Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Signals, a CHDS podcast, explores the ideas, events and issues shaping homeland security.
In each episode, we offer a new perspective from experts in the field.
Today we discuss terrorism, how it has evolved, and what we've learned along the way.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Is Gettysburg still in Diver?
[00:00:30] Speaker C: Welcome everyone to signals. My name is Caleb Cage and I recently took over as the Master's Program Lead for the center for Homeland Defense and Security. I couldn't be happier to kick off this podcast for the center and engage with our community more directly. I'm also incredibly excited to welcome our two guests today to the show. Dr. Bruce Hoffman, who is a professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Dr. David Brannan, who is senior faculty and a program Manager at at the CHDS center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Welcome to you both.
[00:01:06] Speaker D: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Thanks, Caleb.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: It's good to see you. And I've got to say, as a moment of personal privilege here, I'm exceptionally honored to be here today because both of you have meant so much to me in my journey as both a practitioner and as a budding, maybe emerging so scholar or academic in the field of homeland Defense and security. And so it's great to connect with you both and to learn more about you and your careers here.
So getting started here, you may not appreciate this characterization, but I think it's personally true you are both giants in the field, particularly with respect to the study of terrorism. How did you first become interested in this topic?
[00:01:52] Speaker D: Bruce well, firstly, thanks Caleb again for having us both on.
There's no greater honor and pleasure than to have one of your former students described as a giant in the field because that means hopefully I did my job right.
That David is justifiably such a leading figure.
As to your question, interestingly, a lot of people have been asking me that question this year for two reasons. One, one, because the 25th anniversary of the APOCAL September 11, 2001 attacks have gotten lots of people thinking about terrorism and about that milestone and so many people came into the field afterwards.
But also this fall, in addition, marks my 50th year studying terrorism and people have seen that in my bio and they go, wow, that's a long time ago. As indeed it is. And that was the first semester I was at graduate school. It was a two year master's program or master's equivalent, had a different degree name and oddly enough we had to choose our thesis topic that was due like 18 months hence. We had to choose it then and in 1972, when I had been an undergraduate, back in those days, you came up to college, at least in the northeast of the United States, after Labor Day. Now, everybody starts well before Labor Day. So I arrived after Labor Day, 1972, September.
And within a day or two of my arrival, the Munich Olympic attack happened. And for at least 72 hours, you had this very dramatic denouement, you know, unfolding, and this. This drama really unfolding. And that's what first garnered my attention on terrorism.
And. But there was no way to study it. No one was studying terrorism then. And it was only when I came to graduate school four years later that terrorism was beginning to emerge as a subject worthy of scholarly inquiry. And it just so happened that that December, when I had to make this decision, it was down to the wire.
Abu Daoud, one of the Masterminds of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, was arrested in France.
And despite extradition treaties with West Germany and Israel and demands from both of them to extradite him, they refused. And I thought to myself, well, everybody always says terrorism is a failed strategy as well as tactic, that it has no impact. But here you've got two. Two countries demanding the extradition of a terrorist criminal, and one country, like, define international law and define treaty obligations. And this made me think, there's something more to this subject that we just don't understand.
And accordingly, in December 1976, I embarked on the study of terrorism.
[00:04:44] Speaker C: That's incredible. I think we can spend the next hour just digging into everything that's changed and everything that you Learned from the 70s on. But let's go to Dave real quick. Dave, same question for you. How did you get engaged in the study of terrorism?
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Caleb, it's incredible, indeed, what you just heard from Bruce was done with me for the last 30 years. So he takes a course question, and he weaves history and he weaves analysis together, and he gives you a compelling analysis that answers the question, but it also fills in the blanks. And he's just done this with me over and over and over again. Bruce, I certainly remember the Munich massacre, but that's not what drove me towards studying terrorism. I was a cop in Southern California, and I got hurt in successive fights on duty until the surgeries could no longer put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was medically retired as a sergeant from the SWAT team. But the reality is, I was angry when I left. I went and cowboyed at Big Springs Ranch in Elko County, Nevada. I'm sure you're acquainted with that, Caleb, and I also built saddles.
