Americans only learn by disaster. Theodore Roosevelt
President Roosevelt’s words certainly apply beyond events in the United States. The plague of terrorism is worldwide. It’s not new history is filled with such times. Unfortunately, though, the lessons paid for in blood by one nation or group is forgotten and the outrage visits another, in a different time and location. The proof? The destruction of lives in the terrorist attacks of Mumbai in November.
The after-action information coming from India is troubling. According to reports in The Times of India and Associated Press, in the absence of a firing range and of ammunition for practice in Mumbai, members of the law enforcement agencies have not opened fire in the past 10 years. One senior inspector told the Times, ”I’ve been in the police force for a long time, but I had no occasion to open fire for practice.”
Other reports suggest officers had zero training with their firearms, and few were even armed. A photographer despaired over the fact that armed officers in the railway station didn’t fire on two terrorists who calmly and methodically murdered more than 50 men and women. He said the terrorists were “sitting ducks” as they stood together in conversation. He even took a photo of them.
Police officers ran or hid. Officers were quoted as saying there was firearms training “on paper only” because top officials denied them range access, ammunition, weapons and training. If that’s the case, what ending could they expect? You will fight as you train.
The offenders trained in depth to operate in pairs and teams. They employed the buddy system, with one terrorist firing while another also fired or reloaded as they covered one another. They moved, and their movement was both their offense and defense, cover and concealment. They carried all their deadly gear with them rifles, hand grenades, explosives, ammunition and dried fruit and nuts, prepared for a lengthy fight.
More terrible than any weapon, the terrorists brought with them a mindset and determination that was solely focused on murder.
The hostages taken prisoner in the Jewish Center in Mumbai were cruelly tortured before their execution. If officers wound a terrorist, he will be taken into custody and cared for. If terrorists wound an officer, he will be murdered. There simply is no equivalence between the sides. One strives for death, and one fights for life.
The terrorists wore clothes and backpacks that blended in with the population, and other than their AK-47s and submachine guns were in no way conspicuous. Absent their weapons, how would they be located and identified? One pair of murderers ambushed a police van after recognizing the officers before they were seen. Six of the seven officers in the van, including the chief of counterterrorist operations, were murdered. The offenders then drove off in the police van. The point: The terrorist need not identify any person other than his cohort when committing murder, but first-responding police officers must be able to identify everyone as friend or foe.
And finally, one news report indicates that after the assault began on the night of Nov. 26, it took hours for the Indian commando squad to arrive in Mumbai because it’s based near Delhi, hundreds of miles away, and does not have its own aircraft. Even after the commandos, who are better armed and trained than police officers are, began fighting the terrorists holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, they lacked a floor plan, whereas the militants seemed to know the hotel’s layout well.
So, what can we take from these terrible events to make it less likely to happen here, in our nation, in our towns and cities?
1. Heed the Warning Signs
If we accept as fact the many reports put out after this terrible event, we know India’s government was forewarned by the United States of a coming attack. While we don’t know the specifics, the targets were said in part to be luxury hotels. The message was not communicated from the top down because of a system incapable of doing so, and any word received by local authorities was ignored or not acted on.
2. Leadership Must Be Proactive, Responsive & Adaptive
Organizational inertia (i.e., unfocused actions, or just going through the motions) coupled with denial is a deadly combination. Police leadership sets the tempo and the depth of everyday police action and response. True leaders are not only willing but want to push the issues and prepare for the unthinkable as if it were the inevitable. Managers who simply look to get by day to day will fail when the event rolls over them. Managers who are out of touch are always out of time as events overtake them. So, at the top, the challenge is obvious: Lead or manage?
Leaders must be willing to allow line-level decision making in chaotic incidents. In law enforcement, we exist as hierarchical organizations geared toward the top making the big decisions. For critical incidents, however, we must improve our ability to respond by decentralized leadership. In attacks like those in Mumbai, patrol supervisors will be the generals of the street, and individual initiative will rule the moment. No centralized command structure can assimilate the issues and actions fast enough to give off-site commands to those first responders who have only seconds to make decisions.
