The piece from CFR landed in my inbox this morning, and it’s worth your time if you’re running security operations, building programs, or placing the people who do. Twenty-five years past 9/11, the threat picture has fractured in ways that make the early 2000s look almost straightforward. We faced one adversary then. Today it’s al-Qaeda franchises, Islamic State networks, Iranian proxies mixing with contract criminals, narco-traffickers now designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and a widening spectrum of domestic actors the FBI calls nihilistic violent extremists. That’s not threat inflation—it’s the environment your teams are operating in.
The drone problem is the most concrete example of the preparedness gap. The FAA documented more than four hundred illegal drone flights over U.S. airports in the first quarter of 2025 alone, and DHS reported roughly one hundred fifty drones per day crossing the southern border during the first half of that year. The technology is cheap, accessible, and proven in Ukraine and the Middle East. Bipartisan counter-drone legislation that would give DHS and Justice the authorities they need has stalled. If you’re responsible for critical infrastructure or base security, you already know the detection and interdiction tools haven’t kept pace.
What makes this harder is that radicalization no longer requires a recruiter or a training camp. Social media algorithms weaponize emotion at scale, and the Islamic State demonstrated how effective peer-to-peer campaigns can be when it recruited fifty-three thousand foreign fighters from eighty countries. The generations born after 9/11 consume content differently, and hostile actors understand that. They’ve built narrative engines that turn geopolitical events—Abu Ghraib, Gaza, the 2026 Iran campaign—into recruitment fuel with long half-lives. The skills required to counter that are not the same ones that disrupted cells in Anbar Province.
Iran’s shift to contract violence is worth watching. The regime has moved from state-directed operations to hiring criminals, cartel enforcers, and gang members for attacks on U.S. soil. The tradecraft is sloppier, but the intent is serious, and the targeting includes former cabinet officials and a sitting president. The 2026 U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran—particularly strikes that destroyed heritage sites, civilian infrastructure, and a girls’ school in Minab that killed one hundred twenty students—will produce blowback. Anyone who thinks that war won’t generate new ideologically motivated actors hasn’t been paying attention to how terrorist narratives are built.
AI is entering the fight on both sides. Extremist groups are already using it to fabricate news content, sharpen targeting, and identify subcultures to exploit. Governments will have more computational power to predict and disrupt, but the gap between capability and deployment is real. If you’re hiring for threat analysis, red teaming, or program development roles, the candidates who understand how AI reshapes both attack surfaces and defensive postures are the ones who’ll add value in the next three years.
The policy environment has drifted. Counterterrorism was the seventh sub-bullet in the Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy and didn’t make the top eight in the Trump administration’s 2025 version. The most recent National Counterterrorism Strategy lists narcoterrorists, legacy Islamist groups, and left-wing extremists but gives state-sponsored terrorism and far-right violence only glancing treatment. That’s a mismatch with the threat picture, and it shows up in funding, authority, and leadership attention. The programs that worked—community resilience efforts, counter-narrative campaigns, coalition building—have been defunded or abandoned.
If you’re building a security organization or advising one, this is the moment to pressure-test assumptions. The adversaries are more diverse, the technology is more accessible, and the ideological fuel is plentiful. The talent you need isn’t just people with clearances and track records in traditional counterterrorism—though that remains the foundation. You also need operators who understand algorithmic influence, autonomous systems, and how to build defenses that adapt faster than the threat. Those people exist, but they’re not sitting on job boards.
The preparedness gap is real, and it’s widening. The organizations that close it will be the ones that take the current threat environment seriously, invest in the right capabilities, and put leaders in place who can see around corners. The others will be reactive. That’s always been the difference.