Make no mistake. The next gruesome terrorist attack is already being planned in meticulous detail, down to its last nuts, bolts and murderous rivets, even as we are recovering from the staggering barbarism perpetuated at Paris. This is the cold, stark, uncomfortable reality of the terrorism afflicted world we live in – a reflection of our high octane, incredibly fast paced digital world.
It is critical therefore to learn our lessons quickly and proactively prepare ourselves. To appreciate the tone and tenor of these subtle lessons from Paris, it is first important to understand the operational context from which these arise.
Trends
There are two clear trends emerging in urban terrorism across the globe.
First, the terrorist community is globally linked and clearly favours urban spaces to unleash its mayhem. There are visible strains that the Paris attack was influenced by the success of the 26/11 Mumbai model – multiple small teams dispersed across the city, using assault rifles, grenades and explosives to create maximum casualties.
Second, the propensity to target high density crowds at "events" – rock concerts, performing art theatres, stadiums hosting sports events, diners at popular, crowded cafés and shopping malls. The Taj Mahal hotel, CST railway station and Leopold café in Mumbai, and the Bataclan concert hall, Stade de France and a restaurant on Rue de Charonne amongst others in Paris are specific examples.
Lessons for India
So what then are the lessons to be learnt from this attack in Paris? While the effort should consistently remain on denying an opportunity to the terrorists to execute their plans, the capacity of the city to respond is equally critical in managing an incident, if it occurs.
Here are three critical lessons that need to be quickly learnt to suitably tweak our strategy.
One, at the strategic level, we need to reorient and recalibrate our national approach to security. Consider this – Rs 48,000 crores has been earmarked by the government of India to be spent over five years to create 100 smart cities. The government has identified 10 core infrastructure elements to be developed for each smart city – safety and security being just one of them. On a pro-rata basis, this works to approx. Rs 10 crore per infrastructure element per city per year.
However, bucketing security as just another infrastructure element of the smart city project without urgent prioritisation and proportionate hike in spending shall be disastrous. The spending pattern of capital should reflect our priority – security should have the lion's share in the initial years, to support urgent enhancements to security infrastructure and technology. The strategy should be to rapidly and radically alter the networked security architecture landscape on dedicated high speed bandwidth, enabling preventive surveillance of public spaces and seamless and rapid first response to emerging situations. While some of this is already being done in some cities, the effort is too little, too slow. We need to ramp up efforts on a war footing. In the current context, a city that is not secure cannot be smart.
Two, at the operational level, there is a case to group together the first responders of the city in a crisis (police reaction teams, firefighting teams and disaster management teams) into composite action teams. These teams need to be located in different geographic locations across the city, prepared to take on concurrent multiple attacks. Remember, one of the prime objectives of the terrorists is to overwhelm the infrastructure and response capacity of the law enforcement agencies, thereby accentuating the crisis. On 26/11, every single fire tender and police reaction team in Mumbai was busy dealing with the emerging situation at the Taj, Trident, CST & Chabad House in South Mumbai. A concurrent attack in central Mumbai or the suburbs at this time would have meant no capacity to react at all. It is critical to ensure that these teams consistently train and rehearse contingency and reaction drills together to improve speed and efficacy of response.
Three, at the tactical level, it is important to empower ordinary citizens to supplement street level ground intelligence. Simply by encouraging every individual with a cell phone on the street to click a picture or video of an activity that they identify as suspicious and relaying it to a centralised control room can dramatically improve first response times. Such crowd sourcing of information by leveraging existing technology and the power of cell phones and internet can dramatically alter the citizen’s involvement in collaborative policing.
It is also important to encourage and empower the private security industry towards taking on less critical security tasks, thus freeing up crucial police manpower to concentrate effort on responding to crisis. To quote an example, approx. 2,500-3,000 police personnel are deployed for the security of each match at sporting events like the Indian Premium League. Effectively, this means tying down of this precious police resource on non-essential tasks. These tasks could be outsourced to private security agencies, under supervision of a core team of Police officials, backed up by quick response teams to meet emerging security situations.
Attitudinal change
It is essential to consciously push for a different approach to security at the societal level. While it is fashionable to question and, indeed, blame the intelligence agencies for failing to predict and pre-empt terrorist strikes, it needs to be accepted that the human intelligence resources required to corroborate and validate multiple technical inputs are hugely out of proportion to existing numbers. The answer lies not in incremental enhancements to police numbers but a two-fold strategy. The first is investing in technology-led, data-driven, backbone security infrastructure. The second element is to exponentially enhance the preventive posture and crisis response efficacy of the law enforcement agencies by empowering and encouraging collaborative policing by the public at large.
Winning multi-dimensional wars require multi-dimensional efforts at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. We need to be secure by being smart.
