The coordinated suicide bombings that killed more than 30 people and wounded 250 more at an international airport and downtown subway station in Brussels on Tuesday were “shocking but not surprising” and shared many of the hallmarks of previous European terror attacks, according to Stanford terrorism experts.

“My research shows that in general, terrorist plots in Europe involve larger numbers of conspirators than do plots in the United States,” said Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Belgian authorities said that as many as five people may have been directly involved in the bombings, including two Belgian-born brothers with violent criminal records, and that several suspects were linked to the same terrorist network that carried out the deadly Paris attacks last November.

“It is common for terrorist conspiracies anywhere to be formed from prior social groupings – friends and relatives,” said Crenshaw.

“The bonds that link individuals are not entirely ideological by any means. Criminal backgrounds are also not surprising. Indeed prison radicalization is a well-known phenomenon.”

A Notorious Neighborhood

Many of the suspects in the Brussels bombings had ties to the inner-city neighborhood of Molenbeek, a majority Muslim enclave of mostly Moroccan descent with a long history as a logistical base for jihadists.

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“Brussels and particularly Molenbeek is one of those places that comes up a lot when you’re talking about counter terrorism,” said Terrence Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC.

“You do have terrorism networks that use these areas, in the same way that organized crime does, to thrive…It seems to be the place where all the networks are locating in part because Belgian security hasn’t been very effective in fighting terrorism.”

Foreign Fighters Bring the War Home

Belgium is a small nation, with a population of around 11 million people, but it has the highest per capita percentage of any Western country of foreign fighters who have joined the battle in Iraq and Syria, according to a recent report, which estimated the total number at 440.

“People were even saying it was not a matter of if, but when Belgium was attacked,” said Joe Felter, a CISAC senior research scholar and former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces.

“You’ve got a high concentration of radicalized individuals in that neighborhood of Brussels, so logistically it was easier for them to recruit, plan and coordinate the execution of these attacks. Local residents loading up explosive packed suitcases in a cab and driving across town to the airport exposes them to much less risk of compromise than would a plot requiring cross border preparation and movement by foreign citizens.”

Felter said he was concerned that the Brussels bombings, for which the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility, would inspire copycat attacks in other countries.

“The real risk now is these home-grown, self-directed terrorist attacks,” he said.

“A successful attack like this, with all its media attention and publicity, is only going to inspire and motivate more attempts going forward.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said European nations needed to do a better job of sharing intelligence to track foreign fighters as they returned home, during a foreign policy speech at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on Wednesday.

“The most urgent task is stopping the flow of foreign fighters to and from the Middle East,” Clinton said.

“Thousands of young recruits have flocked to Syria from France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Their European passports make it easier for them to cross borders and eventually return home, radicalized and battle-hardened. We need to know the identities of every fighter who makes that trip and start revoking their passports and visas.”

Turkey’s president announced at a press conference on Wednesday that his country had deported one of the suspected Brussels bombers back to the Netherlands last year with a clear warning that he was a jihadi.

Identifying Hot Spots

Clinton said authorities also needed to work to improve social conditions in problem areas such as Molenbeek.

“There…has to be a special emphasis on identifying and investing in the hot spots, the specific neighborhoods, prisons and schools where recruitment happens in clusters as we’ve seen in Brussels,” Clinton said.

Other European countries such as Denmark, which has also been struggling to deal with a high percentage of foreign fighters, are trying to proactively to discourage citizens from travelling to Syria to fight, said Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and a CISAC affiliate.

“Politicians are likely to talk about tougher legislation, but there are also measured voices, calling for a strong, long term preventive effort against radicalization to prevent problems from growing out of hand,” said Dalgaard-Nielsen.

“Police need to prioritize community outreach and long term trust building to try to ensure the collaboration of minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in the effort against terrorism.”

Stanford political science professor David Laitin, who recently published the book “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” in collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, said his research found that Muslims faced higher discrimination in the economy, in society and in the political process compared to Christians from similar immigrant backgrounds.

