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insider Threats and organizational root causes the 2009 fort hood terrorist attack

Abstract: This essay examines the 2009 Fort Hood terrorist attack with two goals in mind: illuminating the organizational weaknesses inside the Defense Department which led officials to miss the insider terrorist Threat; and contributing to a growing body of theoretical research examining the connection between underlying organizational weaknesses and disasters. ********** Insider Threats to American national security pose a potent and growing danger. In the past five years, trusted US military and intelligence insiders have been responsible for the Wikileaks publication of thousands of classified reports, the worst intelligence breach in National Security Agency history, the deaths of a dozen Navy civilians and contractors at the Washington Navy Yard, and two attacks at Fort Hood that together killed sixteen people and injured more than fifty. Defined as those who use "authorized access, wittingly or unwittingly, to do harm to the security of the United States," insider Threats encompass an array of adversaries--ranging from mentally ill individuals who commit uncontrolled violence, to coldly calculating officials who betray vital national security secrets. (1) This essay analyzes a case study of one important subset of the insider Threat Universe--Islamist terrorists --and highlights the often overlooked organizational weaknesses that prevent the US government from detecting them. Specifically, it examines the underlying organizational shortcomings that kept the Defense Department (DOD) from detecting and collecting red flags before the 2009 Fort Hood attack, when a self-radicalized Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan walked into the deployment center and fired 200 rounds, killing thirteen Defense Department employees. (2) Hasan's shooting spree remains the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 and the worst mass murder at a military installation in American history. Hasan may be the best-known example of an Islamist terrorist insider but he is not the only one. (3) Importantly, Hasan's Fort Hood attack is also a case that is empirically rich for process tracing, thanks to declassified investigations by the DOD, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). (4) While these investigations provide valuable new information about what happened, they still offer an incomplete understanding of why. To date, the 2009 Fort Hood attack has been attributed mostly to leadership failures, poor policy guidance, and political correctness regarding disciplining or investigating a Muslim-American in the military. (5) These are important parts of the story, but they are not the only important parts. Key organizational factors--structures, career incentives, and cultures inside the Pentagon--also played an essential and overlooked role. Better understanding of these silent and powerful organizational dimensions provides a fuller picture of what went wrong and the lessons to be learned. Section one reviews a growing body of research in organizational theory and its insights for the Fort Hood case. Section two provides a narrative of Hasan's radicalization and attack drawing from recently declassified primary sources. Section three turns to the Pentagon, examining key failures and their organizational causes. Section four offers concluding thoughts about what can be gleaned from this case and why it matters. Organization Theory and Disasters Research examining the connection between organizational pathologies and disasters is wide-ranging but offers four key insights for understanding why the Army failed to prevent Hasan's 2009 attack. The first is surprise attacks are almost never really surprises. Instead, decentralized structures are prone to scattering signals of impending attack rather than aggregating and amplifying them. Wohlstetter's classic examination of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor found that separate intelligence units in the War, Navy, and State departments operated largely independently, without a central coordinating mechanism. …