Facing Catastrophe - Risk and Response: The 9-11 and 11-M Commissions' Blind Sides

Scott Atran ()
Additional contact information
Scott Atran: IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Background thinking for the upcoming Madrid terrorism summit stems partly from the 9/11 Commission and Spain's Comisión 11-M. Their presentations fall short on pinpointing the sources of attacks that carry the most risk and how best to respond. Terrorist attacks over the last decades follow a power-law distribution, which anticipates future terrorist events with ever broader effects. Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make us less secure even if they predict most terrorist events. Evolution, complex adaptive systems, and WWII experience from British intelligence provide salutary lessons for thinking "outside the box" with decentralized expertise. History shows that people do not readily panic in surprise attacks and that local actors may be best able to organize response efforts. Proposals to centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in terrorist networks in the wake of Al-Qaeda's operational demise.

Date: 2005
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/ijn_00000597v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, 2005, 05-05

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/ijn_00000597v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:ijn_00000597

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().