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Stephen Flynn: Reassessing our vulnerability to terrorism

The recent explosions in West, Texas, and Boston underscore the nation’s ongoing vulnerabilities despite lessons learned from the 9/11 attacks. Points asked Northeastern University Professor Stephen Flynn to assess the areas where America needs to boost its level of preparedness. Flynn is founding co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security and author of The Edge of Disaster, a book about the vulnerability of America’s critical infrastructure.

What is critical infrastructure?

It’s infrastructure, systems, networks that provide essential functions and services for a society. It’s not necessarily an asset per se that’s critical, it’s the function that the asset provides.

Are facilities such as the West Fertilizer Co. plant a cause for concern?

Absolutely. From a security perspective, an adversary’s goal for targeting critical infrastructure is to cause mass destruction or mass disruption. You really look for, what are the potential infrastructure [items] that could result in mass loss of life or high-profile damage to a community? And that has to be part of your assessment to assign some priority to it with regard to putting in place safeguards.

Has the nation dramatically pro- gressed since 9/11 in addressing our critical infrastructure vulnerabilities?

No. I’m not sure why an adversary needs to import a weapon of mass destruction to the United States. We have lots of them pre-positioned and next to densely urban areas and critical infrastructure throughout the United States. Refineries, chemical plants and the transportation that moves them around … some of the most dangerous substances on the planet.

They’re handled in remarkably safe ways, overwhelmingly, and they provide such a critical service for a modern industrial society. So it’s not that we want to go back to an age where we didn’t have these. But we also need to think through, given the overwhelming focus since 9/11, that this risk is an ongoing one. We need to be looking very carefully at some of these facilities and highly hazardous commodities and make sure that we’re mitigating the risk and are well-prepared to deal with the consequences should things go wrong.

Why are we not doing that?

At its core, basically, efforts to go after critical infrastructure as a major imperative following 9/11 crashed headlong into the federalism issue and the private-public, market-based issue. We didn’t notice it so much because the overwhelming effort during the Bush administration was to take the battle to the enemy. A constant refrain was: “We do it over there so we don’t have to do it here.” So we didn’t do much to look around here at home and identify what’s vulnerable and critical and work our way through the messy dialogue about how we safeguard it.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security ask companies to provide worst-case disaster appraisals with their risk-management plans. Why isn’t that information released publicly?

I am one who advocates for more candidness about infrastructure’s potential vulnerability and potential consequence, frankly because that’s the only way in a democracy that you get any significant effort to address vulnerability and prepare. The West incident is not likely to be an act of terror. Yet the consequences to the community are the same, in terms of risk to emergency responders, risk to people who were there and risk to the surrounding community.

What conclusions do you draw from the Boston attacks?

The Boston incident is a manifestation of the new face of terrorism that many folks in the Homeland Security and counterterrorism world have been worried about: a shift from the large-scale, 9/11-plus efforts that Osama bin Laden was largely geared toward. You don’t need the massive-scale attacks that are very difficult to pull together without being detected and intercepted.

Instead, [terrorists’ thinking is] let’s energize with largely domestic footing, in the form of radicalization, small groups, locally based, who can cause mischief. Not on a 9/11 scale, but one that can certainly cause real death and destruction. Boston was done with very crude explosives and at a very public gathering in a densely populated urban area. In short, not a lot of sophistication, carried out to great effect, in terms of the visuals. It proved what a crude weapon in the right place at the wrong time can do.

How much safer would we be if we refocused on critical infrastructure security?

If we bake in safeguards to mitigate risk or, should disaster happen, to have a nimble response and rapid recovery, that ends up driving down threats by making these potential infrastructures far less attractive. If you hit it and it’s a fizzle, not a big bang, there’s not a motive to do it. If it’s less vulnerable to disruption, it takes more capability to overcome your safeguards, which trims down the number of folks who can do it.

What are the impediments to private industry accepting greater responsibility?

If there’s no agreed-upon standard, and there’s no enforcement, then it puts the companies who are doing the right thing at a competitive disadvantage over those who are not. And it doesn’t necessarily make the public a whole lot safer.

In the absence of being able to do it competently, the reflex is to not do it at all.

This Q&A was conducted and edited by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Tod Robberson. His email address is Steve Flynn’s email address is