But after a couple of years of cowboying, not only could my body not take it anymore, but I was missing a sense of mission. And it's interesting I would not have been able to put those words to it at that time, but I know now, having worked with CHDS so much, that I was missing the mission that I had felt a part of as a cop and especially as a SWAT cop. Some of you folks will know Pat Miller, and I know Caleb does, and Bruce and Pat and I are all friends. And he's taught at chds, taught intel there for better part of two decades. Decades. He was a friend of mine long before he came to chds, and his intel background exposed him to Bruce's writings. And I was talking to Pat one day about my frustrations, and he suggested I look up Bruce and I look up where he was then and see if I was interested in what he was doing. And so I did that. And what I found was that Bruce was at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. And I finagled my way into the university, and that was problematic, but I finagled my way in there. I moved my family there to study and to learn from him. And I have spent 30 years studying under him and learning from him. Caleb, you opened up with some very kind words, but I was a student of Bruce Hoffman's in 1996. I remain a student of Bruce Hoffman's today. And I will always be a student of Bruce Hoffman's because he's so far ahead of the pack that the rest of us are just trying to catch up. He's been a mentor, and I'm pretty happy and proud to call him my friend at this point, too. But he's also been a mentor and a friend to CHDS and to students that he's spent time talking to over many years.
[00:08:08] Speaker C: And, Bruce, that's also reflected in your career, right? You're at a public policy or you've been a part of public policy schools, foreign policy schools, trained as a historian, if I understand that correctly, with some international relations as well.
How have you seen that, what you just said, what you both just said about not specializing but being broadly educated. How have you seen that play out in your professional career as well?
[00:08:36] Speaker D: Well, I think you always have to have a foundation, and mine was always Middle Eastern terrorism. But then I deviated from it for a long period. I just.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: I didn't.
[00:08:44] Speaker D: I rebelled against it. I mean, I thought in the 80s and, and 90s that it was just too diff. I tried it was too difficult, it was too complex, it was too morally challenging to get into the terrorism counterterrorism dynamic. And I deliberately ignored it.
But that gave me a foundation and the historical foundation, especially historical, not so much for what the terrorists did, but you could get into archives and see the government response and see it used from all offices of government, the whole of government, police, military, intelligence, civil service, legislature, or the executive.
And that, that was very important to me and gave me a perspective how difficult counterterrorism was and then the extensive field work I did. But also having been with the Coalition Provisional Authority and also having worked at the CIA when I was scholar in residence, and at the FBI when I was a commission, a congressionally appointed commissioner, it definitely improved my teaching because you understood the practicalities. I mean, in Iraq you understood that you could have the best policy idea in the world. Doesn't matter if you can't get buy in, if you can't reach consensus.
And also how, how difficult it was to accomplish even the smallest thing. I think sitting in a classroom, not CHDS students as much as my undergraduates, especially Georgetown at St. Andrews, in the sense they have no idea how difficult it is to get government to move, how to affect a bureaucracy, how to enact legislation and policy. And that was one thing that my historical background may be very sensitive to. It was very important, but I would argue the comparative dimension.
It didn't tell you so much what you, if you did, if this was done in Country x especially was 50 years ago, that before all of us were watching, it was being widely watched by the terrorists and guerrillas themselves. I mean, it was required viewing for Al Fattah, for the African National Congress, for the, the Tamil Tigers, for the Black Panthers, for the Provisional Irish Republican Army. All of them studied it. That's the thing about successful terrorist organizations.
To go back to the cliche of the 2000s when we talked about Al Qaeda, then they're learning organizations. They have to be. They don't survive. So they learn not only from their own mistakes, but from the mistakes of other terrorist groups so that they can perfect their own operations.
The frustration or the pathology that I've seen in governments and the arms of government is that they don't learn very well. They learn well when they have to on the spot, and then they forget about it. And, you know, frankly, that's happening again too. I see now is that all the lessons that we often painfully learn from the war on terror are being discarded now. We're not going to fight that kind of war again. We're only going to fight against, you know, peer rivals. It's not true. I mean, what we've seen, especially in the past 25 years, the first quarter of this century, is that terrorism is a fixture of national security.
It may be dormant and it may be quiet, but the terrorists haven't stopped plotting and planning. They're merely looking for a window of vulnerability or an opportunity to strike. And unfortunately, what I've seen over the decades of studying terrorism is we constantly reinvent the wheel and forget the lessons that we should really have hardwired. We're never going to let this happen again. We're never going to lower our guard. And in recent years we're saying, you know, terrorism isn't the threat it once was.
But terrorism has been shown in this century to be highly consequential, even more so than it's been in any prior century.
[00:12:28] Speaker C: What do you think the cause of that is? What's the cause of terrorism becoming more consequential and more of an opportunity for organizations that want to use it to achieve their political aims?
