Feds warned a year ago that U.S. ill-prepared for attacks on ‘soft targets and crowded places’
Tragic start to 2025 prompts worries about a new era of terrorism foretold in a 2023 Rand Corp. report to the Homeland Security Department.
A year before twin New Year’s Day incidents in New Orleans and Las Vegas darkened the start of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security commissioned a study that warned America was facing a new era of terrorism and was ill-prepared to protect its citizens from that threat.
“Attacks on soft targets (STs) and crowded places (CPs) (ST-CPs) represent a significant challenge in the 2023 security environment,” Rand Corp’s Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center reported to the agency, urging a significant change in posture for a security apparatus that spent two decades hardening defenses against the sort of foreign-inspired and spectacular attacks that al-Qaeda pulled off on Sept. 11, 2001.
Rather than flying planes into hardened security targets of major institutions like the Pentagon or World Trade Center towers, a growing number of foreign-inspired or domestic-grown terrorists and mass shooters have deployed low level tactics – vehicles, improvised explosive devices and guns – on targets with less security but that still house large numbers of potential human victims, the report noted.
Drivers in Wisconsin in 2022 and Germany in 2024 plowed through Christmas Day gatherings with extreme lethal consequence. Shooters from Buffalo, N.Y.; to Charleston, S.C.; and Orlando, Fla.; to San Bernandino, Calif.; claimed numerous victims by focusing on stores, schools, and houses of worship with lower security postures. Plots to plant improvised explosive devices multiplied in the last decade too, a Just the News review of tens years of mass casualty incidents showed.
Meanwhile, such soft targets have been provided little training and security guidance, Rand warned.
“We found little specifically on how to secure open spaces and non-secured buildings that, almost by definition, do not have more-intensive security measures,” the report warned. “What little is present sometimes includes surveillance cameras and other sensors (for areas that have shot detection). The only reliable security measure present, however, is the bystanders themselves.”
You can read the full report here.
Rand’s report was as academic as it was prescient. On Wednesday, police said, an Army veteran apparently radicalized to support ISIS drove his vehicle bearing an ISIS flag into a crowded French Quarter in New Orleans, where scores were still celebrating New Year’s Eve, claiming 15 lives and injuring many more.
The driver, identified as 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar of Texas, also came armed with guns to shoot officers and had explosives both inside his car and planted in the neighborhood he targeted.
FBI officials said it was a terror attack, and they believed others, still uncaptured, assisted it.
Meanwhile, another driver pulled up to the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas a few hours later on Wednesday morning and detonated a rented Tesla Cybertruck filled with fireworks and explosive materials, killing one and injuring seven.
FBI officials said they were trying to determine if it was a terrorist attack and whether it was related to New Orleans. Both drivers, authorities said, rented from the same rental company, heightening concerns.
Whatever the final outcome, the incidents reaffirmed that soft targets remain soft and easily accessed, creating potential catastrophic opportunities for bad actors when they are crowded like a hotel and public celebration area were on the New Year’s holiday.
The vulnerabilities coupled with four years of an insecure border under President Joe Biden and liberal defund the police movements in big cities have created a perfect storm, one key lawmaker told Just the Newson Wednesday night.
"With the Democrats defund the police and open borders policy fiascos, it was always just a matter of time before America would experience these terrorist type of attacks,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and soon to be chairman of the Senate’s most powerful investigative body.
Johnson’s home state experienced the Christmas parade massacre carried out by a lone driver in 2022 in Waukesha, Wis., and he has warned for years that America has too many soft targets for bad actors to strike.
“President Trump has some major Democrat-created messes to clean up,” he added.
The question of local police capabilities has already surfaced in the New Orleans tragedy, where officials admitted security barriers known as bollards that were intended to protect pedestrians from vehicles had been temporarily removed and were to be replaced because they malfunctioned at times before the attacker drove through Bourbon Street shortly after 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“Bollards were not up because they are near completion, with the expectation of being completed before the Super Bowl,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell admitted Wednesday afternoon.
The lack of barriers and the ease the driver found in driving into the French Quarter is particularly alarming for experts given that the city was hosting a major college championship football game, the Sugar Bowl, on Wednesday and the NFL's Super Bowl a month later.
"There's obviously a lot of blame to go around for this terrorist attack in New Orleans,” former CIA analyst and National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz told Just the News. “Security barriers in the street that were put in place to prevent this type of attack were not activated. That is the fault of New Orleans police and officials. “
But Fleitz said the federal government and the Biden administration also deserved blame, focusing on issues like opening the borders to more illegal aliens, imposing ideologies like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on security agencies, and equating political dissent with terrorism.
“The Biden administration has admitted at least 250 of the known migrants were on the U.S terrorist list. I believe a much larger number of terrorists entered the country as illegal migrants across the southern border since 2021,” he said.
“We also have a Homeland Security Department and an FBI that has lumped radical Islamist terrorists, a non-politically correct term government employees are forbidden to use, with peaceful protesters such as parents who attend PTA meetings, pro life protesters, and the January 6 protesters.
Fleitz said he is "very concerned that Biden's mismanagement of our homeland security agencies has seriously undermined their ability to defend the American people against real domestic security threats like radical Islamist terrorism."
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who was briefed on the New Orleans tragedy, suggested Americans will be more alarmed when all the details are eventually made public.
“Here’s what I want to ask from the federal government: Catch these people and then tell the American people the truth,” Kennedy said. “Now, I don’t want you to tell us yet anything is going to interfere with the investigation. And there are things that I’ve been told that I think are true that I’m not sharing with you today because it could interfere with their investigation.”
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