Insights / Executive Protection

Making a Threat vs. Posing a Threat: The Pathway at the Heart of Targeted

By Warren Pulley · November 8, 2026

The central idea in Targeted fits in one sentence: making a threat is not the same as posing a threat. It is the first slide of every BTAM course I teach, and it changes how a protective team reads every email, call, and visitor.

Why isn't a threatening message the main warning sign?

Someone who makes a threat has said or written something threatening. Someone who poses a threat is behaving in ways that suggest he intends and is preparing to cause harm. The two can overlap, but they are different questions, answered with different evidence.

The book draws on the threat management distinction between howlers and hunters, popularized by Frederick Calhoun and Stephen Weston. A howler makes threats, often loudly and repeatedly, but has no intention or capability of acting. A hunter intends to act, and many hunters never warn the target at all, because a threat warns the target. The Secret Service's Exceptional Case Study Project, which the book cites, found that many people who attacked or came close to attacking public figures never communicated a direct threat to the target beforehand.

What is the pathway to violence?

Targeted teaches the pathway in six stages. They are not a checklist every attacker completes in order. People skip stages, loop back, stall for years, or step off the path. But the stages give a team a map:

1. Grievance: a sense of being wronged, real or imagined. Its focus matters more than its accuracy.
2. Ideation: the belief that violence is acceptable or necessary.
3. Research and planning: gathering schedules, addresses, routines, and security details.
4. Preparation: acquiring what is needed, and sometimes rehearsing.
5. Probing and breaching: testing security by showing up, calling to confirm a schedule, or trying a door.
6. Attack.

The further along someone is, the less time you have and the more forceful the intervention may need to be. Early on, quiet, low-cost steps work. By the probing stage, the conversation may involve protective orders, law enforcement, and changes to the principal's schedule.

Where do the warning signs actually show up?

Usually not in the principal's inbox. The book stresses leakage, the communication of intent to a third party: a friend, a coworker, a family member, or an online audience. A company's social media team or a front-desk employee may see it long before the executive does. That is why Targeted insists on one front door for every concern, and why it trains assistants, household staff, and front-desk employees to report research behavior, such as calls confirming a schedule or questions about a home address.

The book's composite case makes the point. A billing complaint, a later remark about where company leaders live, and a polite call asking whether the CEO would speak at a promoted breakfast each went to a different person. None of them did anything wrong by the standards they had been given. Nobody saw the path.

What does the protector do Monday morning?

Every chapter of Targeted ends with a checklist by that name. For the pathway chapter, it includes teaching the six stages to the whole protective team in one short briefing, and reviewing the last six months of concerning communications to ask, for each one, "Where on the pathway might this person be?"

The book goes on to cover building a threat management team, lawful investigation with an OSINT toolkit and guardrails, scaling protection to the assessment, residential hardening, and digital footprint. For the protective side of the job, see The Protective Detail.

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