[00:12:44] Speaker D: Well, firstly, right now, many of them in a particular movement think they're winning. I mean, you know, Iran and Iran's terrorist proxies think that they've won the war. I mean, I'm not saying they have, but that's their thinking. And why the negotiations have become so fraught and difficult. They think they're in the catbird seat. So that's one thing. I think there's a greater consensus that terrorism can succeed. I mean, think back to September 2001. President Bush declared a war not just against Al Qaeda, but against all terrorist groups with global reach.
Well, you know, 25 years later, Al Qaeda still exists and has spawned a number of franchises that are even more threatening. Al Shabaab and Somalia. For, for, for, for example, the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. That would have been unimaginable 25 years ago.
It spawned ISIS. I mean, groups that were formed in the 1980s on who many wars have been declared, whether it's Hezbollah or isis, I'm sorry, Hezbollah or Hamas, still exist. So that's one reason, I think. Secondly, if terrorists, as I said a moment ago, are learning organizations, they're taking advantage of developments on the battlefield, especially drone warfare.
Right now everybody's running around saying drone warfare is a new, because of the Iran war in particular new threat.
ISIS pioneered the use of drones. I mean, much more primitive dropping single hand grenades or a single block of plastic explosives or carrying out reconnaissance, but at a very primitive Level ISIS a decade ago paved the way for what we're seeing now in the extensive use of terrorist drones, whether it's the Houthis, whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's, of course, Hamas or the irgc.
And then I think we can't underestimate in the non kinetic realm, the power of social media. I mean, terrorists have been extremely effective in exploiting social media to control and dominate the narrative. And that's another lesson I reg that I think we haven't learned is that from the start, the war on terror is supposed to be a war of ideas. And we prosecuted it much more kinetically and not unsuccessfully. I mean, look, proof of the pudding is the homeland has been safe for 25 years. That's enormously important, and that's an immensely significant achievement. What worries me is what I've seen. The pattern in the past is we then become complacent, we lower our guard, we don't take the threat of terrorism as seriously. And that's precisely the opportunity, the vulnerability that terrorists look to exploit. And then what do we do?
[00:15:27] Speaker C: Yeah. And if these are learning organizations, right, and if they're cells and networks and those sorts of things like we understand them to be, very often, then the kinetic efforts are not as effective. Right. There's a lot of that, Dave, you brought up in group narratives. And I remember learning about social identity theory before I was in your class because it's such an important part of your unconventional threats course.
Tell us a little bit about the paper that you and Anders wrote. Talking to terrorists that sort of set you off and how that's been received, set you off on this path, I should say, of social identity theory and how that's been received.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: When he talks about the Tamil Tigers, he went to Sri Lanka, right, to do the work when he stood.
Yeah, it wouldn't. When he's talking about Afghanistan, he's been to Afghanistan to work on it. When he's talking about Iraq, he's been to Iraq to work on it. And so for Anders and I, Bruce was the exact opposite of almost everybody else who was a leader in the field, which was to sit and to spend time in the library and to spend time in the database, but to not become, as I remember, one leading figure tell me not to become a spokesman for the despised.
And I thought, I don't want to be a spokesman for the despised, but I do want to speak to those I despise because I think they may have some input.
As Matt has famously said, the enemy gets a vote, right?
[00:17:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: And so I would like to know what they have to say.
[00:17:19] Speaker C: Yeah. And, you know, empathy is a common word right now, but it just means understanding things from other people's perspectives. And that's one of the things I took away from that article was I don't have to agree with other perspectives, but to understand them is an important part.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: I hope you don't agree. I hope we don't lead anybody to agree, but I do hope that we are more capable by understanding what that social group, that violent social group, and why they might do what they do.
Because I would like to have policies, as Bruce just mentioned, it's great to come up with these ideas, but if those policies cannot be implemented by government, then they're not really that valuable. And that's one of the bonuses of CHDs.
[00:18:12] Speaker D: Well, especially I think as society becomes more complex, it also becomes more vulnerable. So the synergy between, you know, the study of it and the practical application to, you know, of threat assessment to homeland security is absolutely vital because the stakes are so. Are so large.
You know, I think, let's say the terrorism studies field, which I'm really much more familiar with, I would say historically it's been conservative with a small C, that it's being very difficult for scholars, less so practitioners, because I think they have to understand, they do understand that this is a very dynamic and constantly evolving phenomena. But within the academy, I've just seen that there's a conservatism. I mean, we talked about it a little earlier when my article in the early 1990s discussing the rising threat of religiously motivated terrorism was widely dismissed.
