James Joyner: Throughout the book, you point out how easy it would be for relatively small groups with minimal funding to create power blackouts, disrupt our oil distribution networks, or even stage 9/11-style attacks on a routine basis. Why do you suppose that hasn’t already happened? For that matter, we are surely more vulnerable than Jerusalem or Baghdad to suicide bombers, yet we have yet to see such attacks in our cities. Why?
John Robb: To understand this, you need to understand that classic symbolic terrorism is plagued by diminishing returns. The more you use it, the less of an effect it has. So, in order to match or exceed previous impacts, you need to increase the scale or breadth of the attack. The problem for al Qaeda is that 9/11 was so big that it made exceeding it very difficult in a post 9/11 security environment. Anything less would have damaged their brand. Further, al Qaeda suffered serious blows during the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s taken them years to reconstitute the ability to launch attacks.
