Tragic start to 2025 prompts worries about a new era of terrorism foretold in a 2023 Rand Corp. report to the Homeland Security Department.
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A year before twin New Year’s Day incidents in New Orleans and Las Vegas darkened the start of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security commissioned a study that warned America was facing a new era of terrorism and was ill-prepared to protect its citizens from that threat.
“Attacks on soft targets (STs) and crowded places (CPs) (ST-CPs) represent a significant challenge in the 2023 security environment,” Rand Corp’s Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center reported to the agency, urging a significant change in posture for a security apparatus that spent two decades hardening defenses against the sort of foreign-inspired and spectacular attacks that al-Qaeda pulled off on Sept. 11, 2001.
