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A serious-looking professional man in government security sits in front of a computer in a darkened room with multiple computer screens. Every nation faces threats. These threats can be social, such as aggression from a neighboring land, infiltration from a terrorist group or global economic trends that compromise the nation's welfare. In other cases, threats tin can be natural, such as hurricanes or viral pandemics. Any threat challenges a nation'south power and disrupts its well-being.

The field of national security safeguards against such threats. National security protects non simply citizens simply also the economic stability of national institutions. In the U.S., national defense has been a guiding principle of the government at least since 1947, when so-President Harry Due south. Truman signed into police the National Security Act. Amid other things, this legislation created the secretary of defense chiffonier position, nether whose leadership all branches of the military operated.

Crucially, national security and global security aren't the same matter. National security involves a national authorities working autonomously to protect its citizens from threats. Global security involves a coalition of nations working together to ensure that each of them may enjoy peace and stability; this is a guiding principle of organizations like the United Nations.

Ane of the core responsibilities of national security is identifying potential dangers and readying the right response. This article volition highlight five of the near consequential national security threats and provide insight into how governments respond to them.

What Is a National Security Threat?

Anything that threatens the physical well-being of the population or jeopardizes the stability of a nation's economic system or institutions is considered a national security threat. National security threats can exist further broken down into groups.

Hostile Governments

Some national security threats come from foreign governments with hostile intentions. These threats may include straight acts of state of war and aggression. but they can also exist subtler and harder to detect. Examples include espionage and election interference.

Terrorism

Countries also face up threats from groups who don't formally represent a strange authorities but may exist sponsored or tolerated past foreign powers. Terrorist groups may seek to cause chaos and disruption through physical violence or, in some cases, cybercrime.

Proliferation

An enemy state doesn't have to accept straight ambitious activeness for it to annals equally a potential threat to national security. The idea of proliferation, specifically with regard to avant-garde weaponry, may also be taken into account. If a hostile state is known to exist stockpiling chemical weapons, developing nuclear capabilities or otherwise escalating its capacity for devastation, it qualifies as a national security threat, even without using those weapons in a straight set on.

Cybercrime

Online criminals pose a danger to national security, including those not associated with hostile governments or terrorist groups. Cybercriminals may hack economical institutions, regime websites or power infrastructures equally a way of stealing or extorting money. They may also commit cybercrimes to accelerate an ideological agenda.

Natural Disasters and Diseases

Non all threats to national security involve the malignant influence of bad actors. Hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters can pose serious damage to a nation's people and concrete infrastructure. Pandemics similar COVID-19 weaken wellness care systems and economies.

1. Pandemic Threats

For a recent example of a national security threat, look no farther than the COVID-19 pandemic. While pandemics can unfold on a global scale, different countries face them in different ways, often to varying levels of success.

This still-unfolding global health crisis demonstrates how widespread affliction endangers not just the physical wellness of citizens but also socioeconomic structures. Meanwhile, global responses to COVID-xix have highlighted how governments can protect confronting such crises.

How Disease Disrupts

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nigh every country in the world. In addition to causing alarming and tragic death tolls, the virus has shown the widespread social and economic havoc that a pandemic tin yield.

The highly infectious nature of the disease has forced many businesses to close their doors, either temporarily or permanently. This has resulted in significant revenue losses.
As businesses accept closed or limited their services, it's resulted in layoffs and reduced work hours. In the U.S. alone, COVID-19 has sent the joblessness rate from nether 4% to over 10%.
The effects of the pandemic have impacted different industries at asymmetric levels, with some industries hitting especially hard. Examples include the travel and hospitality industries.
The cumulative touch on of lost revenues and ascent unemployment has put many nations on the brink of recession and resulted in turbulent stock market activity that has impacted many U.S. investors.

Protecting Against Illness

COVID-xix is a reminder that the threat of a global pandemic is ever-present. It's a call for national governments to be prepared. Governments accept a number of means to safeguard their denizens from diseases and viral threats.

