But Mitre report concludes DoD can do more to anticipate WMD terrorist attacks
Predicting the occurrence of a terrorist event using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is not possible under any approaches identified to date, concluded a recent report from a federally funded research corporation, making it extremely difficult to foresee a massively catastrophic event like the 9/11 terrorist attack.
The assessment of a such an unusually large terrorist attack falls to the study of social sciences, where predictive models have faced a lot of difficulties in attempting to determine the outcomes of human behavior, said the report Rare Events , developed by the JASON project of the Mitre Corp., based in McLean, Va.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) tasked the project with evaluating the possibilities of anticipating and assessing the risks of rare catastrophic events. Within DoD, the US Special Operations Command and the US Strategic Command have combined forces to set up a WMD-Terrorist intelligence and operations analysis enterprise, the report detailed.
The intelligence center would attempt to anticipate how terrorists would gain access to and use WMDs in the next ten years. It would further identify and prioritize sources of WMD and terrorist activities related to WMD.
But the JASON report, released publicly by the Federation of American Scientists Wednesday, concluded that no models or research exists to help the intelligence community predict catastrophic vents.
"Experience from the natural sciences and engineering provide guidelines for how to characterize certain aspects of the risks involved, but are of limited value or applicability at the present time," the report stated. "Social science approaches pursued to date are far less well developed, and not even at the point at which their utility can be evaluated, as currently applied.
"No reliable metrics of accuracy have yet been identified, and there is a significant deficiency in applying standard approaches from engineering and science such as false alarm rates and signal detection in the face of massive clutter," the report added.
The report further argued that ongoing collaborative experiments offer not real value in predicting WMD threats because such experiments involve unproven assumptions, but that academic expertise proves "highly valuable" in real-time decision-making with regards to WMD threats.
The JASON project made a number of specific recommendations to DoD to improve its modeling and capabilities for attempting to predict a catastrophic event, however. For example, JASON suggested that intelligence agents focus on motivation for a WMD attack, thereby decreasing the necessity to identify specific events. Institutes such as the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism, based at the University of Maryland and funded by the Department of Homeland Security, have conducted studies on terrorist motivations that would prove useful in that endeavor, the report said.
DoD uses a conceptual framework of intent, capability and opportunity, but adding motive to the framework would boost the intelligence community's attempts to anticipate WMD attacks, the report recommended.
Case study
The researchers at JASON have spent more than a decade studying bioterrorism specifically, generating ten studies specific to the topic. As such, they examined the possibility of developing the means to predict a bioterrorism attack as a case study for predicting catastrophic events.
"The earliest JASON studies on bioterrorism predate 9/11 and focused mainly on what attacks might be possible given the principles of biomedicine and biotechnology and the potential capabilities of terrorist groups," the report explained. "After 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax letters, the emphasis shifted to force protection and defense of the homeland in the face of an unspecified threat."
Because rare events themselves are nearly impossible to predict using current research, JASON suggested a progressive study of common terrorist events with low consequences, regular events with greater consequences, and then potential rare events with significant consequences.
Common events could form a base of an information pyramid, the report offered, where intelligence analysts could examine information available on bioterrorist methods along with intent and activities.
"In order to develop a framework for relating actual low-level events to as yet-unseen high-level events, it will be useful to characterize a middle ground along the same axis," the report concluded. "For example, one could compile information pertaining to bioterrorist activity of any kind, including hoaxes, expressions of intent and the acquisition of restricted materials, and attempt to correlate these data with failed attempts and successful small-scale attacks.
"This information may bridge the gap to more infrequent events on a somewhat larger scale, which in turn may indicate the probability of a rare and more devastating event," the report added.
A validated statistical model that made use of a robust database would prove extremely useful to predicting rare bioterrorism events in this scenario, the report conjectured. Intelligence gathering and forensic studies would further direct the allocation of resources for protecting against and responding to a WMD event.
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