VCU homeland security experts offer insight into the post-9/11 security landscape

By Sian Wilkerson

Twenty-five years ago, the Sept. 11 attacks ushered in a new era of American life and fundamentally altered the nation's concept of safety.

In the years since, "counterterrorism has become an enduring feature of American government and foreign policy, with no endpoint," said Virginia Commonwealth University's David Webber, Ph.D. "9/11 helped create a lasting security environment where the possibility of terrorism and its prevention is a permanent feature of American life."

VCU News caught up with experts in the homeland security and emergency preparedness program in VCU's L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, including Webber, Curtis Brown and Christopher Whyte, Ph.D., who together offered a 360-degree view on the post-9/11 security landscape and what we can expect to see in the years to come.

Beyond creation of the Department of Homeland Security itself, can you tell us about a post-9/11 policy, measure or other action that has had particularly broad or deep significance or impact?

Brown: I believe one of the most significant post-9/11 actions was the sustained federal investment in building state and local homeland security and emergency management capability. Over the last 25 years, billions of dollars have supported personnel, training, exercises, equipment, communications, technology, intelligence sharing, emergency operations centers and specialized response teams. Although much of that investment was initially focused on terrorism, those capabilities have proven invaluable for responding to hurricanes, floods, cyber incidents, public health emergencies, civil disturbances and other hazards.

The challenge now is sustaining and modernizing those capabilities as the federal role evolves. Recent discussions about shifting greater responsibility to states and local governments raise real concerns, particularly for smaller states and under-resourced communities that may struggle to replace federal funding. Technology, including artificial intelligence and improved information-sharing tools, offers opportunities to build capacity, but it will not eliminate the growing demands created by more frequent, complex and simultaneous events. The next major challenge for the homeland security and emergency management enterprise will be finding creative ways to sustain what we have built while developing the capabilities needed for the threats ahead.

Webber: There are numerous changes after 9/11 that had a major impact on American and global politics, as well as the American way of life. The obvious ones include the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the expansion of government surveillance capabilities with the PATRIOT Act and the overhaul of air travel. But I think the most significant consequences of 9/11 were less tangible: the expansion of presidential war-making authority, the securitization of everyday political issues and the normalization of a permanent state of counterterrorism.

The passing of the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 changed the architecture through which the U.S. could conduct counterterrorism, giving the president broad authority to use the military as a counterterrorism tool. It did not specify a specific target or enemy, it was not geographically bound and it was not time limited. Rather, it authorized the president to use necessary force against anyone that planned, authorized, committed or aided the perpetrators of 9/11. It was the primary legal foundation for the war in Afghanistan that lasted nearly 20 years. Furthermore, it has been interpreted to allow force against any "associated forces" of al Qaeda, meaning that it has been used by every president since 9/11 to authorize the use of military force in more than 20 countries.

Another major impact of 9/11 is a more general securitization of political issues. It is impossible to discuss the impact of 9/11 without discussing the impact it had on the American psyche. We no longer viewed ourselves as invulnerable, as 9/11 instilled a deep anxiety and fear of another terrorist attack. Those anxieties were instrumental in transforming a wide array of public issues into security issues. After 9/11, for instance, border security was increasingly framed not simply as a law enforcement or immigration issue, but as a matter of homeland security and counterterrorism. We also see this securitization in the treatment of things like civil protests, political dissent and drug trafficking through a counterterrorism lens, including the designation of drug-trafficking organizations as terrorist organizations and the use of military against them. In this sense, 9/11 facilitated an expansion of what Americans and the government came to understand as "security" problems.

Whyte: I always think first of the enormous post-9/11 effort to improve information sharing across government. The attacks exposed serious problems in the way information moved (or, more accurately, failed to move) between intelligence agencies, law enforcement and different levels of government. There were a series of reforms through the 2000s that tried to address those failures. Probably most significantly, the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center and established a broader information sharing environment. Joint terrorism task forces were also expanded, and state and local fusion centers became important nodes for moving information between federal agencies and officials closer to the communities and infrastructure they were trying to protect.

