Counsel On Foreign Relation
This isn't terrorism related...but how to severely disrupt the nuclear industry and NRC's self interested groupthink. To go at dangerous groupthink like a terrorist would. This below article explains how to do it?
"“When you hear ‘best practices,’ run for your lives,” says retired Army Col. Gregory Fontenot, director of the “Red Team University” at Fort Leavenworth, Kan."
There is a big NRC and nuclear industry disruption story here over Indian's Point's flooding analysis. It is much like Arkansas Nuclear One's flooding barriers violations and it is a worst story than them. It is the NRC and Indian Point maliciously conspiring to violate the flooding regulations. It is a Walmart size cover-up. You can use a host of discombobulated engineering rationalizations to disable flooding protections because its just too expensive to back fit into a defectively designed mid 1970's era plant. You got a lot of crazy talk right in the documents?
You Tube: 'Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy'
If I was Entergy and the NRC, I would immediately shutdown Indian Point in order to protect the rest of the industry from the future blow back with the severe enforcement of safety flooding protection regulation. Maybe it is already too late. There is a nasty story to be told through what is in your documents. Just think about how this is going to look with all the vetting by Entergy and the NRC through relicensing. Nobody had the guts to pick up and clear the flooding violations? To make your flooding analysis and plans as pure are a virgin?
"Zenko interviews more than 200 experienced red-teamers, including white-hat hackers, senior corporate executives, former CIA directors and retired four-star generals, to assess the prospects for this small industry. Turns out, they’re an odd bunch. “Red teamers are weird,” Zenko writes. “They tend to be loners, mavericks, and arrogant, which is exactly why they think and act differently — the most vital skill of a red teamer.”"
No question about it, I am a highly qualified "red team" person...
How to anticipate unthinkable
terrorist attacks? Hire oddballs to think of them.
D TEAM: How to Succeed by
Thinking Like the Enemy
By Micah Zenko
Basic Books. 298 pp. $26.99
The terrorists come to shore at
the South Street Seaport and scatter throughout Manhattan on foot and in cabs.
They detonate bombs and shoot civilians in Grand Central Terminal; they take
hostages at Macy’s in Herald Square. Too late, authorities realize that the
hostage-taking is a diversion allowing co-conspirators to massacre people in
luxury hotels dozens of blocks away. The New York Police Department, outwitted
and overmatched, quickly runs out of personnel to deploy.
The events are fictional, but the
failure was real enough, as
Micah
Zenko recounts in his grimly well-timed book,
“Red
Team.” It was a result of a simulation the NYPD carried out in 2008, a week
after 10 members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group struck Mumbai in a
horrific assault that hit luxury hotels, a train station, a Jewish community
center, a cafe and other spots, using bombs and AK-47s to kill about 170
people. “It was considered such a potentially catastrophic scenario that
additional exercises modeled on Mumbai were conducted in the following two years,”
Zenko writes.
It’s not entirely fair to read a
book four years in the making in light of events that happen to occur at the
time of its publication. But it’s certainly tempting. The coordinated Islamic
State attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 129 people, have not just
unleashed a transnational manhunt and the start of a
“pitiless”
war, in the words of French President François Hollande. They’ve also
produced second-guessing about strategy and intelligence, as well as worries
that soft targets around the world — including
in
Washington — could suffer similar tragedies.
So, how to anticipate the
unthinkable? Well, you could hire people to think of it. Zenko, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, lays out the uneven history and potential
of “red teams” — small, expert groups of outsiders enlisted to find vulnerabilities,
shake up preconceived notions and imagine the unimaginable, all in an effort to
improve security and thinking throughout the military, intelligence and
corporate worlds.
The tale begins centuries ago,
when the Vatican established the “devil’s advocate” to argue against proposed
canonizations; ranges to the Cold War, when the Rand Corp. and the Pentagon
assigned red teams to anticipate Soviet strategies and negotiating tactics; and
expands in the post 9/11-era, when the CIA created its Red Cell team to “tell
me things others don’t,” in the words of then-CIA Director George Tenet.
Zenko interviews more than 200
experienced red-teamers, including white-hat hackers, senior corporate
executives, former CIA directors and retired four-star generals, to assess the
prospects for this small industry. Turns out, they’re an odd bunch. “Red
teamers are weird,” Zenko writes. “They tend to be loners, mavericks, and
arrogant, which is exactly why they think and act differently — the most vital
skill of a red teamer.” They need a deep cultural understanding of the
institutions they’re assisting, yet should remain independent of them. They
must be talented writers and briefers, be skeptical of authority, have held
multiple jobs in their fields, and be intimately familiar with “large systemic
failures, which helps them envision future failures.”
