Posts Tagged rand corporation

Homegrown Terrorists

From The RAND Corporation:

Dozens of young Americans like Nguyen have attempted to join overseas jihadist groups in the past several years, raising special concern among counterterrorism officials that they might bring the fight home with them when they return. The threat was punctuated with gunfire earlier this year, when two French brothers—Chérif and Saïd Kouachi—stormed the Paris offices of the news magazine Charlie Hebdo; both had reportedly trained with groups in Yemen and then slipped back into French society.

A RAND analysis by internationally renowned terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins of more than 100 cases found that almost all of the American jihadists who went overseas ended up dead or landed in the same place as Sinh Vinh Ngo Nguyen. Brought down by his trusted confidante, who was really working undercover for the FBI, Nguyen admitted in court that he was trying to get to Pakistan to help train al Qaeda fighters. He was sent to prison for 13 years.

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Deprive ISIS Of Its Finances

From RAND Corporation:

The Islamic State has emerged as the world’s richest terrorist group, with estimated assets of $1 billion to $2 billion. Its sophisticated and strategically driven financial scheme is a key reason that U.S. officials say this fight could last years.

 

An examination of newly declassified financial documents the group created dating to 2005 reveals an organized criminal operation that is funded through rackets like protection, extortion and the co-opting of the region’s oil industry. This makes the group a self-sustaining operation, largely free of reliance on the largesse of wealthy foreign patrons. While airstrikes may disrupt the flow of oil and profits, they will not lead to the group’s financial ruin anytime soon. Based on our research, we estimate the Islamic State will bring in $100 million to $200 million this year. And that’s being conservative.

 

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The ISIS Threat To The U.S.

From RAND Coporation:

Terrorists can operate in many environments. Al Qaeda cells have existed in hostile states with efficient law enforcement capabilities, like the United States or Germany. Terrorist organizations have a much easier time operating in states with low capability, even when those states are hostile to them. Examples would be Yemen or Nigeria. Terrorists have an easier time operating in ungoverned space, where little or no state apparatus exists, such as Somalia. But an even better place for terrorists to locate their home base is in a state that is sympathetic to their purposes. And the best place of all would be a state the terrorists actually controlled. In that environment they would not only be free of state interference, they would actually be able to employ the attributes of sovereignty to their purposes—the police, the security services, the banking system, the diplomatic establishment. Imagine the difficulty of dealing with terrorists with diplomatic immunity.

 

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Pre and Post-9/11 Crises

From RAND:

The main difference between the immediate post-Cold War decade and the post-9/11 era as regards the variety of international challenges is that during that earlier period these challenges were faced and dealt with seriatim, rather than allowed to accumulate. Each of the above cited hurdles was taken, for the most part successfully, before the next was encountered. As a consequence, the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations usually had the luxury of managing only one serious crisis at a time.

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Fight Today’s Terrorist Threat, Not Yesterday’s

From RAND:

Counterterrorism is not just about daring raids and drone strikes. It is about the hard work of collecting and sifting through vast amounts of information and managing relationships among organizations that often regard sharing information as an unnatural act. Large- scale enterprises involving multiple government agencies and multiple levels of government are difficult to manage.

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Middle East Most Serious Threat to U.S.

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TSA Procedures Need to Be Remade from Scratch

From RAND:

It is time for a new approach to meeting America’s next-generation aviation security needs, one that dodges the influence of politics and bureaucracies and relies instead on the resources and objectivity of independent researchers operating from a clean slate. This would enable the government to confront the need for cost-risk trades that agencies and Congress find so difficult to acknowledge and present to the public.

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Long-Term Prospects for the Afghan Peace Talks

From RAND Corporation:

In the first few days of 2012, the Afghan Taliban confirmed in an email to media outlets what had been whispered about for weeks: that a tentative agreement had been reached to open an office in Qatar from which to engage in preliminary peace negotiations with the U.S.-led coalition. The move drew criticism for cutting the Afghan government out of the loop and for lending legitimacy and influence to the Taliban even as it continued carrying out serious attacks. However, it also represented the first important step toward the near-universally accepted reality that any resolution in Afghanistan would occur at the negotiation table and not on the battlefield.

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Resurgence of al Qaeda

From RAND:

One significant trend is the expansion of al Qaeda’s global network. The leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in Iraq, and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (in North Africa) have sworn bayat, or loyalty, to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and provided him with funding, global influence, and a cadre of trained fighters. None of these affiliate organizations existed a decade ago. But, over the past several years, attacks by these affiliates have increased.

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Prototype Tools to Support Local Disaster Preparedness Planning and Collaboration

From RAND Corporation:

Against a backdrop of terrorist threats, natural disasters, and heightened concern about pandemic influenza, national security policy is now based on an all-hazards approach to disaster preparedness planning. Effective local planning is critical to disaster preparedness. Military installations and their civilian counterparts — local government and local health-care providers — can strengthen local-level disaster preparedness planning. This is the second report of a larger study aiming to develop planning support tools for local military and civilian planners. It describes a prototype tool that focuses on risk-informed, capabilities-based planning to determine (and address gaps in) the capabilities and resources a locality will likely require in the event of a disaster, with the prototype demonstration focusing on earthquakes, hurricanes, and pandemic influenza. The report also describes two social networking tools for local coordination of disaster preparedness and sharing of resources.

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