War Is Boring

I wrote this piece for the now-defunct Homeland Defense Journal. It was never published.

by DAVID AXE

In mid November, ten Pakistani men armed with AK-47s hijacked an Indian fishing boat, reportedly while the vessel was visiting the Pakistani port of Karachi. On November 26, the commandeered vessel — its captain eventually was murdered — made landfall 500 miles away in Mumbai, India. The assailants, traveling in four groups, hailed taxi cabs. Splitting up, they dispersed into the city, heading for train stations, hotels, a restaurant, a business park and a hospital. After the passengers had exited, the taxis exploded, from grenades or improvised bombs. Two drivers were killed.

The exploding taxis were the first shots in a terrorist siege of India’s financial capitol. For hours the gunmen ranged through Mumbai, firing their assaults rifles and throwing grenades. After shooting up crowded public places, the attackers occupied two hotels and a Jewish outreach center. For three days Indian security forces battled the gunmen. When it was over, nine attackers were dead and one was in custody. They had killed 164 people, including Indian police and commandos and 22 foreigners.

The Mumbai attack, sponsored by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, represents a “new form” of terrorism, according to Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “For enemies looking for an easy way to inflict fear and casualties, armed assault is among the best options,” James Carafano, an analyst for the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, wrote in a December report.

“I think we can expect that groups will look to that as a model for themselves,” Donald Van Duyn, the FBI’s chief intelligence officer, said at a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on January 8. Indeed, on Feb. 11, a Mumbai-style attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed 20 people. A Pakistani group is suspected in that attack.

The U.S. must “be prepared for soft targets to be attacked” the same way, Charles Allen, the Department of Homeland Security’s Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, said at the same hearing.

Some analysts disagree that infantry-style terror tactics are anything new — and that the U.S. is particularly vulnerable to them. “Armed assaults employing small arms and grenades have long been a staple of modern terrorism,” Fred Burton and Scott Stewart wrote in a January report for intelligence publication Stratfor. They highlighted earlier incidents including the thwarted Fort Dix plot in New Jersey in 2007 and the 1972 kidnapping, and eventual murder, of Israeli Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists using infantry tactics.

Most previous, successful, infantry-style assaults targeted Europe and South Asia, Burton and Stewart pointed out. “There are a number of factors … that would reduce the effectiveness of a similar attack inside the United States,” especially the ubiquitous presence of highly trained, and well-armed, “street cops” in American communities.

Still, U.S. police and Homeland Security officials, and the elected representatives who oversee them, aren’t taking any chances. “It is imperative that we take smart, cost-effective security measures, through means such as security awareness training, exercises focused on soft targets, and improved information-sharing about potential threats,” Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said during the January hearing.

These three methods — awareness, training and information-sharing — characterize the emerging American approach to preventing, or mitigating, a Mumbai-style attack on U.S. soil.

At sea and on land in large, highly symbolic jurisdictions — New York City, for instance — expensive, specialized technology plays an important role in defending against Mumbai-style attacks. But some observers worry that cheap, readily available civilian technology, such as text-messaging, handheld wireless devices and Internet “social networking” sites, complicates the defenders’ jobs.

Sea … the first line of defense
The Mumbai attackers chose an unexpected entry point into India. “Sea infiltration permitted the attackers to come ashore with a substantial cache of weapons that might have been detected during a land entry into the city,” Allen said in his Senate testimony.

The Indian Navy and Coast Guard in November had deployed ships and aircraft on reports of terrorist movements at sea, but failed to stop the Mumbai attackers. Some observers blamed poor intelligence and inadequate coordination of maritime forces. “We have neglected the seaways, but now we have learned that we cannot ignore them,” Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony said in a January interview.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security for years has feared that terrorists might use small boats to support an attack on American targets. “Vessels used by transnational contraband smugglers such as self-propelled semi-submersibles or high-powered ‘go-fast’ speed boats, could easily be converted into delivery vehicles for WMDs or to deliver potential terrorists to our shores,” Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen (no relation to Under Secretary Allen) wrote in the October issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.

A terrorist group’s small boats would represent a “needle in the haystack” among the estimated 21 million craft that ply U.S. waters, Commandant Allen wrote. To spot potential attackers at sea, the Coast Guard recognized a need for “more eyes and ears.” To that end, in April 2008 the rescue service published its new Small Vessel Security Strategy, built on a year of research. The strategy calls for a “coordinated effort of federal, state, local, and tribal authorities, together with international partners, private industry, and recreational users of the waterways” to “enhance maritime security.”