“But there is no evidence that higher degrees of discrimination lead Muslims into the unspeakable acts that members of an inhuman cult are performing in the name of Islam,” said Laitin, who is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

“From what we have tragically seen, the attractiveness of the present murderous cult does not derive from everyday discrimination," he said. "Research has shown that it is not the poor and downtrodden who are radicalized in this way; but rather reasonably educated second-generation immigrants from largely secular backgrounds.”

Europe Divided

Laitin said he expected to see many European countries tighten their border controls in response to the Brussels attacks, as well as greater support in the United Kingdom for the movement to leave the European Union in the upcoming referendum.

“The biggest short-term effect, in my judgment, will be the erosion of one of the great achievements of European integration, namely Schengen, which promised open borders throughout the continent,” Laitin said.

“I foresee greater security walls that will come to divide European countries.”

Fighting a Hostile Ideology

Felter said that while it was undoubtedly important to improve intelligence sharing and invest in greater security measures as part of concerted efforts to target ISIS and interdict future terrorist plots, the key to undermining support for and defeating ISIS was combating its perverted version of Islam.

And, he said, that effort would have to come largely from within the Islamic community itself.

“The symptoms may be suicide bombers in airports, but the root cause is this hostile ideology that’s being pushed on these at-risk individuals through aggressive radicalization and recruitment efforts carried out largely via the internet that then inspires them to carry out these self-directed, ISIS-inspired attacks,” Felter said.

“There’s got to be a longer-term effort to address the root causes of this, to discredit and delegitimize the appeal of this ideology that they’re promulgating online and through social media that’s inspiring these young men and women to go off and commit these horrible acts in the misguided belief that it is their religious obligation to do so.”

 

 

 

 

The U.S. military needs to train and recruit more “cyber warriors,” and improve its offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said during a visit to Stanford University last week.

“Today we’re not sufficiently strategizing, organizing, training or equipping to be cyber warriors,” James said at a roundtable discussion on cyber policy. “We’ve made progress over the last year or two, but it’s not good enough. We need to do more, to be open to different ways of bringing people on and retaining people so we can bring the best and brightest into our ranks.”

She called on Silicon Valley to “move past the debate over Edward Snowden and the debate over encryption” and help the military combat cyber threats to U.S. national security. “Particularly here in Silicon Valley, how can we get better access…and work better with some of the great innovations here in Silicon Valley?” she asked.

Stanford University was just one of the stops on James’ schedule, which also included meetings at Google, Facebook, FireEye and In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community).

James said she’d come to Silicon Valley to “listen and learn” and search for “the next big thing” – from drones to big data.

“We’re actively on the hunt for what will be our next advantage as the military,” she said.

She said the military was working to streamline its procurement process so it could move more quickly fund new technological development using what she called “rapid acquisition.”

“You can’t build the next fighter aircraft under this, but you can build smaller types of technological products and get something under contract within 30 days,” she said.

Protecting networked weapons systems and critical infrastructure at military bases were two top priorities for the Air Force, James said.

It is also working to develop better defensive capabilities to protect satellites and other assets in space, and prevent adversaries from disabling critical missile warning and global positions systems, James said.

“Space had been a fairly tranquil, uncontested area,” she said.

“Nowadays, space is much more contested and congested. There are many more companies and countries up there.

“If a conflict on earth bleeds into space in some way, how do we defend our constellation?”

Military operations centers will need to integrate more cyber capabilities in order to create more options for defense and offense, James said.

“What we need in future is a multi-domain operations center where we’re fully plugged in terms of cyber and space...so that a commander at every turn has military options that go beyond bombing a target,” she said.

“The President, the Secretary of Defense, everybody is pressing, ‘We want more options. We want more targets.’.”

But James acknowledged that even digital conflict could cause collateral damage in the physical world.

“Let’s say we take out a power grid to shut down a particular part of a country to stop a military action,” she said.  “Maybe you’d shut off power to a hospital and people would die.”

That’s why cyber operations would continue to be governed by the law of armed conflict.

“Before a cyber target would be hit, there would be a legal decision with other parts of the government,” James said. “It’s not solely [up to] a commander on the scene.”

In an indication of the growing importance of cyber operations, political and military leadership in Washington are considering elevating U.S. Cyber Command from under U.S. Strategic Command to become its own unified command, James said.

