp. 1-14.

[2] B. Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers,

(London: Transaction Publishers, 2005) p. 9.

[3] P. T. Coleman & A. Bartoli (2003). Addressing Extremism, The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, Colombia University (2003), p. 2. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/i/a/document/9386_WhitePaper_2_Extremism_030809.pdf

No, Terrorists Are Not Freedom Fighters: Isolating Definitional Flaw in a False Equivalence Argument

For many years within the homeland security enterprise, it has been a regular exercise in banality to intone that one person’s terrorist is merely another’s freedom fighter.[1] To a reflective practitioner taking the time to define terrorism with precision, however, this formulation collapses on contact with a key distinction of a feature that is de rigueur for terrorists as a default yet antithetical to freedom fighters as a rule. What is this distinguishing feature? 

Targeting of Noncombatants 

Terrorists do not hesitate to slaughter innocents. Indeed, this is often their primary tactic and stock in trade. There is a logic to this tactic, no matter how morally reprehensible it may be judged by a society intent on passing as civilized. The logic is in the terrorist attacker’s calculation that, in the face of material disadvantages in force, finance, and weaponry, the only apparently remaining options are those that confound defenders while supplying a disproportionately high yield and posing minimal risk. In essence, this is the cold logic of resorting to asymmetric attack vectors to even the odds in the eyes of the attacker, as illustrated here:

 

In practice, the greatest asymmetric value derives not from direct confrontation against a superior military or police force that is trained and equipped to fight back and kill or capture terrorist attackers. It is from attacking non-combatants who lack training and weapons and, even better, are caught unawares, hence unlikely to return fire. In this calculation, the slaughter of innocents begins to figure prominently in the terrorist playbook as not only an attractive but a default tactic to embrace to further the attackers’ ends. By contrast, freedom fighters do not target non-combatants or, if they do harm innocents, do so inadvertently or as a last resort – not as a first resort. After all, slaughtering one’s own offers no inducement for recruiting future freedom fighters. This, then, is a key distinction that undermines the terrorist as freedom fighter equivalency argument. 

The moral distinction recalls an illustration by William F. Buckley, a writer and magazine publisher who served in the military and, briefly, in the Central Intelligence Agency. Buckley highlighted the absurdity of morally equating the Soviet Union to the United States by noting that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, one should not denounce both as men who push old ladies around.[2] 

Definitional Morass Fueling the Equivalency Argument 

Whether by inadvertence or calculation, government agencies do no favors for the public by defining terrorism in terms that omit this targeting of non-combatants. Indeed, terrorism definitions skew in line with a given agency’s predilections and likely concentrations in dealing with terrorist threats.[3] Thus, when government organizations converge on definitions that forget about this centrality of targeting non-combatants to the definition of terrorism and terrorists, they invite an otherwise specious airbrushing of terrorists as freedom fighters, especially by focusing that definition thus: 

 “Terrorism is a non-state actor’s threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” [4]

A better definition, as supported by other official sources [5], might take on this representation:

Another Flaw 

Closer examination of the foregoing, official definition, however, uncovers yet another unforced limitation. Specifically, this definition draws emphasis to terrorists as being necessarily non-state actors, when characterizing terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” [6] What of state-sponsored terrorists? This definition would appear to place such actors out of the purview of actions which have at their heart the disproportionate impact making their mark through the slaughter of innocents rather than through direct, force-on-force battle. 

Why the Omissions 

Omitting mention of the targeting of noncombatants allows any military to brand as terrorists what might otherwise be considered irregular troops or guerilla fighters. There is a public relations value to such branding. The irregulars, when defending against an invading force, may indeed qualify as freedom fighters if they are combating armed soldiers but not carrying out campaigns of slaughter targeting noncombatants. The price they pay may still be execution and denial of any of the international protections reserved by the Geneva Conventions for regular, uniformed combatants. Commandos take similar risks and pay the same price. 

Yet Another Definitional Flaw 

A final flaw deserving remark attends the predisposition of law enforcement agencies to define terrorism first and a foremost as a crime, with terrorists branded primarily as criminals, in consequence. This predilection creates another vulnerability for attackers to exploit. The administrative advantage of such a definition for police-oriented agencies is that branding a thing as a crime necessarily places that thing within law enforcement purview, which may justify a given agency’s claim of primacy in managing the response to all criminal matters. What could possibly backfire with such an approach? In practice, the law enforcement mindset puts a premium on apprehension and punishment of offenders, actions which arguably provide a necessary and valuable public service. However, if terrorism is instead defined as something categorically distinct from crime, then this opens the door to addressing terrorism and terrorists with an altogether different mindset. Under these circumstances, the policy door opens to according prime value to anticipating and preventing terrorist attack rather than avenging it. 

If a deep dive into the foregoing definitions teaches anything, it is that these details matter. Easy or partial definitions of terrorism and terrorists deserve to be scrubbed for institutional bias which may inhibit rather than advance defeating the terrorist threat.

Nick Catrantzos

NOTES:

[1] ^{B. M. Jenkins, (1990). The study of terrorism: Definitional problems. RAND. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6563.html}

[2] J. Goldberg, "When Push Comes to Torture," Sept. 27, 2006,National Review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/09/when-push-comes-torture-jonah-goldberg/

[3] N. Catrantzos, Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners and the Rising Tide Menace (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2023) pp. 178-179.

[4] National Consortium for the Study and Response to Terrorism, 2021.

[5] U. S. Code: Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section  2656 f (d)

[6] Ibid.