U.S. national security faces rising challenges from insider threats and organizational rigidity, said political scientist Amy Zegart.
Zegart wrote that in the past five years, seemingly trustworthy U.S. military and intelligence insiders have been responsible for a number of national security incidents, including the WikiLeaks publications and the 2009 attack at Fort Hood in Texas that killed 13 and injured more than 30.
She defines “insider threats” as people who use their authorized access to do harm to the security of the United States. They could range from mentally ill people to “coldly calculating officials” who betray critical national security secrets.
In her research, which relies upon declassified investigations by the U.S. military, FBI, and Congress, Zegart analyzes the Fort Hood attack and one facet of the insider threat universe—Islamist terrorists.
In this case, a self-radicalized Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan 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 mass murder at a military site in American history, she added.
Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, reported the findings in the US Army War College Quarterly Parameters.
