The threat of violent non-state actors acquiring and using highly sophisticated technologies has been a persistent theme in successive U.S. national security strategies.
While violent non-state actors have not successfully acquired and employed weapons of mass destruction outside of a few select cases, they still maintain an interest in these weapons and in the possibility of engaging in high-consequence but low-probability attacks.
Although the long-prophesied violent non-state actors’ high-technology or WMD threat has not borne out to the extent many predicted, terrorists, insurgents, and militias have nonetheless taken advantage of commercially available technologies to engage in more mundane but still destructive attacks.
Violent non-state actor adoption of common technological tools has been corrosive to U.S. national security interests by abetting routine VNSA planning and operations and allowing these groups to adapt to changes in their operational environment.Violent non-state actors (VNSAs), especially terrorist organizations, have merited mention and concern in every U.S. national security strategy since the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 and the release of the first U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. A persistent concern expressed in successive post-Cold War and post-9/11 U.S. national security strategies was the potential acquisition and use of advanced technologies (to include weapons of mass destruction) by non-state actors in ways inimical to U.S. security interests generally and that undercut traditional U.S. military advantages specifically.
The United States has been correct to be concerned about the catastrophic consequences that would likely result from VNSAs of any type acquiring WMDs or other advanced military technologies. But what has been perhaps more corrosive to U.S. national security over the 25 years since 9/11 has been VNSAs’ prolific adoption, acquisition, and use of more common and less sophisticated technologies to not only cause death and destruction globally—in the form of often crude but coordinated armed attacks and bombings—but also to evolve, adapt (passively and actively), and maintain themselves as going concerns. This is evidenced in part by the expansion of the types of challenges and threats posed by VNSAs to U.S. national security over time, as reflected in the activities and behaviors of various VNSAs as they have adapted their operations and tactics to take advantage of technological change on an apparently perpetual basis.
Several examples from successive U.S. national security strategies illustrate how VNSAs have used readily available technologies to threaten U.S. national security. The 2006 NSS identified disruptive challenges that the United States was likely to face from VNSAs engaging in malign cyber operations. Threats to the security of cyberspace from terrorist networks, criminal hackers, and organized criminal groups—as well as threats posed by the abuse of financial systems that rely on cyberspace for their functioning—were also identified as challenges in the 2010 and 2015 NSSs. Terrorist organizations, drug traffickers, and criminal cartels appeared in the2017 NSS and were noted for their ability to adapt quickly and outpace U.S. defenses, while Jihadist terrorist groups were called out for using sophisticated technological tools to engage in information campaigns and recruitment and to encourage attacks on the United States and its allies.
Cybercriminals were also highlighted in the 2017 NSS for their ability to exploit online marketplaces and cryptocurrencies in their conduct of illicit activities, while cyberspace itself was noted for how it offered various adversaries the ability to disrupt American political, economic, and security interests and damage the infrastructure, networks, tools, and devices used by American citizens to conduct business and communicate with one another. The 2022 NSS addressed the threat posed by cybercrime and the illicit use of cryptocurrency, while the 2025 U.S. NSS emphasized the risks to the U.S. homeland posed by narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations, each of which has leveraged various technological tools to advance its interests.
VNSAs have creatively employed technology not only to adapt how they conduct operations but also to adapt the types of operations they conduct. For instance, over the past several decades, VNSAs have used two-way radios, cellular telephony, manned flight, personal computers, space-based navigation, space-based imagery, the Internet, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, digital encryption, and modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the planning and conduct of attacks, the transshipment of drugs, weapons, and explosives, the conduct of money laundering, resource gathering, and training, and in the day-to-day management of their associated personnel.
The Islamic State was an early adopter of UAV technology for surveillance and reconnaissance and later in the conduct of crude but effective attacks; IS was also an early adopter of AI for the generation of propaganda and other targeted communications; the New Orleans terror attack committed by Shamsud-Din Jabbar in 2025 was supported by numerous technologies, to include Meta Ray-Ban glasses for surveillance and social media to broadcast his allegiance to IS. Terrorists, criminals, and insurgents alike are increasingly converting everyday technologies into tools that abet violence, profit, destruction, and disorder through a process called “malevolent innovation” that helps them adaptively outpace law enforcement agencies, often at low cost and in ways that defy traditional methods of discovery, disruption, or interdiction.
VNSAs have also used technology to facilitate activities that would be impossible without the proliferation of cheap, widely available computers and smartphones, which enable the exploitation of the freedoms and vulnerabilities inherent in cyberspace and its constituent software-defined systems. For instance, various VNSAs and their adherents have engaged in cyber-espionage, ransomware attacks, hacking for profit, network-enabled bank fraud schemes, and identity theft, all of which are aided by technological tools and few of which were engaged in by VNSAs until the last decade or so. It is both ironical and paradoxical that despite the United States Government’s stated concerns regarding VNSAs’ acquisition and use of advanced technologies that a) technologies that were once considered advanced are still sophisticated but, for the most part, are cheap and commercially available and, b) the majority of the technologies that VNSAs use to plan and conduct their operations were invented in the United States by U.S. inventors and firms taking advantage of U.S. government research and development funds for their creation.
While it remains exceedingly difficult for VNSAs to acquire and employ truly sophisticated technologies like ballistic missiles or WMDs, this does not mean that VNSAs do not have an interest in such weapons and does not diminish the validity of the United States Government’s concerns about VNSA WMD acquisition and use. It is well known that jihadist groups have expressed interest in and sought access to chemical and biological weapons. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda established a research program to investigate the development and use of ricin, botulinum toxin, and anthrax. Islamic State produced and used sulfur mustard and explored the use of toxic industrial chemicals crudely integrated into weaponry and explosives. While it is difficult to prove a negative, it is likely that U.S. concerns about VNSA WMD acquisition have raised the global profile of this prospect to the point that even rogue states or others that could assist in such acquisition are reluctant to do so. But there is a world in which that dynamic could change, with states helping terrorists acquire and use WMD.
It is likely that most VNSAs have little interest in technologies and weapons whose acquisition would trigger alarms and further scrutiny, leading to organizational disruption. Whether this response has been an active adaptation—insofar as VNSAs have consciously made the choice to eschew highly destructive technologies in favor of less spectacular but more utilitarian and democratized devices and tools—or a passive response to changes in their operational environment—where organizational goals and objectives have morphed over time to better fit what these organizations are best capable of achieving—is difficult to discern. What is certain, though, is that the rising tide of technological proliferation has heightened both perceptions of the threat posed by VNSAs and the likelihood that VNSAs will remain an adaptive national security concern.