We must therefore prepare our street supervisors and officers to take initiative and recognize that their choices will determine the outcome. As one of our finest trainers, retired U.S. Army Special Forces operator Paul Howe, says, “I believe our active shooter training will pay off if the first officers take initiative and decisively engage and push through the threats. This will keep the body count down.” (Visit Howe’s Web site at www.combatshootingandtactics.com.)
3. Prevention & Deterrence
The key to stopping terrorist attacks is keeping in touch so that we have the opportunity at prevention and deterrence. The intelligence function remains the foundation of this effort. All information must be reviewed, sources considered and warnings made in an effective and timely manner.
Getting the information starts the process, and everyone plays their part. In the big picture, the NSA, CIA, FBI and the myriad federal giants work ceaselessly to ferret out plots and plotters. In city policing, only NYPD is large enough to bring together an in-house intel operation that spans the globe. Yet that does not mean that all levels of law enforcement officers don’t play a fundamental role.
Law Officer readers are most likely men and women involved in street work. It’s at this level that field contacts are made and the plotters “touched.” The excellent field questioning officers have learned in combating the drug trade is equally valuable on the terrorism side. In fact, the two are likely joined with the terrorists making use of smuggling routes and methods. (A human being and weapons take up a lot less space that a cargo bay full of dope.)
Attention to detail both for officer safety and information gathering is critical. The what-if scenarios we mentally and physically rehearse in training must be carried to the street, and on each stop officers must break out of routine and say to themselves, “This is the one. This guy I’m stopping for the traffic violation is the key to coming terrorist attacks.”
Fiction? No. It happened prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. One of the plotters was stopped for speeding on a highway, but unfortunately no connection could be made.
Unlike that event, in Evanston, Ill., members of the FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization, were found by a police officer responding to a suspicious vehicle call. They were armed and ready, but so was the officer and his backup. That day went to the police, and future days can as well.
4. System Capability & Officer Response
Information is useless if it has no pipe to flow through. It’s an error to expect we will be hand-fed the timely warning by the federal government. It’s possible, but just as likely that we’ll find key information or interdict the offenders at the local level.
The point: Information must flow from the top down and the bottom up. Officers must be aware of and make use of the intelligence fusion centers that have been established in many jurisdictions nationwide. These centers are staffed by all levels of law enforcement and serve as information clearing houses that directly respond to officers on the street while bringing information to the attention of the “giants.” Don’t hesitate to report information or suspicious persons to the Center. Small details may be the keys that shine the light on a coming threat.
Along with the fusion centers, Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) exist nationwide under the lead of the local FBI office. Make sure you know who your agency’s contact is within the JTTF for your region and channel information to them as appropriate.
Local police officers own the home-field advantage. Yet in Mumbai, this advantage was lost to the terrorists, who had done their reconnaissance and knew the target layouts better than the police and follow-on military.
As noted counterterrorism trainer Joe Bierly points out, “We must strive to gain and maintain this advantage building plans [reviews], walk-through’s of potential targets, liaison with security directors of hotels, airports, etc., are examples of what must take place ahead of the attack. All that preparation does double duty [because] it helps during an active shooter scenario as well.”
Be aware of the homes and apartments on your beat. The street officer knows in detail what car or person belongs where and who is out of place and out of character for the locale.
The calls you respond to may yield opportunity. Many a criminal has been arrested for serious offenses because they were exposed during a domestic dispute. In the aftermath of a domestic battery, the victim may well give up information out of anger or fear of the offender be ready to mine it.
The surviving terrorist of Mumbai was a street criminal who had been recruited into the terrorist organization. Criminals are what they are, and when on a mission, they may still yield to shoplifting or theft urges, which provides police an opportunity to look below the surface.
5. Stand Ready & Prepared to Fight
First, we need the right mindset. In an article written on the attack by Elliot Chudoff, he commented, “The first lesson of the attacks has already been misunderstood: This is not a criminal justice issue; it is war.