Indeed, Zenko’s most compelling
stories are of failures, cases when red teams were not used or when their
efforts were ignored, misused or precooked. He cites the after-action report on
Operation Eagle Claw — President Jimmy Carter’s aborted rescue attempt for the
American hostages in Iran — which found that Pentagon planners had “reviewed
and critiqued their own product for feasibility and soundness as they went
along.” (This underscores a key rationale for red-teaming: “You cannot grade
your own homework,” Zenko reiterates.) After the 9/11 attacks, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission “was found to be conducting fraudulent testing of
simulated terrorist attacks” against commercial nuclear plants, Zenko writes,
including by giving a year’s advance notice so sites could beef up security.
And in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services hired McKinsey &
Co. to “pressure-test” the Affordable Care Act’s federal marketplace, only to
disregard warnings of likely glitches in the HealthCare.gov site. (Ask Kathleen
Sebelius what happened next.)
Zenko also highlights a 2002 war
game that formed part of the Millennium Challenge, a congressionally mandated
exercise aimed at exploring the military’s operational readiness for near-term
conflicts. Widely considered to resemble the operational plan to disarm and
depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Zenko writes, the effort was also meant to
showcase the high-tech military transformation that Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld championed. However, the red-team leader, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul
Van Riper, a skeptic of those efforts, quickly overwhelmed the simulated U.S.
fleet with a barrage of missiles and speedboat suicide attacks. “The whole
thing was over in five, maybe ten minutes,” he said.
Except it wasn’t. Restrictions
were placed on the red team’s subsequent actions — such as forcing it to
position its air defenses in the open so the blue team could easily destroy
them — that compromised the exercise. Van Riper sent a blistering e-mail to
several military colleagues that was promptly leaked. (“Fixed war games?
General says Millennium Challenge ’02 was ‘scripted,’ ” read the Army Times
headline.) The problem, Zenko writes, is that both the red team and the
military leadership had preconceived objectives going in, undercutting the
exercise.
The author highlights successes
as well, notably the red-teaming of the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011 — both of
the underlying intelligence and the logistics of the SEAL mission itself.
Various analysts placed the probability of the al-Qaeda leader hiding out in
the compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, at 75 percent, 60 percent and even 40
percent, leaving the president to conclude that he basically had a coin-toss
decision. “We were at 0 percent for a decade,” counterterrorism official Andrew
Liepman explains, “so going from 0 to 50 percent meant a lot to everyone.” And
the red-teaming of the raid prepared the SEALs for multiple eventualities,
including, as transpired, the malfunction of one of their helicopters.
Zenko outlines best practices for
red teams, even though, he admits, that very notion is anathema to red teamers,
who mistrust rules or guidelines. “When you hear ‘best practices,’ run for your
lives,” says retired Army Col. Gregory Fontenot, director of the “Red Team
University” at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where officers receive training in how to
think critically, avoid groupthink and improve cultural empathy. Perhaps most
essential to red-team effectiveness is that the boss of the organization
undergoing the red-team effort must buy in to the idea, otherwise the team will
be marginalized and underfunded, its findings ignored.
Though sympathetic to his
subject, Zenko is careful not to oversell. There can be a faux sex appeal to
red teams. He notes that the CIA’s Red Cell team has cultivated “an air of
mystery,” in part because of the eye-catching titles of its internal memos —
“The View from Usama’s Cave,” for example — which it deliberately contrasts
with the more staid reports of the intelligence community. Zenko says that in
2012, the team’s members even met with Foreign Policy magazine staffers for
headline tips. “They wanted to know how our stuff went viral,” recalls Blake
Hounshell, then the magazine’s managing editor. “The techniques that we
considered to be ‘click bait’ were what they were most interested in.” Not the
most encouraging use of tax dollars.
So, could red-teaming somehow
have prevented the Paris attacks? Zenko explains that the NYPD’s Mumbai-style
simulation yielded specific improvements in preparedness, so there is hope. But
anticipating all potential acts of terrorism is an impossible task, no matter
how imaginative a team might be, especially when multiple institutions —
spanning local and national authorities, military and intelligence agencies,
and even cultural and sports organizations — must get involved. Still, Zenko offers
a compelling argument for forcing ourselves to think differently, which is
ultimately the main purpose of a red team. Even if we won’t know exactly what
to expect, we might be better equipped to respond when the unexpected strikes.