So the point is, what I've always kept my eye on in my career is what are the emerging trends? What do we see that's going on now that gives us a window into the future? And it's not, you know, this. This incredible genius. It's not this ability to predict the future. It's not this omniscience. It's just looking at the trends and discerning from the trends what the threat around the corner is and how we can best start preparing for it now. And I think that's really the nexus of terrorism studies in homeland security.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: Yeah, but Dave, to your point about the sort of knowledge development, the academic contributions that scholars have been able to make in the last 50 years or 25 years that you've both been in this field, what have been the most interesting and important scholarly developments or contributions to the knowledge that we have on terrorism that you all have seen?
[00:20:17] Speaker B: I would say this, that studies in conflict and terrorism has been there for every piece of it, for all the developments along the way. And I think about Martha Crenshaw and David Rapport and yourself and Paul Wilkinson and. And how these various ways of looking at terrorism have been really rolled out in the academic work that. And of course, terrorism and political violence, too, The. The other journal.
But yeah. I shouldn't even answer this. You should answer this, Bruce.
[00:20:50] Speaker D: Well, we should add Brian Jenkins, too.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Yes. And I'm so sorry, dad.
[00:20:55] Speaker D: It's interesting that you know their work. Walter LaCour as well, Jerry Post. I mean, there's a lot of people. Mark Jurgensmaier. It's interesting how all of their works have held up so well from the 1970s and that students still turn back to, like, the core foundational works. That's not to say that some great things haven't been published since then, but, you know, that's kind of the canon that we. That we start with.
I think a lot of the research that was very contentious in the 80s and 90s especially, but even in the 70s about terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction was enormously important.
And again, there was. There was a fierce debate. I mean, one of the arguments in my 1993 paper, Holy Terror, was that the first, you know, incident using a weapon of mass destruction, even though it's misnamed, but a chemical, biological or radiological weapon, I argue, would come from a religious cult that no one's heard of, not from all the established terrorist groups that we were watching. And that turned out to be right. But there were. There was a lot. But all those debates, I think, sharpened our thinking, even if there were plenty of people that disagreed on either side. I mean, what's interesting is since the whole WMD debacle and Iraq, what was once one of the cornerstones of terrorism study, there's almost nothing published on this subject nowadays, which is a real problem, because when we talk about the future of terrorism, the advantages that, unfortunately, artificial intelligence research are going to bring to terrorists in closing the operational loop, hastening their development of these weapons, just developments in science as well and the way they're communicated, we need to be paying attention to what we've kind of neglected for almost.
Well, for more than 20 years. I would say, too, that in the 2000s, the intense focus on suicide terrorism was very beneficial because that's a phenomena we do see less of now than we saw then. And this body of knowledge from practitioners, from scholars, from others that all merged together, and that was always very interdisciplinary, I think Was, was, was quite important.
The work on understanding the power and reach of social media, and especially, I'll contradict myself a little bit, the publications on ISIS at the end of the 2,000 teens that really highlighted that. I mean, contradicting myself just saying that that was a very narrow focus on just one group. But that group was so revolutionary and so consequential.
All that, I think, has been enormously positive.
What worries me a bit today is that especially in political science, there's a real emphasis on quantitative methodologies and sometimes overtly theoretical and modeling approaches that frankly, a lot of them are replicating empirical and qualitative work that was done a long time ago. Not that there's not value in that, but we shouldn't become enamored, if any one single disciplinary approach. I think what makes terrorism studies so interesting and what has sustained the journal is that it is a big tent and that we should always be open to other ideas and other approaches as well.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: I hope we stand ready to move and pivot.
Bruce has told me for 30 years that terrorism is dynamic and amorphous and evolving.
I would say that as you bring up critical thinking, critical thinkers in relation to terrorism studies, but also homeland security more generally, and at this particular moment, homeland defense as well, we need to be dynamic, and it's not comfortable to be dynamic. And we rarely like to evolve because we're comfortable where we are.
And if we don't do that, we will not be ready for the next merged threat, whatever that might be. Because Bruce is exactly right. These are learning organizations, and there's a heavy penalty for, For a failure to be successful. And so they want to get it right.
We have to, we have to be willing to make those incremental changes. Not huge changes, but incremental changes. And at leading this country to moving with the threat, or perhaps ahead of the threat, which is where I like them to be.