The Air Force currently has around 1,700 personnel working directly on cyber offense and defense, spread among the National Guard, Reserves and active duty. And it recently established a new Cyber College at Air University on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama to train more internal talent.

But military leaders are also looking for other ways to scale up their cyber forces, James said.

“Maybe leveraging the private sector and leveraging Silicon Valley can help us,” she said.

 

 

This book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal.  That conventional wisdom, argues Brad Roberts in The Case for Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, has not been informed by the experience of the United States since the Cold War in trying to adapt deterrence to a changed world or of the Obama administration to create the conditions that would allow further significant changes to U.S. nuclear policy and posture.  A CISAC affiliate, Roberts served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy during the first Obama administration. He wrote the book, which draws heavily on his experience in government, during his time as a consulting professor and William J. Perry fellow at CISAC in 2014. To purchase the book, please visit: http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26137

Why did you write this book?

My main purpose was to reclaim the middle in the U.S. nuclear policy debate.  As in so much of the rest of our national political life, the middle has disappeared from this particular debate, leaving two deeply antagonistic camps to dominate it. One favors more disarmament now, while the other sees many enduring roles for U.S. nuclear weapons. The division didn’t matter so long as the United States could live off the investments of the Cold War.  It can no longer do so, as old weapons and delivery systems age out and expensive decisions must be made.  A coherent and centrist approach is needed to guide national choices, and this book attempts to fill that gap.

 

What is your main argument?

That the conditions do not now exist for the United States to safely take additional steps to further reduce the number and role of U.S. nuclear weapons. The Obama administration set out a strategy for creating those conditions in 2009, and the results have been disappointing. Russia has rejected further arms control. China has rejected further transparency.  Others have refused to join an international consensus against nuclear weapons. This experience must temper enthusiasm for the disarmament project. The conditions do not exist and are not proximate.

 

What is the case against nuclear weapons? And why do you think the case for nuclear weapons is more compelling?

The case against nuclear weapons has been made on many grounds:  historical (‘these are nothing more than cold war relics’), moral (‘their use in war would violate the laws of war so deterrence is immoral as well’), and prudential (‘we can’t prove that deterrence works but we can prove that these are dangerous weapons’). The case for nuclear weapons derives first and foremost from the role the United States wants to play in the world—as a security guarantor to others and a projector of power to promote stability and our values. In today’s world, without nuclear weapons, the United States could not play that role.

 

Can you ever imagine a scenario where the U.S. would need to use nuclear weapons again?

We don't have nuclear weapons to fight and win wars with them; we have nuclear weapons to ensure they are never used against us or our allies—in other words, for deterrence.  The President would only consider the employment of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances when the vital interests of the United States or an ally are at risk. Though extreme, such circumstances are not implausible. The cold-war vintage bolt-from-the-blue major strike isn’t the potential problem today; rather, the problem is a regional conflict that goes badly for an adversary who then tries to escalate his way out of failed aggression against a U.S. ally. At least three nuclear-armed potential adversaries have now long studied the common problem they face:  deterring and defeating a conventionally-superior nuclear-armed major power and its allies. They have developed theories of victory built around nuclear coercion, blackmail, and brinksmanship, aimed at breaking the will of the United States and its allies, including with limited nuclear strikes to demonstrate their resolve. Our deterrence strategy requires that we have an effective ability to respond and that the threat to employ it in the circumstances they create is credible. Moreover, let us distinguish the verb “employ” from “use.” U.S. nuclear weapons are used every day to cast a shadow of doubt over the thinking of potential challengers to U.S. interests and to assure our allies. 

 

President Obama set out a vision for a world free of nuclear weapons at a speech in Prague in April, 2009. Does your book contradict the President’s strategic vision?

President Obama is a pragmatist and this was reflected in the Prague speech. In 2009, we took some steps to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons and set out a plan for working with others to create the conditions for further reductions. But so long as nuclear weapons remain, the President is committed to ensuring that nuclear deterrence remains effective. Toward that end, the administration has expended considerable time, energy, and money.  This is the story of that effort and a distillation of key lessons.