Welcome to the Homeland Security and Defense Center
The Homeland Security and Defense Center conducts analysis to prepare and protect communities and critical infrastructure from natural disasters and terrorism. Center projects examine a wide range of risk management problems including coastal and border security, emergency preparedness and response, defense support to civil authorities, transportation security, domestic intelligence programs, technology acquisition, and related topics.
Center clients include the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and other organizations charged with security and disaster preparedness, response and recovery.
The Homeland Security and Defense Center is a joint center of the RAND National Security Research Division and RAND Infrastructure, Safety and Environment.
Recent Publications
Preparedness exercises play central roles in both the building and assessment of organizational readiness for future incidents. This article describes the application of systems analytical approach adapted from engineering that examines response operations as systems with potential failure modes that could hurt performance at future incidents.
Concerns about terrorists smuggling nuclear bombs into the United States in container freight have led to demands for 100% inspection at either U.S. or foreign ports. However, under some circumstances, it may be possible to deter nuclear smuggling attempts with less than 100% inspection.
Passwords are proving less and less capable of protecting computer systems from abuse. Multifactor authentication (MFA) — which combines something you know (e.g., a PIN), something you have (e.g., a token), and/or something you are (e.g., a fingerprint) — is increasingly being required. This report investigates why organizations choose to adopt or not adopt MFA — and where they choose to use it.
Examines whether house demolitions are an effective counterterrorism tactic against suicide terrorism. We link original longitudinal micro-level data on houses demolished by the Israeli Defense Forces with data on the universe of suicide attacks against Israeli targets
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is responsible for controlling the flow of goods and people across the U.S. border, a difficult task that raises challenging resource management questions about how best to minimize illicit flows across the border while facilitating legitimate ones.
New Ideas in Homeland Security: A RAND Occasional Paper Series
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is responsible for controlling the flow of goods and people across the U.S. border, a difficult task that raises challenging resource management questions about how best to minimize illicit flows across the border while facilitating legitimate ones.
Effective intelligence gathering and a Muslim community unsympathetic to calls to violence have discouraged homegrown jihadist terrorism in the U.S. While there was a spike in domestic terrorism in 2009, the perpetrators were mostly individuals who recruited themselves into the role of terrorists.
While the United States government has historically undertaken strategic reviews and produced numerous strategy documents, these have provided only very general directions for U.S. policymakers. This paper defines an approach to strategic planning and illustrates its application using the example of the critical national security topic of counterterrorism.
Deterrence is a critical feature of cost-effective counterterrorism efforts, but it is not well understood or measured. This simple framework for evaluating the relative value of deterrent measures draws on a growing literature on the role of deterrence in counterterrorism strategy and terrorist decisionmaking.
Being able to understand why terrorist attacks have failed and to predict the likelihood of which will succeed is important for homeland security and counterterrorism planning. Literature on the topic suggests that the threat of any terrorist operation can best be evaluated by examining three key sets of characteristics.
Concerns about the panpoply of possible terrorist attacks are central to the design of security efforts to protect both individual targets and the nation overall. Two questions can be posed to assess the novelty and ease of execution of emerging threats, allowing security planners to both learn from new threats and prioritize.
Featured Research
Fear has made al-Qaeda the world's top terrorist nuclear power, yet it possesses not a single nuke. This is a lesson in how terrorism works, writes Brian Michael Jenkins.
It may be possible that the development and deployment of improved security technologies and reconfigurations of security checkpoints will keep security one step ahead of terrorist adversaries, but it also may be an appropriate time to explore fundamentally new approaches, writes Brian Michael Jenkins.
Despite al Qaeda's increasing use of the Internet to attempt to radicalize and recruit homegrown terrorists in the United States, the turnout has been tiny and mostly inept.
Andrew Morral is a Senior Behavioral Scientist at RAND. He formerly directed RAND’s Homeland Security Program and RAND’s Safety and Justice Program. His expertise includes program evaluation, performance measurement, and survey research. His recent publications include studies of counterterrorism deterrence, terrorism risk estimation, and police use of force.
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