Bombay Lessons

Bruce Schneier suspects we’ll probably learn the wrong ones. After all, as he points out, there’s very little you can do to stop 18 men with guns and grenades once they’ve begun their attack. I suspect John Robb would agree. Well-planned low-tech attacks that “leverage” a city’s own infrastructure are one of the nightmare scenarios.

Yet since this kind of mission is more likely than not to end in the deaths of the terrorists themselves (cf the Chechen attack on a Moscow theatre) it remains, happily, an unpopular career choice. And for that one should be truly thankful. Imagine how easy it would be to cripple the railways, or, armed with just a bag or two of grenades to knock-out much of a city’s electriciy system. Consider too how vulnerable Saturday morning markets in quiet country towns are. Once you start thinking about this sort of thing you realise there’s no end to the potential targets and, consequently, no start to any sensible or realistic set of security measures that can be taken that don’t require the public to be inconvenineced out of all proportion to the likely threat.