[drusepth]

The motivation behind understanding what drives these kinds of extremists is to understand what about their view of the world drove them to start shooting people up, and then identify what led them to that point in their life and start addressing those problems such that other people don't end up in a similar position. A bit of a cat and mouse game in an abstract sense, but understanding and preventing future attacks by like-minded individuals requires understanding what leads someone to such a bad state in the first place.

This is, of course, in _addition_ to other counter-terrorism infrastructure like intelligence gathering, monitoring, security, response, etc. Many of those more well-known systems are intended to identify bad actors and prevent them from doing bad things; understanding bad actors can lead to more methods to prevent regular people from becoming bad actors in the first place.

[bilbo0s]

>* identify what led them to that point in their life and start addressing those problems...*

Here's the thing, people been doing this for literally MILLENNIA now, there is no way to identify everything that will drive extremists to kill. That's the essential problem with that philosophy. Even where you are able to identify the core issue, say for instance the religious divisions in the MidEast region, there is really no way to address the core problem. It's just far easier to engage the extremists, than it is to convince Christians, or Jews, or Muslims, to NOT be Christians, or Jews, or Muslims.

Extremists will just never be placated, and we shouldn't put too much effort into trying, because that gets people killed as well.