“The Mumbai attacks provide us with a glimpse of the terrorist vision of the future. For those who believed terrorism was a means of improving a negotiating position over limited goals, Mumbai should help them realize that this conflict is neither limited nor over peripheral issues. It is looking more and more like total war with each attack.”
Chudoff is right, this is war, and must be considered as such. No negotiations, no appealing to mercy or compassion. It’s a fight to the death for the attackers. It will be a fight to the end for police.
How do we stack up? If we fail at deterrence, we’re left to the fight, and once the terrorists are in action, there will only be bad endings, with some far worse than others. We must have the willingness to immediately counter the attack.
The attackers must be overwhelmed by accurate, aimed fire directed at them at the earliest moments of their attack. No waiting for hours on special teams or the “real” police. We are as real as it gets. If the terrorists are allowed to set defenses, blockade entrances and set explosives, the outcome will be a repeat of Beslan, Mumbai and every other event in which the murderers were allowed to make a bad situation the worst possible.
Bottom line: Police must be capable and ready to fight. This is the core mission of law enforcement: protect our citizens and residents from threats to their lives. There’s a time to talk and a time to fight. Administrators and street officers must know the difference.
We also must take stock of the training we’re doing. Does the training look in any way like the fight in Mumbai? Are we prepared, or are we also paper tigers?
The ordinary day-to-day police activity we engage in has been and remains fundamentally lacking in such fighting response and capability. Can civilian police have such capabilities? Short answer: Yes.
Tactical skill and basic response equipment are key to such a response. Fighting terrorists in our cities and towns isn’t about unrestricted use of force. It’s about law enforcement having small-unit capabilities that include fire-and-maneuver tactics, and responsive command and control.
This is no different than the training we’ve developed and worked on to counter active shooters in schools and public venues. It’s an expansion on that effort to include multiple offenders at multiple sites. If the offenders (criminals or terrorists) demonstrate such training and capabilities in their attacks, first responders can and must do no less.
We can and must have the same equipment and skill set. Every patrol officer should have access to a rifle chambered in .223 caliber or larger. Such attacks are not the realm of pistol-caliber carbines. Our rifle and ammunition must have the ability to provide accurate fire at distance and penetrate offender body armor and intervening barriers. And, each officer must have a go bag that contains extra ammunition, radio and flashlight batteries, wound bandages, a tourniquet, binoculars and other combat essentials.
Skills come as a result of reality based training. Currently, a training course developed here in Illinois by several of our SWAT officers takes street officers from the same agency and shift (where possible) and puts them through high-risk scenarios in which they must work as a cohesive force and use small-unit tactics to overcome threats. The officers who have done so gave this two-day training the highest marks and returned to their agencies far better prepared to act together with far greater capability against any violent threat they will encounter.
At the same time, command and control from the top level must also be trained on these concepts, embrace the training for the street officers and SWAT, make the funds available and stand ready to make command decisions in extraordinary circumstances.
“Although our police are generally far better equipped and trained than what we saw in Mumbai, I fear we would still have similar headlines in many of our cities should such an attack happen here. It takes time to develop an effective intelligence capability to prevent an attack. Likewise, it takes time to equip and train a response force. You can’t wait until the attacks begin here.”
Joe Bierly of CTC Inc.
(www.counterterrortraining.com)
Final Thoughts
Mumbai has moved from the front pages of the news, as do all terrible events. But we must not forget it. The families, loved ones and friends of the murdered will bear the burden for their lifetimes. Who will stand for them? Who stands for our communities? It will be the men and women of law enforcement who run to the fight when all others run away.
This is not business as usual, and any who believe that the means to prepare for a homeland attack is to continue to walk the same path of yesterday will pay a heavy price. Worse, those citizens who can’t defend themselves and depend on us for protection will pay the heaviest.
None of this is beyond the American law enforcement officer and agency. We have skilled men and women in uniform on the street and in command positions. It only takes the willingness to accept that the threat is real, imminent and coming to your hometown.
In the end, it’s not enough to be willing to fight. There must be a total commitment to win.