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INTRODUCTION
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, it is natural to engage in self-reflection-and even self-criticism-of the way we as a nation responded to the events of that horrible day in 2001, and in subsequent years as the terrorist threat evolved and took on new and different forms. In one sense, there is much on which to look with satisfaction and even pride. After all, the incontrovertible bottom line of our collective effort across three presidential administrations has been the avoidance of additional catastrophic attacks on the homeland. If you look closely at the way in which our senior intelligence officials describe the homeland threat environment, there is a range of terrorism-related concerns we confront as a nation, but the threat of mass casualty attack orchestrated by a foreign terrorist organization like al Qaeda has diminished significantly.1
At the same time, it is difficult to look back on those twenty years of focused national effort, with the massive application of resources and an extraordinarily high human cost, and conclude that we have solved or significantly mitigated the problem of terrorism and violent extremism. As former UK government official Suzanne Raine recently argued, "[t]he uncomfortable truth is that there have been no real changes to the underlying conditions that gave rise to the new wave of Islamist terrorism which started in the 1990s."2 If anything, the threat we face today is more diverse and more complex, particularly given the increase in volume and intensity of the domestic terrorism threat here in the United States. And while our capacity to play effective offense and defense against that threat is significantly enhanced compared to where we stood at the time of 9/11, terrorist groups and other violent extremists also enjoy significant advantages that have emerged over that time.
Thus, while terrorism concerns may no longer sit alone atop our hierarchy of national security concerns as they did in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the effort to keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks at home and abroad promises to consume a significant portion of our national wealth-and policymaker bandwidth-for the indefinite future. Metaphorically speaking, we are on a terrorism treadmill, with the speed ramping up or down from time to time...