Commentary | The National Counterterrorism Center Must Expand to Better Fight Domestic Terrorists – By Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware (Defense One) / May 26, 2023
Broadening the NCTC’s mission to include homegrown terrorism will require bold executive leadership and congressional action.
Twenty years ago this month, a new counterterrorism intelligence center was established to protect Americans from foreign terrorists, with powers and legal authorities to suit. But the threat has changed, and Congress must now reconfigure the National Counterterrorism Center to centralize and analyze information pertaining to domestic terrorists as well.
While the NCTC—launched in 2004 as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center—was formed to deal with an existing terrorist organization (al Qaeda) championed by an identifiable leader (Osama bin Laden), today’s threat is as much domestic as it also remains foreign; and comes not from an organization but from a leaderless, digitally connected network of likeminded racists, hatemongers, misogynists, and xenophobes spurred to violence by self-perpetuating online echo chambers peddling malignant, exclusionist ideologies and conspiracy theories. A far less pronounced, but nonetheless concerning, development is the accompanying danger of violent extremism from the far-left, which produced the 2017 attack on Republican congressmen and others training for the annual bipartisan charity baseball game, and may be rising in a post-Dobbs world.
Recent administrations have noted the changing threat. The Trump administration’s 2018 National Counterterrorism Strategy was the first to warn about domestic far-right and far-left extremists and issue-specific militants. The Biden administration then laid out a plan to meet the threats in 2021’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, an ambitious document that calls for more data, information-sharing, and efforts to combat root causes behind radicalization and violence.
