Responding to Catastrophic Terrorism

Current approaches to conventional terrorism are too restrictive for the environment of catastrophe and must be supplemented by insights from disaster management and escalation theory. Although disaster management alone cannot address weaknesses in strategic planning, when complemented by the concept of escalation, the two become a useful aid to understanding events directly related to extremes of scale, complexity, or longevity. Responding to catastrophic terrorism will thus require security interests to be balanced by strategic focus, policy coherence, operational skills, and cultural values.