Connecting Laboratories

Past connecting enquiry laboratories, governments tin can create an infrastructure for easy, collaborative work toward vaccines and other treatments.

Authorities Advice

Authorities communication can also play an important office; for example, through articulate advice about the importance of hand-washing, social distancing and mask-wearing, governments tin educate citizens on how to keep themselves safe.

Economic Intervention

Governments may too offer intervention in the economy, whether through widespread payments to citizens or with a more than targeted stimulus to industries hit hardest by shutdowns.

Emergency Management

Emergency management systems may exist put into place, ensuring that governments have all the right tools to decisively communicate with citizens in the effect of an emergency.

2. Biological Warfare

Some diseases occur naturally and not through whatever deed of malignancy or hostility. However, history also provides many examples of biological weapons being harnessed to cause widespread terror. Biological warfare poses a significant threat to national security, yet governments can put into place important safeguards to minimize this risk.

Botulinum Toxin

Botulinum toxin, classified by scientists as a neurotoxic protein, has a number of commercial uses, both in food processing and in the manufacturing of corrective products. However, when weaponized and deployed, it can cause significant wellness effects, including the disease botulism.

The use of botulinum toxin as a weapon originated in World War 2. Since then, it's been widely classified as a potential agent of biological warfare. In the 1990s, a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, deployed this toxin on the streets of Tokyo, causing panic but thankfully resulting in no fatalities.

Anthrax

Another potential agent of biological warfare is anthrax. Anthrax is a highly infectious, potentially lethal disease that'southward caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. This naturally occurring bacterium has been around for centuries, but was starting time harnessed and weaponized in Globe War I. During Globe War II, the U.Southward., Great Britain and Japan all experimented with anthrax as a weapon.

In the modern era, anthrax is a common agent of biological warfare. This is because the leaner is easily found in nature or synthesized in a laboratory and because it tin can exist released quickly and securely.

The U.Due south. Centers for Disease Command and Prevention notes that anthrax has been weaponized in the past. "In 2001, powdered anthrax spores were deliberately put into letters that were mailed through the U.S. postal organisation," the agency reports. "20-2 people, including 12 mail handlers, got anthrax, and 5 of these 22 people died."

Protecting Confronting Biological Warfare

These are just two bioterror threats nations face. Crucially, governments can prepare for such attacks with approaches similar the following:

Governments can train public health workers on how to deploy rapid responses.
Governments can directly funding to help public health departments stockpile medications and treatments.
Laws can regulate the possession and transfer of hazardous ingredients that may be used to create biological weapons.
Laboratories can be kept at the ready, prepared to acquit testing at the first sign of biological warfare.

3. Cyberterrorism

Cyberterrorism provides another national security threat. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a global think tank, reports dozens of incidents of cyberterrorism in 2020 lonely. In India, a grouping of homo rights activists was targeted by terrorists who infected their computers with malware. Suspected North Korean hackers compromised 2 prominent European defense firms, sending them faux task offers equally a way to infiltrate their systems and recollect classified data. These are simply two of the countless examples of criminals using hacking and other nefarious digital schemes to cause disruption and chaos.

Types of Cyberterrorism

Experts place cyberterrorist attacks into three distinct categories: simple-unstructured, advanced-structured and complex-coordinated.

Elementary-unstructured assault. A terrorist deploys bones hacking tools against a single target; ordinarily, the tools used were fabricated by someone else.
Advanced-structured attack. A terrorist conducts a more than sophisticated and targeted assail against multiple targets.
Circuitous-coordinated attack. A terrorist employs highly advanced hacking tools to cause mass disruption, targeting an entire business, state or nation.

Threat of Cyberterrorism

Cyberterrorist activity poses a threat to national security for a number of reasons:

Because banking and financial systems are increasingly digitized and connected to the internet, many cybersecurity experts fear that hackers could cause widespread economic instability, potentially causing a recession or depression.
In that location are also fears that illicitly acquired information could be publicized. In other words, hackers could breach authorities agencies as well as the privacy of citizens.
Still another fear regarding cyberterrorism is that by hacking into power or utility infrastructures, terrorists could cause chaos throughout major metropolitan areas.

