U.S. national security faces rising challenges from insider threats and organizational rigidity, a Stanford professor says.

Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote in a new study 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.

Insights and lessons learned

Zegart's study of insider and surprise attacks as well as academic research into the theory of organizations led her to some key insights about why the Army failed to prevent Hasan's attack when clues were clear:

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In the Fort Hood case, she said, bureaucratic procedures kept red flags about Hasan in different places, making them harder to detect.

• Career incentives and organizational cultures often backfire. As Zegart wrote, several researchers found that "misaligned incentives and cultures" played major roles in undermining safety before the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Zegart's earlier research on 9/11 found the same dynamic played a role in the FBI's manhunt for two 9/11 hijackers just 19 days before their attack. Because the FBI's culture prized convicting criminals after the fact rather than preventing disasters beforehand, the search for two would-be terrorists received the lowest priority and was handled by one of the least experienced agents in the New York office.

• Organizations matter more than most people think. Robust structures, processes and cultures that were effective in earlier periods for other tasks proved maladaptive after 9/11.

In the case of the Fort Hood attack, the evidence suggests that government investigations, which focused on individual errors and political correctness (disciplining or investigating a Muslim American in the military) identified only some of the root causes, missing key organizational failures.

Hasan slipped through the cracks not only because people made mistakes or were prone to political correctness, but also because defense organizations "worked in their usual ways," according to Zegart.

Adapting to a new threat

In terms of organizational weaknesses, Hasan's Fort Hood attack signaled a new challenge for the U.S. military: rethinking what "force protection" truly means, Zegart said. Before 9/11, force protection reflected a physical protection or hardening of potential targets from an outside attack. Now, force protection has evolved to mean that the threats could come from within the Defense Department and from Americans, she added.

"For half a century, the department's structure, systems, policies and culture had been oriented to think about protecting forces from the outside, not the inside," Zegart wrote.

In the case of Hasan, the Defense Department failed in three different ways to identify him as a threat: through the disciplinary system, the performance evaluation system and the counter-terrorism investigatory system run jointly with the FBI through Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

"Organizational factors played a significant role in explaining why the Pentagon could not stop Nidal Hasan in time. Despite 9/11 and a rising number of homegrown Jihadi terrorist attacks, the Defense Department struggled to adapt to insider terrorist threats," Zegart wrote.

Difficult to change

Another problem was that the Pentagon faced substantial manpower shortages in the medical corps – especially among psychiatrists. So the Defense Department responded to incentives and promoted Hasan, despite his increasingly poor performance and erratic behavior.

In addition, Zegart found the Defense Department official who investigated Hasan prior to the attack saw nothing amiss because he was the wrong person for the job – he was trained to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse, not counterterrorism, which is why he did not know how to look for signs of radicalization or counterintelligence risk.

"In sum, the Pentagon's force protection, discipline, promotion and counter-terrorism investigatory systems all missed this insider threat because they were designed for other purposes in earlier times, and deep-seated organizational incentives and cultures made it difficult for officials to change what they normally did," she wrote.

Zegart acknowledges the difficulties of learning lessons from tragedies like 9/11, the NASA space shuttle accidents and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting.

"People and organizations often remember what they should forget and forget what they should remember," she said, adding that policymakers tend to attribute failure to people and policies. While seemingly hidden at times, the organizational roots of disaster are much more important than many think, she added.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) honored two of the top students of the 2015 Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) at a Japan Day event at Stanford University on August 13, 2015. The two 2015 RSP Japan Day honorees were Meera Santhanam and Katie Goldstein.

Japan Day commenced with welcoming comments by Dr. Gary Mukai, SPICE Director, and opening remarks by Consul General Jun Yamada, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco. Praising Meera, Katie, and their fellow RSP students for their dedication to the study of Japan and U.S.–Japan relations, Consul General Yamada noted, “The U.S.–Japan relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world today. Without a doubt this is due to past generations’ tireless efforts to understand each other and build the kind of mutual trust that has made this relationship so durable and successful. To assure the future vitality of the U.S.–Japan relationship, it is therefore our joint responsibility to prepare the future generation for continuing this task. Through the Reischauer Scholars Program which has been instrumental in fostering future leaders who have acquired a deep and broad understanding of Japan, a solid foundation for this purpose has been established.” 