Col Subin Balakrishnan,@beesubin on Twitter, is an ex Special Forces officer from the Indian Army with over two decades of experience in counter-terrorism operations in multiple operational theatres across the country. Views expressed are personal.
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It is critical therefore to learn our lessons quickly and proactively prepare ourselves. To appreciate the tone and tenor of these subtle lessons from Paris, it is first important to understand the operational context from which these arise.
Trends
There are two clear trends emerging in urban terrorism across the globe.
First, the terrorist community is globally linked and clearly favours urban spaces to unleash its mayhem. There are visible strains that the Paris attack was influenced by the success of the 26/11 Mumbai model – multiple small teams dispersed across the city, using assault rifles, grenades and explosives to create maximum casualties.
Second, the propensity to target high density crowds at "events" – rock concerts, performing art theatres, stadiums hosting sports events, diners at popular, crowded cafés and shopping malls. The Taj Mahal hotel, CST railway station and Leopold café in Mumbai, and the Bataclan concert hall, Stade de France and a restaurant on Rue de Charonne amongst others in Paris are specific examples.
Lessons for India
So what then are the lessons to be learnt from this attack in Paris? While the effort should consistently remain on denying an opportunity to the terrorists to execute their plans, the capacity of the city to respond is equally critical in managing an incident, if it occurs.
Here are three critical lessons that need to be quickly learnt to suitably tweak our strategy.
One, at the strategic level, we need to reorient and recalibrate our national approach to security. Consider this – Rs 48,000 crores has been earmarked by the government of India to be spent over five years to create 100 smart cities. The government has identified 10 core infrastructure elements to be developed for each smart city – safety and security being just one of them. On a pro-rata basis, this works to approx. Rs 10 crore per infrastructure element per city per year.
However, bucketing security as just another infrastructure element of the smart city project without urgent prioritisation and proportionate hike in spending shall be disastrous. The spending pattern of capital should reflect our priority – security should have the lion's share in the initial years, to support urgent enhancements to security infrastructure and technology. The strategy should be to rapidly and radically alter the networked security architecture landscape on dedicated high speed bandwidth, enabling preventive surveillance of public spaces and seamless and rapid first response to emerging situations. While some of this is already being done in some cities, the effort is too little, too slow. We need to ramp up efforts on a war footing. In the current context, a city that is not secure cannot be smart.
Two, at the operational level, there is a case to group together the first responders of the city in a crisis (police reaction teams, firefighting teams and disaster management teams) into composite action teams. These teams need to be located in different geographic locations across the city, prepared to take on concurrent multiple attacks. Remember, one of the prime objectives of the terrorists is to overwhelm the infrastructure and response capacity of the law enforcement agencies, thereby accentuating the crisis. On 26/11, every single fire tender and police reaction team in Mumbai was busy dealing with the emerging situation at the Taj, Trident, CST & Chabad House in South Mumbai. A concurrent attack in central Mumbai or the suburbs at this time would have meant no capacity to react at all. It is critical to ensure that these teams consistently train and rehearse contingency and reaction drills together to improve speed and efficacy of response.
Three, at the tactical level, it is important to empower ordinary citizens to supplement street level ground intelligence. Simply by encouraging every individual with a cell phone on the street to click a picture or video of an activity that they identify as suspicious and relaying it to a centralised control room can dramatically improve first response times. Such crowd sourcing of information by leveraging existing technology and the power of cell phones and internet can dramatically alter the citizen’s involvement in collaborative policing.
It is also important to encourage and empower the private security industry towards taking on less critical security tasks, thus freeing up crucial police manpower to concentrate effort on responding to crisis. To quote an example, approx. 2,500-3,000 police personnel are deployed for the security of each match at sporting events like the Indian Premium League. Effectively, this means tying down of this precious police resource on non-essential tasks. These tasks could be outsourced to private security agencies, under supervision of a core team of Police officials, backed up by quick response teams to meet emerging security situations.
Attitudinal change
It is essential to consciously push for a different approach to security at the societal level. While it is fashionable to question and, indeed, blame the intelligence agencies for failing to predict and pre-empt terrorist strikes, it needs to be accepted that the human intelligence resources required to corroborate and validate multiple technical inputs are hugely out of proportion to existing numbers. The answer lies not in incremental enhancements to police numbers but a two-fold strategy. The first is investing in technology-led, data-driven, backbone security infrastructure. The second element is to exponentially enhance the preventive posture and crisis response efficacy of the law enforcement agencies by empowering and encouraging collaborative policing by the public at large.
Winning multi-dimensional wars require multi-dimensional efforts at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. We need to be secure by being smart.
Col Subin Balakrishnan,@beesubin on Twitter, is an ex Special Forces officer from the Indian Army with over two decades of experience in counter-terrorism operations in multiple operational theatres across the country. Views expressed are personal.