Cyberthreats are alarming considering they tin be deployed remotely, anonymously and cheaply.

Protecting Confronting Cyberterrorism

Governments may take multiple precautions against cyberterrorist action. In the U.S., for example, the Department of Defence monitors U.South. interests in cyberspace and maintains a list of those who've been assessed every bit potential threats. Onetime President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing U.S officials to impose sanctions on those suspected of participation in cyberterrorism against the country.

Additionally, governments may provide guidance to businesses and local municipalities, equipping them with best practices for enforcing strong encryption and cybersecurity measures.

4. Climate Change and National Security

Climate change may too be considered a national security threat as its long-term effects may bring disastrous ecological consequences. However, because this is a threat that all nations face, and because much of the piece of work done to fight climate modify is done through international coalitions, climatic change is more than oft regarded as a global security issue.

Touch of Climate Change

Climate change adversely impacts national economies in many means. Some examples include the following:

Rise body of water levels event in flooding, which does significant harm to real estate and infrastructure in littoral areas.
Droughts and irregular rain patterns have both been linked to climatic change and could crusade disruption to agronomical practices and supply bondage.
Climatic change may also upshot in extreme storms and natural disasters, which crusade widespread holding damage and merits homo lives.

Specific Threats to the U.s.

Climatic change is a threat facing the entire world; at the same fourth dimension, some of its implications have a unique bear upon on the U.S.

For example, a Pentagon report noted that climate change threatens the stability of a number of mission-disquisitional U.S. military bases. The report focused on 79 military installations across the globe and establish that 53 of them currently face peril due to flooding; 43, due to drought; and 36, due to wildfires.

Combating Climate change

Climate change presents serious risks. Governments can accept meaningful steps to protect national security interests against climatic change and its ravages.

Governments can ready local emissions goals, reducing the prevalence of air pollution.
Governments can encourage the employ of electric or hybrid vehicles, such as through revenue enhancement incentives.
Governments can invest in public ship infrastructures, reducing the need for cars on the road.
Authorities science agencies can raise public awareness virtually the threat of climatic change and about the deportment individuals tin can take to minimize this threat.
Governments can incentivize carbon farming and other ecologically neutral practices.
Governments can too impose penalties on businesses that don't meet environmental standards.

v. Transnational Crimes

An important additional national security threat is a transnational offense. The FBI defines transnational criminal offense groups every bit groups that seek their own ability, influence, or financial gains through illegal activity, regardless of physical geography.

Examples of Transnational Crime

Transnational offense groups work across geographic boundaries and violate the laws of multiple nations; because of this, they pose a threat to many countries at the same time. Stopping this action may require split national security agencies to work together — a challenging task given questions of jurisdiction as well equally friction points between nations.

Transnational crime may take a number of forms, including the following:

The procurement of illegal goods, including drug trafficking
Illicit services, such every bit human trafficking
Business infiltration and racketeering

Precautions Confronting Transnational Crime

Different countries reply to transnational crime in different means. In the U.Due south, the FBI has a transnational criminal offence program devoted to eliminating any criminal activeness that poses a threat to U.S. interests.

Specifically, the FBI uses laws such as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which provides them with legal avenues to disrupt and dismantle entire criminal enterprises, rather than targeting private criminal actors ane at a time.

Co-ordinate to the FBI, the agency uses "a multifaceted arroyo" to locate transnational crime groups and to disable their infrastructures for criminal activity.

Keeping the Country and Its People Safe

Wide-ranging threats imperil every nation. It's vital for governments to put national security and emergency response efforts in identify, allowing them to identify and thwart any natural or man-made disruptions to peace, safety and stability.

If you're passionate about these goals, and if you desire to pursue a career keeping nations safe, you tin can begin by finding out more nigh opportunities to set up yourself. Enrollment in an academic program devoted to national security and emergency response tin can help you develop the skills required for success in this field. Larn more nigh Eastern Kentucky University'south Master of Science in Condom, Security and Emergency Management.