Influencing Transnational Terrorist Organizations

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, government agencies and scholars have combined to generate a wide range of studies and literature describing individual factors believed to influence the transnational terrorist threat against the United States. Given the fiscal reality of limited resources, the United States cannot fully fund and implement a complete set of measures to counteract all the identified factors. The purpose of this study is to consolidate this array of factors; and more importantly, to suggest a framework for analyzing the interactions and relative importance of each factor to support resource allocation decisions. A comprehensive literature review identified 13 factors having potential influence. These factors were then analyzed using an Influence Net approach. Utilizing notional interaction and influence assessments, the suggested framework highlighted six of the factors with relatively greater potential to influence the terrorist threat. These six factors span the temporal spectrum from near-term impacts targeted against the existing terrorist threat to long-term strategies directed at influencing the "next generation" terrorist threat.