For more than two decades, counterterrorism thinking in the United States, Australia, and across allied democracies has been shaped by lessons drawn from 9/11 and its aftermath. Early models focused on organised networks, overseas training, and command-and-control structures. The rise of the Islamic State forced a further evolution, toward online radicalisation, lone-actor violence, and increasingly compressed timelines between ideological commitment and attack.
The Bondi attack has unsettled many of those assumptions.
Over the last decade, one of the strongest empirical findings across US, Australian, and European case studies was that offenders were getting younger and mobilising faster. The period between radicalisation, what practitioners sometimes call ‘flash’, and violence, ‘bang’, was shortening. This insight shaped intelligence prioritisation, threat assessment frameworks, and prevention efforts across allied systems.
Bondi appears to challenge that model.
Public reporting indicates that the alleged offender, Naveed, was radicalised at around 17 years of age but didn’t carry out an attack until he was 24. That six-year gap isn’t a rapid pathway to violence. It sits uneasily alongside assumptions that contemporary extremist mobilisation is necessarily fast, impulsive, or digitally accelerated.
This matters because counterterrorism systems are built on models of risk over time. Those models influence how agencies triage leads, allocate finite resources, and decide which individuals warrant sustained attention and which do not.
If reporting is accurate, Naveed maintained contact with Islamic State supporters or sympathisers over a prolonged period. His primary network appears to have been domestic and familial, centred in the home. From an intelligence perspective, this is a low-signal environment. It doesn’t generate the volume, velocity, or variety of indicators that would ordinarily justify the exercise of intrusive collection authorities.
There would never have been sufficient intelligence to meet the legal thresholds required in either the United States or Australia for covert warrants, listening devices, or persistent surveillance. That isn’t a system failure; it’s the product of legal and ethical constraints that define liberal democratic policing and intelligence.
What Bondi forces policymakers and practitioners to confront is a deeper challenge: how do we assess long-duration radicalisation that doesn’t translate into immediate action?
In recent years, much counterterrorism analysis has implicitly treated inertia as a form of mitigation. Individuals who are radicalised but inactive are often categorised as lower priority unless new indicators emerge. Bondi suggests that this assumption deserves re-examination.
A person can be ideologically committed, socially embedded in extremist belief systems, and operationally dormant for years, until something changes.
That ‘something’ may be an accelerant.
Accelerants aren’t necessarily ideological. They are catalysts that convert belief into violence. They can be personal, relational, psychological, situational, or symbolic. They may include personal crises, perceived grievance escalation, family dynamics, triggering events, or moments that provide moral permission for violence. Critically, accelerants are highly individualised and often invisible to institutions.
At present, we don’t know what, if anything, accelerated Naveed and his father toward violence after six years. We may never know. But the absence of clarity is itself instructive. It highlights how limited our understanding remains of the transition from long-term radicalisation to action, particularly in closed domestic environments.
This raises uncomfortable questions for homeland security systems in both the US and Australia.
Do existing frameworks adequately account for long-duration radicalisation trajectories? Are periodic reassessments of ‘radicalised but not currently threatening’ persons of interest sufficiently sensitive to changes in personal context rather than just changes in ideology or network activity? And how can agencies identify potential accelerants without criminalising belief or dramatically expanding surveillance?
There are no easy answers. Resource constraints, legal thresholds, and civil liberties considerations aren’t optional—they’re foundational. Expanding monitoring based on ideology alone would be neither effective nor acceptable.
At the same time, Bondi suggests that static threat assessments may be insufficient when radicalisation is persistent rather than accelerating. The risk isn’t that every radicalised individual will act, but that a small number may do so after long periods of apparent dormancy.
Caution is essential. One data point doesn’t make a pattern, and counterterrorism history is replete with examples of overcorrection driven by fear rather than evidence. Bondi alone shouldn’t trigger wholesale doctrinal change or reactive policy expansion.
Yet when the stakes involve mass-casualty violence, the inverse risk must also be acknowledged. If a single case exposes a blind spot in how threat over time is conceptualised, can we afford to ignore it?
For US and Australian homeland security communities, the lesson from Bondi isn’t about blame or missed warnings. It’s about intellectual humility. Radicalisation isn’t always fast. It’s not always loud. And it’s not always externally networked.
Sometimes it’s slow, domestic, and enduring. Recognising that reality will not prevent every attack. Still, it may help allied systems ask better questions about time, risk, and the fragile moments when belief becomes violence.
