National security faces challenges from insider threats, scholar says 4 September 2015, by Clifton B. Parker

investigations by the U.S. military, FBI and Congress, Zegart analyzes the attack and one facet of the insider threat universe – Islamist terrorists.

In this case, a self-radicalized Army psychiatrist named walked into a Fort Hood facility in 2009 and fired 200 rounds, killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others. The shooting spree remains the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 and the worst at a military site in American history, she added.

Insights and lessons learned

Family of the victims of the Fort Hood shooting pause at Zegart's study of insider and surprise attacks as a memorial for the fallen on Nov. 10, 2009. In a new well as academic research into the theory of study, Stanford political scientist Amy Zegart examines organizations led her to some key insights about lessons learned from the terrorist attack at the U.S. why the Army failed to prevent Hasan's attack when military post. clues were clear:

Routines can create hidden hazards. People in bureaucracies tend to continue doing things the U.S. national security faces rising challenges from same old way, even when they should not, Zegart insider threats and organizational rigidity, a said, and not just in America. In the Cuban missile Stanford professor says. crisis of 1962, for example, U.S. spy planes were able to spot Soviet missile installations in Cuba Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for because the Soviets had built them exactly like they International Security and Cooperation at Stanford always had in the Soviet Union – without and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote camouflage. in a new study that in the past five years, seemingly trustworthy U.S. military and intelligence In the Fort Hood case, she said, bureaucratic insiders have been responsible for a number of procedures kept red flags about Hasan in different national security incidents, including the WikiLeaks places, making them harder to detect. publications and the 2009 attack at Fort Hood in that killed 13 and injured more than 30. Career incentives and organizational cultures often backfire. As Zegart wrote, several She defines "insider threats" as people who use researchers found that "misaligned incentives and their authorized access to do harm to the security cultures" played major roles in undermining safety of the United States. They could range from before the Challenger space shuttle disaster. mentally ill people to "coldly calculating officials" who betray critical national security secrets. Zegart's earlier research on 9/11 found the same dynamic played a role in the FBI's manhunt for two In her research, which relies upon declassified 9/11 hijackers just 19 days before their attack.

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Because the FBI's culture prized convicting explaining why the Pentagon could not stop Nidal criminals after the fact rather than preventing Hasan in time. Despite 9/11 and a rising number of disasters beforehand, the search for two would-be homegrown Jihadi terrorist attacks, the Defense terrorists received the lowest priority and was Department struggled to adapt to insider terrorist handled by one of the least experienced agents in threats," Zegart wrote. the New York office. Difficult to change Organizations matter more than most people think. Robust structures, processes and cultures Another problem was that the Pentagon faced that were effective in earlier periods for other tasks substantial manpower shortages in the medical proved maladaptive after 9/11. corps – especially among psychiatrists. So the Defense Department responded to incentives and In the case of the Fort Hood attack, the evidence promoted Hasan, despite his increasingly poor suggests that government investigations, which performance and erratic behavior. focused on individual errors and political correctness (disciplining or investigating a Muslim In addition, Zegart found the Defense Department American in the military) identified only some of the official who investigated Hasan prior to the attack root causes, missing key organizational failures. saw nothing amiss because he was the wrong person for the job – he was trained to ferret out Hasan slipped through the cracks not only because waste, and abuse, not counterterrorism, people made mistakes or were prone to political which is why he did not know how to look for signs correctness, but also because defense of radicalization or counterintelligence risk. organizations "worked in their usual ways," according to Zegart. "In sum, the Pentagon's force protection, discipline, promotion and counter- investigatory Adapting to a new threat systems all missed this insider threat because they were designed for other purposes in earlier times, In terms of organizational weaknesses, Hasan's and deep-seated organizational incentives and Fort Hood attack signaled a new challenge for the cultures made it difficult for officials to change what U.S. military: rethinking what "force protection" truly they normally did," she wrote. means, Zegart said. Before 9/11, force protection reflected a physical protection or hardening of Zegart acknowledges the difficulties of learning potential targets from an outside attack. Now, force lessons from tragedies like 9/11, the NASA space protection has evolved to mean that the threats shuttle accidents and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. could come from within the Defense Department and from Americans, she added. "People and organizations often remember what they should forget and forget what they should "For half a century, the department's structure, remember," she said, adding that policymakers systems, policies and culture had been oriented to tend to attribute failure to people and policies. think about protecting forces from the outside, not While seemingly hidden at times, the organizational the inside," Zegart wrote. roots of disaster are much more important than many think, she added. In the case of Hasan, the Defense Department failed in three different ways to identify him as a More information: "Insider Threats and threat: through the disciplinary system, the Organizational Root Causes: The 2009 Fort Hood performance evaluation system and the counter- Terrorist Attack." strategicstudiesinstitute.army … terrorism investigatory system run jointly with the er_2015/7_Zegart.pdf FBI through Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

"Organizational factors played a significant role in

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