Red, gray, and blue: A security environment approach to national security policy countering emerging threats targeting critical infrastructure

Novel aspects of the security environment make necessary a radical change in the paradigm employed by the US national security elite in formulating national security policies. All policy is grounded on theory, and theory is predicated by its paradigm. Failure by policymakers to grasp that a Kuhnian gestalt switch is required to correctly perceive the new security environment has allowed the continued influence of an obsolete paradigm that sees the world political system as an international system of states qua major actors, with interests defined in terms of geographical regions. This paradigm does not adequately explain unique components of the altered world political system. Consequently, national security policies founded on this paradigm do not adequately address the most dangerous threats to the United States emerging in the current security environment---non-state actors employing Weapons of Mass Effects (WME). Several factors enable non-state actors to challenge sovereign states, and especially the United States, with unprecedented levels of violence. These factors include rampant proliferation of WME and related materials and equipment in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's demise, the diffusion of knowledge and technologies that arm non-state actors with a level of sophistication and expertise in research and development formerly the exclusive province of great power states, the freeing of non-state actors' political agendas from the Cold War's bipolar constraints, the expansion of an open Internet and broader communications architecture that provides instant access to information and secure, global communications, and the emergence of a US strategic vulnerability in its absolute reliance on a highly-automated, tightly-interdependent and fragile system of infrastructures. This study argues that a radical transformation in national security policy is needed to counter emerging threats targeting US critical infrastructures and population. This transformation cannot effectively proceed until the old paradigm is rejected. To that end, this dissertation presents a paradigmatic framework that describes a security environment approach and details seven models of possible state versus non-state conflict. The study also defines a comprehensive typology of threats by identities, means, modus operandi, targeting preferences, and ends, and develops decision trees that typify the order of action, time sequencing, and interactions during a non-state actor's WME attack of a state's critical infrastructures or population.