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 out from 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 branches, Iranian proxies mixing with contract criminals, narco-traffickers now designated as terrorist organizations, and a widening spectrum of domestic actors the FBI is sorting into new taxonomies. That’s not threat inflation—it’s the environment your cleared teams are operating in.
The drone problem is the most concrete example of how far behind the curve we’ve fallen. 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 U.S. military recorded three hundred fifty incursions at more than a hundred bases. We’ve watched drones reshape warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East for four years, yet bipartisan legislation to give DHS and Justice the authorities they need to counter the threat at home still hasn’t passed. If you’re hiring for critical infrastructure protection or base security, your candidates are walking into a gap between mission and authority that hasn’t closed.
What makes this harder is that the adversary set isn’t just larger—it’s structurally different. You’ve got ideologically motivated groups, state proxies, inspired lone actors, and what the FBI now calls nihilistic violent extremists. Iran has moved from deploying trained operatives to hiring Russian mobsters, cartel hit men, and Hells Angels for operations on U.S. soil. The skill level varies, but the intent doesn’t, and the 2026 conflict with Iran has added a new generation of recruits with fresh grievances. The strike that killed one hundred twenty students at a girls’ school in Minab is the kind of event that feeds extremist narratives for decades, whether the target was intended or not.
Social media has been the accelerant. The Islamic State recruited fifty-three thousand foreign fighters from eighty countries by understanding how digital-native generations consume content and by weaponizing emotion at scale. The peer-to-peer model, the algorithmic amplification, the speed—it’s a different recruitment environment than anything we faced before. AI is now sharpening that edge further: fabricated news anchors, deepfakes, hyper-targeted messaging that identifies subcultures and engages them with precision. Governments will use AI too, and probably more effectively over time, but right now the gap between capability and deployment is real.
The policy response has been tepid. 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 cyberterrorism only passing mentions and omits far-right threats entirely. That’s not a strategy—it’s a list with gaps. Funding for prevention programs has dried up, and the coalitions we built to counter extremist ideology online and in communities have been allowed to atrophy.
If you’re building a security program or leading one, you’re operating in an environment where the threat has diversified faster than the policy architecture has adapted. The people you’re hiring—whether they’re coming from DoD, the IC, or federal law enforcement—are walking into organizations that need them to think horizontally across threat streams that don’t fit neatly into the old boxes. The candidate who can map the drone threat, understand the ideological pull of extremist content on young recruits, and anticipate how AI changes both attack planning and defense is worth the search. That’s not a generalist—it’s someone who has lived in this problem set and knows where the seams are.
The preparedness gap isn’t going to close on its own. We’ve seen this before: terrorism drops down the priority list, attention drifts, and then something happens. The difference now is that the array of actors is wider, the technology is more accessible, and the ideological fuel is being produced in real time by conflicts that generate images and narratives faster than any countermessaging can move. If you’re responsible for security at a defense prime, a federal agency, or critical infrastructure, you’re not preparing for the last war—you’re preparing for the one that’s already being waged in ways we’re still learning to see.