Mukai recognized Naomi Funahashi, RSP Manager and Instructor, for her tenth year of teaching the RSP. Funahashi has empowered over 250 Americans with not only subject matter content knowledge on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations but also tools of critical analysis and perspective taking. Reflecting on her ten years of teaching the RSP, Funahashi commented, “While advancements in distance-learning technology over the past ten years have eased the logistical challenges of the RSP, the students remain at the heart of why I continue to love teaching this course. I have the unique privilege of guiding some of the most talented high school students in the United States through an exploration and examination of Japan, and I am confident that many of them will comprise the leadership of future U.S.–Japan relations.”

Funahashi gave an overview of the RSP to the Japan Day audience of over 30 people, which included Professor Indra Levy, RSP advisory board member, and Maiko Tamagawa, Advisor for Educational Affairs, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco. Named in honor of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, a leading educator and noted scholar of Japanese history and culture, the RSP is an online course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered annually to 25–30 high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors across the United States.

Meera Santhanam (junior, The Nueva School, CA) and Katie Goldstein (senior, Crystal Springs Uplands High School, CA) were recognized for their coursework and exceptional research essays. They articulately presented their research that focused on women in the Japanese workforce and equity-related issues concerning LGBTQ people in Japan, respectively; and skillfully answered provocative questions from the audience. 

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Since 2003, the RSP has provided a creative and innovative approach to teaching high school students about Japan and U.S–Japan relations. The program provides American students with unique opportunities to interact with diplomats and top scholars affiliated with Stanford University, the University of Tokyo, the University of Hawaii, and other institutions through online lectures and discussions, and introduces both American and Japanese perspectives on many historical and contemporary issues.

The 2015 Japan Day honorees were reflective of the introduction of varied topics and perspectives in the RSP curriculum. When asked to comment on her RSP experience, Santhanam remarked, “With exposure to a wide array of perspectives and in-depth content alike, participating in this program is a decision I would make a thousand times over again. This rare, interdisciplinary opportunity allowed me to connect with my topic on not just an academic, but personal level as well.” Goldstein shared a similar sentiment, also noting the scholarly, yet congenial atmosphere of Japan Day: “The speakers—Dr. Gary Mukai, Naomi Funahashi, and Consul General Yamada—wonderfully set the formal yet fun tone of the academic event. The conversation, while centered around Japan, revolved around a myriad of topics: literature, current events, policies, you name a topic and it was talked about.”

For the first time in the history of the RSP, several RSP alumni introduced high school life in the United States to Japanese students enrolled in SPICE’s inaugural Stanford e-Japan course, which introduces U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations to Japanese high school students.

Stanford e-Japan students indicated early on in the course their desire to interact with students from the United States, and as a result, Waka Takahashi Brown, Stanford e-Japan Manager and Instructor, invited RSP alumni to comment on the discussion boards and guest speak at the virtual classroom on “U.S. High Schools and Education” on August 14, 2015. Brown noted, “The response from both the e-Japan students and Reischauer Scholars has been overwhelmingly positive. Not only have students been more engaged in the discussion boards, but the Stanford e-Japan students also seemed very eager to know what about Japan interested the U.S. students to participate in the Reischauer Scholars Program. I would not be surprised if the RSP and e-Japan students strike up a friendship from these initial brief exchanges.”

The distinguished RSP advisory committee members are Consul General Jun Yamada; Professor Emeritus Nisuke Ando, Doshisha University and Kyoto University; Ambassador Michael Armacost, Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University; Professor Indra Levy, Stanford University; Professor Phillip Lipscy, Stanford University; and Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto, Stanford University.

SPICE has received numerous grants in support of the RSP from the United States-Japan Foundation, the Center for Global Partnership (The Japan Foundation), and the Japan Fund, which is administered by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

The RSP will be accepting applications for the 2016 program in September and October 2015. For more information about the RSP, visit www.reischauerscholars.org or contact Naomi Funahashi.