[00:25:51] Speaker D: That, to me, is the biggest problem in that people are now afraid to discuss certain terrorist movements and their activities, are afraid to call them out as terrorism. We're starting to use all kinds of euphemisms like resistance and defensiveness. I mean, we have to call out all terrorism and say that all terrorism is bad and it's never justified, no matter what the circumstances are.
[00:26:18] Speaker C: It's so interesting you say that about, about the moral compass. I, I remember it's probably seven, eight years ago. I'm not going to remember his name, but I read a. A book about terrorism by a French rhetoric scholar and, and the major takeaway from the book was we have to call terrorism what it is. And I thought, well, that's kind of a baseline point. Like there's. I'm not sure that's worth 250 pages.
But fast forward to today and where we have this sort of moral relativism around a lot of things and even using different euphemisms, as you pointed out, resistance and those sorts of things.
Those things don't change terrorism and what the nature of terrorism is or how societies have to respond to that at all contributions or scholarly contributions that have been made over the last few decades. You brought up this concept earlier of terrorist organizations as learning organizations. And because a lot of my upbringing was in the military and the COIN era, the counterinsurgency era in Iraq, it made me think of John Nagle, who I'm sure you know well, and his book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, I think is the name of the title or the title of the book. And that's one of his points, is about military organizations are big learning organizations, and we can't. We have to continue to be learning organizations because our.
Because our enemies out there are learning organizations.
Where did that come from, from an academic standpoint, where we determined that terrorist organizations were learning organizations, and what are the implications to that for practitioners and scholars alike?
[00:28:08] Speaker D: Well, I think it really smacked everyone in the face where, look, al Qaeda was surviving the greatest onslaught ever directed against the terrorist group in history, an international coalition led by the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind.
And we didn't destroy them. We certainly weakened and attrited and undermined their capacity to operate.
[00:28:37] Speaker C: We just have a little bit of time left, and I want to pivot a little bit if I can. Bruce, I've read your work because Dave introduced me to your research 10 years ago. I've read a lot of interviews by you and those sorts of things. And one of the things that surprised me, I love literature. I love fiction and literary fiction. I love spy novels. And I remember reading an interview with you where you recommended to someone to read A Coffin for Demetrios as an important novel to help understand intelligence and terrorism and those sorts of things.
I'd like to ask you about that. Why is Eric Ambler's 1939 book A Coffin for Demetrios an important book for all of us to read?
[00:29:26] Speaker D: Well, that's a great question. And there's one sentence in that book or one line in that book or piece of dialogue that says it all. And it's Colonel Hockey who's the.
With the Turkish National Police. And he's talking to Latimer, this journalist, and telling the story of Demetrios who conforms to modern terrorism. He's. He's an insurgent, he's a guerrilla, he's a criminal, he's an actual terrorist. He's, you know, he's just, you know, talk about the gray area phenomena of all these things over Narcotics trafficker, he's all those things. But Colonel Hockey tells Latimer, this journalist who's researching the story of Demetrios is the important dimension or the important figure is not the man who throws the bomb, but the man who paid him or ordered him to do it. And that, to me, is exactly the study of terrorism. We've got to go beyond the actual incident itself, which the media focuses on, which often rivets our attention, get beyond that incident. And just as David was describing earlier, what drew him into the field is understanding the perpetrator.
Understanding, not necessarily sanctioning or identifying with, but comprehending why they did what they did, what their path to radicalization was.
How the organizational dimensions of a terrorist group determines its tactics and targets, how its ideology shapes its strategy, how that informs leadership is really the important elements of studying terrorism. And that one line of dialogue from a coffin for Demetrios basically says it all. And it's also a great book.
[00:31:11] Speaker C: That's great. Dave, any ads?
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One that is really important is coming out in a year, and that's the fourth edition of Inside Terrorism. I suspect I have bought more copies of Inside Terrorism than anybody else, Bruce, because I see it as absolutely foundational to setting the stage for our students as they come into this program to understand what terrorism is, to understand what terrorism is not, and then all of the pieces that go along with that.
[00:31:49] Speaker C: Well, let me go ahead and thank you guys once again. It's been a huge honor to talk to you both. Bruce, it's nice to see you again. Dave, it's always great seeing you and I'll see you again next week and appreciate all your insights and your time. This has been a really special first podcast for Signals. Thank you both very much.
[00:32:06] Speaker D: You're very welcome, Caleb.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Thanks for your work here.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Signals, a CHDS podcast. Stay informed, stay alert, and recognize the signals. For more educational resources on homeland defense and security strategy and policy, visit us at CHDS usually.
