Violence Without Warning
By Asher Stern and David Collins
Counterterrorism is obsessed with what attackers think. We should be looking at how our cities are built. Asher Stern and David Collins argue that when the environment is the weapon, the solution isn’t surveillance, it’s design.
A car turns the corner and doesn’t slow down. A sidewalk becomes a path, a crowd, an obstacle. By the time anything registers, the moment that mattered has already passed.
It doesn’t look like an attack until it’s too late.
In New York, Michigan, and New Orleans, the details change, but the sequence of events doesn’t. Nothing has to be built or acquired to launch an attack. Preparation, if it exists at all, is minimal. The assault begins at the exact point where ordinary life is already in motion. Recent incidents, including vehicle-ramming and other attacks in open public settings, point to the same underlying pattern.
That isn’t a coincidence. It’s built into the threat environment. What connects these incidents isn’t coordination. There is no public evidence of that in these recent attacks. It is the absence of physical barriers or the securing of space. Each case shows that the distance between intent and action is now almost nothing. No procurement to flag. No staging to disrupt. In many cases, very little to intercept in real time. The system isn’t being evaded. It is being bypassed entirely.
This distinction matters because it exposes a deeper mismatch between how the threat operates and how law enforcement and intelligence agencies try to detect it.
Modern counterterrorism has adapted to track pathways to violence, including online radicalization and behavioral indicators. Financial signals, travel anomalies, and procurement activity still matter. But the system still relies on the assumption that violence produces something observable before it occurs. That holds in cases where individuals move through identifiable pathways. Increasingly, however, the threat no longer requires those pathways at all.
The problem isn’t that these attacks are invisible. It’s that they no longer need to be. Individually, they can still be dismissed. Taken together, they point to something structural in how violence operates and manifests itself.
The barrier to action is no longer defined by capability, but by whether anything in the environment slows it down. In many cases, nothing can or does. That shift changes what can realistically be detected in the first place.
American civic space is built to optimize movement and freedom. Open intersections. Unobstructed pedestrian flows. And public environments are designed for ease and speed. These are deliberate features. The issue, however, is that they enable circumstances in which low-effort violence is easier to initiate than to interrupt.
The same logic extends beyond the streets and transportation networks. Places of worship, by design, are open, predictable, and accessible, and sit within the same minimally restricted environment. The vulnerability isn’t incidental. It is structural.
The asymmetry is easy to miss. It’s also where the advantage lies for the perpetrator. The state continues to invest in increasingly complex detection systems. The attacker doesn’t need to match that complexity. He or she operates within it, using what is already available, moving through spaces that aren’t designed to slow them down or to impair.
This isn’t an escalation in capability. What has changed is the compression of time. The timeline between intent and action has narrowed to the point where it no longer reliably produces signals. No coordination to intercept. No acquisition or procurement channel to monitor. No preparatory phase that meaningfully separates planning from execution. Just access, movement, and opportunity.
We are not seeing a surveillance failure. It reflects a design problem.
In Israel, this dynamic has been confronted repeatedly, often after attacks that exposed exactly this kind of vulnerability. The response was not to shut down public life. It was to adapt it. Small, cumulative adjustments that change how space functions without dominating it. A crossing that quietly prevents direct vehicle access. A bus stop positioned with distance in mind. Barriers that become part of the landscape rather than interrupting it.
Most Israelis have stopped noticing this changed landscape. That is the point: The barriers are embedded in the environment, even if they go unseen. This introduces seconds, angles, and constraints. Not enough to interfere with daily life, but sufficient to disrupt potential attackers. It’s enough to force deviation from the most direct path between intent and action.
This gap is now being exploited in the U.S.
The system isn’t failing. It’s working exactly as designed. The issue lies in what it was designed to detect. Right now, it’s optimized to detect what can be tracked, while the threat increasingly relies on what can’t be. The result is a widening gap. Not between capability and response, but between how risk is assessed and how it is mitigated.
This isn’t a variation of the threat. It’s a shift in how violence functions.
There is no clean and easy fix. Introducing structural barriers and constraints into daily American life carries tradeoffs. It’s visible. And it challenges expectations about speed and openness. But the alternative is exposure to these growing threats.
The U.S. is optimized for convenience, while the growing threat also rewards immediacy. This trend doesn’t require more capable attackers, only fewer constraints.
That is what has changed. Detection models, even as they have adapted to track behavioral indicators, digital signals, and pathways to radicalization, still rely on something observable to act on. When those signals are absent, there is less to intercept. Models built around observable buildup will continue to miss what no longer produces one.
And until the environment itself becomes part of the security model, the advantage will remain with the perpetrator who needs less, moves faster, and encounters nothing that forces hesitation at the moment of attack.