Dealing with ...

Terrorism has evolved and incidents involving mass hostage taking are among its most complex and terrifying manifestations. In turn, our response must become broader and involve more stakeholders, all working together cohesively. The Crisis Management Framework helps organisations to prepare for and achieve a positive and measured response to such threats.

This book shows how to structure post-factum event analysis, as well as preparedness and resilience for mass hostage incidents. It helps to construct and understand such operations in their entirety without gaps

and to assist contributing organisations that may need to prepare internal processes to integrate and interact with external players.

Table of Contents

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PREFACE

Post-modern Terrorism

Terrorism is hardly a new threat. However, the nature of modern terrorism has changed dramatically. Killings are massive and indiscriminate. Potential adversaries are more likely to strike vulnerable civilian (‘soft’) targets or attack military targets in non-traditional ways to avoid direct confrontation with military forces on battlefields; the aim is to force governments to take various actions that the perpetrators desire, or simply to make a statement. Terrorism has enormous impacts beyond immediate destruction, injury, loss of life and consequent fear. These effects span personal, organisational and societal national aspects at both national and international levels, and may have profound psychological, economic and social consequences.

Globalisation has resulted in a system built for a specific purpose, a system that removes barriers from travel and the exchange of information. Terrorist organisations are harnessing this system to fight the world that developed it in the first place. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are examples of what some analysts see as a form of ‘new’ or ‘post-modern’ terrorist organisations, which are neither securely linked to any one particular state patron, nor are they especially constrained by any limits on the use of violence. Terrorists no longer need public support in any given society; they need to murder a lot of people to fulfil their aim of overthrowing that society.

In such circumstances, national Special Forces and counter-terrorist agencies cannot guarantee 100 per cent security to the public. Concerns about what ‘security’ – or rather ‘insecurity’ – actually mean, have shifted from the seemingly remote level of interstate war to the very close level of personal vulnerability. Now, virtually everyone in the world faces the very real threat of massive casualties.

What can we do about it? Can we get ahead of the hazard and prepare to confront it? The Crisis Management Framework offers a chance to be better prepared and to get things done in a positive and measured way rather than in whatever way events may happen to unfold.