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Predicting the Essential Characteristics of the New Terrorism

RAND's continuous interest in modern terrorism dates back to the early 1970s, when the RAND Terrorism Chronology database began tracking incidents and analysts began studying the changing nature of what they recorded. In 1999, the book Countering the New Terrorism outlined troubling shifts in terrorist organizations and acts that heralded a qualitatively different and far greater threat. RAND terrorism experts noted the increasing lethality of attacks, the absence of clear-cut sponsorship, the urban focus, the evolution toward less hierarchical, more dispersed groups of terrorist “amateurs,” and the communications sophistication that united these groups. The book also stressed the rising influence of religion as a motivating factor, and the appeal of terrorism as an instrument of “asymmetric” strategy that allowed the weak to attack the strong, and it noted that “the changing motivations and agendas of terrorists may raise the symbolic value of more-direct attacks against targets on U.S. territory.” Once the events of 9/11 occurred, demand for the book skyrocketed and it became the best-selling monograph in RAND's history. Though the volume had proved prophetic, its greatest value came after the fact as rational explication of the highly unconventional threat against which the United States was now trying to protect its homeland.