Most interesting to me is that those changes also created new problems. Before 9/11, officials often struggled because important pieces of information remained isolated in different organizations. Today, the problem is often the inverse of that in the form of information abundance, and improving the ability to share information doesn't automatically improve the ability to recognize which information matters. In that sense, one of the central homeland security challenges has shifted from overcoming information scarcity to managing information abundance, something that has been made harder in the age of different emergent forms of artificial intelligence.

I think another shift worth considering is the way in which the post-9/11 period - involving further formative experiences with biological threats, politicization of intelligence, and more - helped make it clear that homeland security depends on a much broader network of actors than the traditional national-security establishment. Federal intelligence and law-enforcement agencies matter, but so do state and local governments, first responders, emergency managers, public-health agencies, infrastructure owners, private companies, nonprofit organizations and communities themselves. Over time, that more expansive architecture has made it easier to adjust as new wake-up calls have appeared. For instance, Hurricane Katrina forced renewed attention to all-hazards preparedness and emergency management, while cyber incidents continue to highlight how much essential infrastructure is privately owned and digitally dependent. And, of course, COVID-19 demonstrated the importance of public health, supply chains and continuity. Recognizing that protecting the homeland is a distributed responsibility is a positive evolution of framing from the eras preceding the turn of this century.

Looking ahead, in what ways do you see the homeland security field continuing to evolve?

Brown: I believe the homeland security field will need to evolve beyond a primarily government-centric model toward much deeper integration of communities, nonprofits, the private sector, faith-based organizations and other trusted local partners. The last 25 years appropriately focused on strengthening government capability to address the gaps exposed by 9/11, but it is increasingly clear that the government cannot prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from every threat on its own. We have made important progress through the "whole community" approach, but there is still significant opportunity to move from simply engaging nongovernmental partners to truly integrating them into planning, decision-making, information sharing, allocating resources and capability development. That will require sustained relationship building and trust, particularly at the community level, where organizations and leaders often understand local risks, vulnerabilities and needs better than the government does. The future of homeland security will depend on our ability to bring nontraditional homeland security partners together in a way that strengthens security and builds community resilience.

Whyte: I think the process of broadening the homeland security enterprise will continue, in part because many of the boundaries we once used to organize security problems are becoming harder to maintain in practice. Foreign and domestic threats increasingly overlap, physical infrastructure depends on digital systems, public agencies depend heavily on capabilities owned and operated by private companies - and so on. A disruption beginning thousands of miles away can affect a hospital, energy provider or local government in Virginia very quickly.

That changes both the problems homeland security professionals encounter and the range of people they need to work with. One of my specialty areas, cybersecurity, is a good example. A major cyber incident response might involve federal intelligence agencies, law enforcement, state and local governments, an electric utility or hospital, cloud and telecommunications providers, cybersecurity firms and emergency managers - all at the same time. And none of those actors necessarily sees the whole problem or controls all the capabilities needed to resolve it. I define homeland security as a governance posture that increasingly involves building ways for all those different organizations to understand one another and act together.

Obviously emerging technologies will push this further. AI, for example, will create new opportunities for adversaries, but it will also change how homeland security organizations themselves operate. AI systems are moving from helping people find and analyze information toward making recommendations and, in some settings, taking actions on their behalf. That gets straight back to governance and creates practical questions about when people should rely on automated systems, who has authority to make consequential decisions and who remains accountable when decisions are distributed across people, organizations and technologies.

I therefore expect the field to become increasingly concerned with coordination, adaptation and resilience across systems rather than with any single category of threat. Terrorism will remain important but so too will natural disasters, cyber threats, pandemics, critical-infrastructure failures, emerging technologies and problems we haven't yet anticipated. Increasingly, it's their intersection that is our concern rather than any in isolation.