Basically, the strategy entails greater information-sharing and operational cooperation by private and public interests with stakes in recreational and commercial boating, plus increased use of sea-, air- and land-based surveillance by federal authorities. But even the most sophisticated surveillance technology is insufficient in light of the sheer area and density of the so-called “maritime domain,” Commandant Allen contended. For that reason, the Coast Guard must rely on the “people most familiar with their local environment. This community is in the best position to identify potential threats and report suspicious behavior.”

Public education poses a problem, Commandant Allen admitted. “Even if they wanted to, most small vessel operators may not know how to report suspicious behavior.” So the Coast Guard has launched America’s Waterway Watch, a website that briefs boaters on the best ways to report suspicious activity.

In the event that someone spots a suspected terrorist boat, the Coast Guard has new weapons for interdicting the vessel before it can reach land. To its traditional arsenal of small cutters, the Coast Guard in recent years has added more than 100 armed helicopters. “Airborne Use of Force” tactics call for snipers, riding in modified HH-65 and HH-60 helicopters, to shoot out a suspect boat’s motors, disabling the vessel so cutters can catch up to make arrests.

These measures might not be enough. Among major American cities, New York, for one, remains vulnerable to seaborne attack, according to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, speaking at the January hearing. “The NYPD, even with the Coast Guard’s assistance, cannot fully protect the harbor.”

The big-city dilemma
Large jurisdictions feature a unique mix of advantages and disadvantages when it comes to preventing and responding to Mumbai-style attacks. According to Carafano, cities such as New York are more prominent terror targets due to their highly symbolic nature. “This could happen anywhere, but you’d think if a terrorist group was going to try this, it would go after the place that’s most significant. The reason they picked Mumbai was because it represented Indian prosperity and Westernness.”

But because large cities are more prominent targets, they historically have received a disproportionate share of counter-terrorism investment — this despite some controversy in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when skewed Department of Homeland Security “risk assessments” channeled million of dollars into obscure counter-terrorism efforts in smaller communities. Restoring funds to major municipalities was one of former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff’s first acts when he took the department’s reins in 2005.

The result, more than seven years after 9/11, is that New York, for one, is comparatively well-defended against a wide range of potential terrorist tactics, including armed assault. The Mumbai attackers ran amuck for nearly an entire day before Indian authorities could mobilize significant forces, highlighting the absence or failure of the city’s systems for early detection of terror acts.

New York, by contrast, is rolling out a $100-million surveillance system, centered on Manhattan’s financial district, that includes 3,000 networked cameras. The cameras, while meant to help spot attackers before they strike, would also help after the first shots have been fired, by assisting officials in spotting and tracking attackers and directing law enforcement to respond. The cameras wouldn’t replace information from local residents and police on the streets, but complement it.

Kelly emphasized that any response to an armed assault would require close coordination among private citizens and city, state and federal authorities. He praised the department’s “collaborative relationships” with other agencies. “We must continue to work together at every level.”

But in the early minutes of an attack, in New York or anywhere, street cops would be on their own. Cops in Mumbai were poorly equipped, and the first officers on the scene during the November attacks were heavily outgunned. “Part of the reason the members of Lashkar-e-Taiba were able to inflict severe casualties was that, for the most part, the local police did not engage them,” Kelly said. “Their weapons were not sufficiently powerful and they were not trained for that type of conflict. It took more than 12 hours for Indian commandos to arrive.”

The NYPD, for its part, maintains standing patrols in the financial district equipped with assault rifles and body armor. The city’s counter-terrorism Emergency Services Unit long has trained with heavy weapons, and Kelly said that officers in the organized crime division would be trained and equipped to reinforce the ESU in a crisis. Kelly said training officers also could act as a reserve force — and that all new police recruits would receive some heavy weapons training. In short, New York’s police are much better positioned to deal with an infantry-style attack than Mumbai’s were.

Kelly described his department’s ongoing efforts to learn from the Mumbai attacks. “Within hours of the end of the attacks, the NYPD notified the Indian government that we would be sending personnel there. On Dec. 1, we dispatched three senior officers. Their assignment was to gather as much information as possible about the tactics used in the attack.” He said the NYPD team leader in Mumbai briefed government and private security managers in New York by phone on Dec. 5.

