Lessons in counterterrorism from the octopus

In 2002, Rafe Sagarin was working in Washington, D.C., as a science adviser. It wasn't long after the Sept. 11 attacks, and Sagarin started paying attention to the security measures on Capitol Hill. "I'd watch these other Capitol Hill staffers and I noticed that they'd just put their hand over the keys in their pockets so they didn't have to waste 30 seconds putting it on the conveyer belt though the security screening — and that didn't set off the alarm when they did that," Sagarin tells host of weekend All Things Considered Guy Raz. "It just made me think, adaptable organisms" — like terrorists — are "going to figure out a way to get around this," he says. So Sagarin, a marine ecologist, turned to what he knew. His new book, Learning from the Octopus, tells how we can learn from organisms in nature to improve our security systems. Interview Highlights On why he focused on the octopus: "Most adaptable systems, and the octopus is a great example, have a decentralized organization where a lot of almost independent parts are allowed to sense and respond to the environment. So the octopus doesn't use that great brain to tell arm one to turn purple and arm two to turn blue as it swims over a coral reef, but rather millions of cells spread across its body are each individually responding to that change in the environment and then giving camouflage to the octopus as a whole. That combination gives you a lot of what you need to be an adaptable organism." On what the military can learn from the octopus: Sagarin says the U.S. military took a long time to adapt in war zones to the challenges posed by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which are still among the biggest killers of our troops. "You had the Department of Defense, which planned for and predicted a certain kind of war, which turned out to be not the war at all that they were fighting. And it was all those soldiers on the ground who are acting as these semi-independent sensors — just like the skin cells on the octopus — who almost immediately recognized that the IED threat was the big problem. It took the Department of Defense, with a centralized, top-down control system, three years to bring up armored vehicles to Iraq, during which 1,300 soldiers died due to IEDs." "Those soldiers on the ground had to adapt in the meantime, and one of the things they did which they did, which is very important and seen throughout nature, is develop symbiotic partnerships. And they were developing partnerships even with people that were previously shooting at them, and it was through these partnerships that they started to get the intel about the IEDs and who were the bomb makers ... and you see a big drop in IED deaths before these up-armored vehicles come into Iraq." On the benefits of decentralization: "There's a very simple thing we can do in wherever we work that can shift us into this mode of having more sense of how the world is changing and having more ability to respond to it. And that is shifting from a mode of giving orders to issuing challenges, which is when we say, 'Here's a problem we're all facing; who among you can solve this problem best?' And every time we've seen a challenge-based attempt at problem solving, you get many more potential responses and potential solutions. You get them much quicker and much much more cheaply than the model where a small group of experts decides or a single contractor has decided to develop something."