'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).

The process is ongoing, which is one of the reasons Homeland Security already knew that a wide variety of liquids could pose a threat.

The problem: The range of liquids is so great it can also include the gin or vodka poured freely in first class.

According to a member of one of the private companies specializing in Red Teaming who spoke only on condition of anonymity, "One of the toughest challenges we have is the public thinking that any threat we discover has to trigger a full defense system immediately. What we really do is help the policymakers decide how much is enough."

In the case of aviation, and put as succinctly as possible, the only way to absolutely guard against every possible risk of a terrorist attack is to do exactly what we did for several days following 9/11: Shut down the entire system.

While that was the correct response in those uncertain hours, keeping the system grounded any longer, or doing it again last week in response to the news coming out of London, would have served our enemy's goal of the long-term destruction of as many American institutions as possible.

There's an example of Red Teaming you can try for yourself, and this one is very personal because it involves your home.

Whether you just rely on locks to keep your home secure or have an expensive or elaborate home security system, you can still play this game by thinking through the following question: If I were a criminal who knew everything I know about my home and alarm system, how many ways could I break in undetected?

Start the exercise by "mentally" thinking like a professional burglar, then move around your place in a sort of virtual reality looking for ways to break in without getting caught.

Suddenly your home won't seem so secure after all. If you take this to an extreme, you'll find yourself eager to harden your defense systems to the level of Fort Knox.

But here's where you have to consider reality.

Yes, you may have found new ways to break into your home, just like Homeland Security knows of many additional ways for terrorists to gain access to aircraft, but putting up impenetrable barriers to each one would be out of proportion to the level of risk, just as completely blocking every threat to an airport would kill the usability of the U.S. airline system.

In other words, this mind game rapidly becomes more of an exercise in risk assessment than risk identification, and that's precisely the same process the government has been engaging in regarding airport and airline security using Red Teams.

Neither life nor transportation systems are without risk, and the fact is, we're at war, with a vested interest in not doing our enemy's work by destroying our own systems.

Maybe the decision to do no more before this week about potentially mixable liquids was right, and maybe it was an incorrect response, but it was a complex decision based on the imprecise discipline of risk assessment.

It can't be repeated too much: If we raise an impenetrable barrier to virtually every terrorist threat to airliners, no one's going to be flying anywhere, and al Qaeda wins.