Intention Over Ideology, Cyber Threat Intelligence, Hurricane History & More
Profiles in Preparedness #40
It’s been a week marked by violence. And once again, the responses have been just as loud as the headlines. The media's shouting about motives, ideologies, and reasons may feel like analysis, but that noise doesn’t stop the next attack. In fact, it pulls focus away from what really matters when it comes to getting left of bang.
For those serious about preventing violence, it’s worth remembering a simple but sobering truth: committing violence is a choice. That choice is the starting point for prevention because it establishes a person’s intent to harm.
In our Tactical Analysis Course that teaches the Marine Corps' approach to threat recognition, we highlight the difference between the variables that change from one attack to the next and the constant that never does.
The variables include attacker demographics, weapons used, motivations, victims selected, and locations targeted. When the focus stays on these factors, prevention becomes a game of chasing the last attack—trying to stop what already happened.
The only constant in preventable attacks is intent. As everything else changes, intent remains present.
A person who has chosen to conduct an attack reveals their violent intent through their behavior. Their actions stand out from what is normal—the baseline—and become observable anomalies.
Focusing on intent over ideology isn’t about making excuses for the motives of any attacker. It’s about effectiveness. Intent drives behavior, and behavior is what we can detect before violence occurs.
This is where prevention lives. That’s where we have leverage.
Inside The CP Journal
Here is an article that was added to the site this week.
The way you design a project—establishing the phases and the sequence of steps you’ll move through from kickoff to closeout—is the “how” that brings project goals to life. It’s the framework that translates intentions into action.
🔒 For Academy Subscribers, this article provides 5 recommendations to project managers designing disaster preparedness projects.
This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.
Article | How the Infamous APT-1 Report Exposing China’s PLA Hackers Came to Be. In 2013, the American public's knowledge of Chinese hacking and wholesale theft of intellectual property (everything from soda recipes to aircraft design, pharmaceutical test results, and countless other things) was pretty limited. Cyber threat intelligence firm Mandiant changed that when they published a groundbreaking report on the PLA's efforts to steal American trade secrets, ultimately leading the US Justice Department to issue the first-ever indictment of nation-state hackers a year later. This fascinating article features an interview with the report's lead author and architect, discussing how the PLA targeted companies and why the report was released.
Article | 125 years after the Great Galveston Hurricane, it still remains relevant if we're willing to listen. Ego and arrogance. It is what led Weather Bureau Chief Meteorologist Dr. Isaac Cline to dismiss the need for the City of Galveston to build a seawall in the years before the devastating 1900 hurricane that killed over 6,000 people. In that era’s version of "it can't happen here," he dismissed conversations about building protections for the island as not needed and "absurd delusions." Those delusions proved prophetic in 1900 when a storm struck that was so strong that it remained a tropical storm into Oklahoma, produced winds near 80mph in Chicago, Buffalo, and Toronto, and helped fuel wildfires in Cape Cod, MA. In the aftermath, the City designed, approved, funded, and completed projects in two years. Even though the projects were reactive, they were finished. As we prepare for an uncertain future, we should remember not only the storm but also how quickly they executed. We must redevelop our ability to get projects done, adapt to changing circumstances, and do so at the pace our environment demands, if we are going to keep our teams, organizations, and communities safe.
Report | Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference. Reproducibility is crucial when developing capabilities that can impact public safety and security. Reproducibility is what leads to confidence that what is being done meets the standards and expectations of the field, which is a current limitation of many AI platforms and their integration into the field. I recognize that this very technical paper on large language models may not be for everyone. Still, it was incredibly helpful in deepening my understanding of why AI platforms give you different answers to the same question.
Article | Not All Uncertainty Is Equal: Why Directors Must Learn the Difference. Some exposures can be modeled, measured, and insured against. Others cannot. That premise opens this article, which does a great job breaking down many of the terms and concepts that go into the methods organizations use to determine their risk. The limitation, though, is that as we prepare for an uncertain future, the past might not offer a reliable look at the future. While some people are arguing about the probability or the method for defining how quantifiable something is, leaders getting left of bang are ensuring they know what they are preparing for, the pre-event indicators that precede catastrophic incidents, and positioning their organizations to grow if or when it occurs.
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Powerful as always. Love the focus despite the noise