The NYPD’s refined practices for studying and adapting to recent terror attacks on other cities represents one of the New York’s best defenses, according to Burton and Stewart. “Hindsight,” they wrote, is a “huge advantage.”

Texting terrorists
That’s not to say New York doesn’t share some of Mumbai’s vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to communications. The Mumbai attackers reportedly received orders by cell phone and email from commanders in Pakistan — including tips gleaned from the commanders watching amateur media coverage of the attacks. The Mumbai-style attackers in Kabul in February apparently also used cell phones to coordinate with leaders in Pakistan. New York, among the most wired cities in the world, boasts overlapping communications systems that a terrorist group easily could exploit.

In light of this, Kelly said the NYPD needed some way to jam cell phones and handheld devices inside an urban battle zone. Jamming technology already exists — the Secret Service used it in isolated circumstances during President Barack Obama’s January inauguration — but would have to be adapted to New York’s size and density. There are literally millions of transmitting handheld devices in the city. “How do you plan for shutting all those down?” asks Chris Battle, an analyst with the Adfero Group in Washington, D.C.

Even if it were technically feasible, simply jamming all signals in an attack zone wouldn’t necessarily mean fewer civilian casualties. There’s a flip-side to blocking communications during a terror attack: jamming could make it difficult for authorities to disseminate information to the public, and to coordinate their own response.

“Accurate information serves to protect the public, reassuring them that the government is responding appropriately to the threat or attack,” Under Secretary Allen said. Without accurate information, there might be panic. In a panic, police and other first responders would find it difficult to respond. Even with active communications, “so badly did [Indian] officials handle communications [during the attack] that an unprecedented public interest lawsuit has been filed against the government,” think-tank RAND reported in January.

Plus, authorities often rely on handheld devices to direct first responders. Blinding and deafening the attackers means blinding and deafening the good guys, too. “Not to mention the effect that would have on positive communications, even [between] people outside law enforcement and first responders,” Battle says. “What about all the citizens frantically trying to find safety and resources for themselves?”

By the same token, suppressing communications would complicate media reporting on the attack. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Kelly said, recalling that the Mumbai attackers gleaned intelligence from initial media reports from the attack zone. “They also talked to the news media via cell phones to make demands in return for the release of their hostages,” RAND pointed out. “This led Indian authorities to think that they were dealing with a hostage situation, which further confounded their tactical response.”

But like with personal communications, journalism plays an important role in an effective response to a terror attack. Suppressing journalists can impede first responders. In the early hours of a terror event, the best intelligence information often comes from journalists, rather than from official sources, Battle says. That’s more true than ever, Battle adds, with the advent of “citizen journalists” using handheld devices to publish short dispatches or photos on social-networking Websites such as Twitter and Flickr.

In hindsight, media critics took citizen journalists to task for publishing a lot of false information during the Mumbai attacks, but Battle says this is not a problem just for amateur reporters. “The idea that traditional media is more accurate is false … That’s a challenge with citizen reporting online, directly, or with a CNN broadcast.” The key, Battle says, is to think of every bit of information coming out of an attack zone as a “piece of the puzzle.” Government rejecting, or blocking, any of those pieces might result in poor intelligence, and an inadequate response to an attack.

No tech solution
The communications question is a wash, according to Battle. For every liability that communications represent, there’s a benefit. Moreover, it’s unrealistic to expect to suppress all handheld devices in a city as large as New York, so authorities must learn to cope.

Battle says that technology is just one enabler among many when it comes to terrorism, but it’s wrong to consider it a cause. “It’s certain that the individuals in Mumbai used technology that is available to every citizen. But what allowed terrorists in Mumbai to kill was a fundamentalist ideology and a belief that God was on their side and they were doing God’s work and were willing to die for it. The best communications in the world won’t alter that type of zealotry.”

At sea, and in jurisdictions big and small, the basic methods for preventing and responding to a Mumbai-style attack are the same: remain aware by enlisting everyday citizens as “eyes and ears”; equip and train the lowest-ranking law enforcement personnel for basic military-style combat; and boost cooperation among private citizens and all levels of government. Just don’t count on sweeping technological solutions.

“We need to go back to basics,” Kelly said, “strengthen our defense on every front, stay sharp, well-trained, well-equipped, and constantly vigilant.”

(Photo: David Axe)

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