'War Gaming' the Enemy

— -- So why weren't our Transportation Security Administration airport screeners prepared to stop terrorists from bringing aboard the components of a liquid bomb before this week?

Did they even know about the threat?

The answer, in brief, is that Homeland Security officials, FBI, CIA, and even the military's Defense Intelligence Agency were all well aware that liquid chemicals could be smuggled aboard U.S. aircraft and "assembled" in flight.

The threat, however, was not considered high enough or immediate enough to justify the no-liquids steps we've now taken, and that decision was not necessarily wrong.

There is a huge difference between discovering something that could be a potential threat, and measuring the possibility that our enemies might actually use such a threat.

The process itself is called "Threat Assessment."

Before a threat can be assessed, it needs to be both discovered and looked at through the same eyes a terrorist would use.

That's where a very important and sometimes shadowy process called "Red Teaming," or "War Gaming," comes into play.

In essence, War Gaming involves commissioning military personnel, government agents or specially trained civilians to form small teams and think like the enemy in order to discover the same things our would-be attackers would find about our vulnerabilities.

In some cases, the Red Teams are done by contractors who specialize in such deep adversarial analysis.

In other cases, it's done within existing federal agencies such as the CIA, FBI, or Defense Intelligence Agency.

In all cases, it's both invaluable and part of what the 9/11 Commission recommended to make sure we never again got caught asleep at the switch.

Following Sept. 11, 2001, the need to think like our enemies became acute, primarily because the attitudes of al Qaeda were so murderously foreign and incomprehensible to logical, balanced minds.

In fact, the White House, in its National Strategy of Homeland Security issued in 2002, specifically cited the need for "Red Teams" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/book/sect1.pdf).