[edX] Terrorism and Counterterrorism / Section 2. Strategies, Tactics, and Technology Use

ㅇ Key Q

• What are the different strategies that terrorist groups use to advance their objectives?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various strategies?
• Why does terrorism essentially function in a technological vacuum compared with modern warfare?
• What are the reasons for terrorists' operational conservatism?
• How do ease and low cost affect terrorist planning and operations?
• Why do terrorists avoid sophisticated technologies when they innovate?
• What role does publicity play in fostering terrorist innovation?
• Why are terrorists rarely attracted to more sophisticated technologies and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)?

 

ㅇ Key Terms

• 1993 World Trade Center Attacks: On February 26, 1993, a car bomb detonated below one tower of the World Trade Center. The bomb, which cost only $400 to construct, resulted in approximately $500 million in damages, killed 6 people and injured more than a thousand.
• 9/11 Attacks: On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jets, killing almost 3,000 people and injuring thousands more. Two of the airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, causing both buildings to collapse, while a third plane crashed into the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. Passengers attempted to retake control of the fourth plane, and it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
• 1998 U.S. Embassy Attacks: Al-Qaeda simultaneously attacked two U.S. embassies, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using truck bombs, resulting in the deaths of 12 Americans and 212 Africans. These were the first attacks that brought Al-Qaeda to American public attention.
• 2000 USS Cole Bombing: Al-Qaeda operatives maneuvered an explosive-laden boat near the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen and detonated it in a suicide attack, killing 17 and injuring 39 American sailors.
• 2009 Fort Hood Shooting - Nidal Hassan: Nidal Malik Hassan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, Texas who embraced jihadists beliefs, shot and killed 13 individuals and left 30 wounded in a mass shooting on November 5, 2009.
• Anwar al-Awlaki: U.S. citizen affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. He was considered a vital asset for reaching English-speaking jihadists and is said to have influenced homegrown terrorist plots in the U.S.
• Attrition: A strategy in which terrorists seek to persuade the enemy that they are strong enough to impose constant and considerable costs if the enemy continues a particular policy. The object is to wear down the enemy's will to continue.
• Biological Weapon: A weapon that delivers toxins and microorganisms, such as viruses or bacteria, an in attempt to inflict disease on people, animals, or agriculture. It is classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
• Bloody Sunday: An incident on January 30, 1972 in which 26 civil rights protestors in Northern Ireland were shot by British soldiers. A significant event for the Provisional IRA, it boosted support and recruitment for the organization.
• Boston Marathon Bombing: Attacks on April 15, 2013, in which two pressure cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 264. The bombing was perpetrated by a pair of Chechen brothers who claimed to be motivated by extremist Islamist beliefs but were not connected to any terrorist group.
• Chemical Weapon: A weapon that uses the toxic properties of chemicals rather than their explosive properties to produce physical or psychological effects. It is classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
• Insurgency: A protracted political-military struggle with the goal of displacing the legitimacy of a government or occupying power and controlling the resources of a territory through irregular military forces. The objective of gaining control of a population and its resources is what largely differentiates insurgencies from purely terrorist organizations.
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: A member of Al-Qaeda and operational chief for the planning of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was captured in 2003.
• Lone Wolf: An individual who is ideologically motivated and inspired by a movement or leader but does not belong to a particular terrorist group and does not follow orders issued by its leadership
• No. 10 Mortar Attack: A remote control bomb attack by the PIRA on No. 10 Downing Street, the British Prime Minister's official residence.
• Nuclear Weapon: A weapon that uses nuclear energy to cause an explosion. It is considered a weapon of mass destruction.
• Propaganda of the Deed: An idea espoused by Carlo Pisacane arguing violence was necessary to inform, educate, and generate publicity for a cause.
• Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA): A nationalist terrorist group formed as a splinter of the long-established Irish Republican Army in 1969, the PIRA conducted a protracted insurgency against United Kingdom security forces and other enemies. Its main objective was the end of UK rule over Northern Ireland and reunification of Northern Ireland with Ireland. The group is known for its technological innovation, specifically in regards to bomb making and explosives. Over time, the PIRA subsumed other IRA elements and assumed leadership of the cause.
• Radar Detector Bombs: Developed by the IRA, these bombs could be triggered by handheld radar guns, like the ones police officers use for speeding. The radar gun could be pointed at the device and transmit a signal to detonate the bomb.
• Radio Receiver Bombs: Developed by the IRA, these bombs could be detonated using radio controls taken out of model aircraft. They allowed the IRA to trigger bombs while remaining a safe distance away.
• Radiological Weapon: A weapon that uses an explosive device to disperse radioactive material with the intent to kill or inflict harm. It is also known as a "dirty bomb" and is considered a weapon of mass destruction.
• Ricin: A poison naturally derived from castor beans, it is ranked third in toxicity behind only plutonium and botulism toxin.
• Spoiling: A strategy intended to ensure that peace talks between moderate leaders on the terrorists' side and the target government do not succeed. It plays on the mistrust between these two groups and seeks to convince the enemy that moderates on the terrorists' side cannot be trusted to abide by a peace settlement.
• Underwear Bomber: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, commonly referred to as the Underwear Bomber or the Christmas Day bomber, attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear while on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan. He was discovered to be connected with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

ㅇFurther Learning 

• [National Geographic] Inside the Nuclear Threat (Broadcast date: 2010)
• [PBS - Frontline] The Insurgency (Broadcast date: February 2006)
• [PBS - Frontline] Target American (Broadcast date: October 2011)
• John Mueller, The Atomic Terrorist, CATO Institute. January 2010. 
• C.C. Harmon, "Five Strategies of Terrorism," Small Wars & Insurgencies (2001), 12:3, pp. 39-66. 

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 ㅇ Strategies : Are Terrorists Strategic?

 

ㅡ Most of terrorist group fail, because of less of strategies

ㅡ IRA, in a vary crass way

 

ㅇ Strategies: Strategic Advantages of Terrorism

1. argely peaceful political movement.
2. You may see some groups embracing guerrilla warfare and other groups very
3. focused on terrorist targets simultaneously

ㅇ Strategies: Attrition

ㅡ How much does it care about public opinion?

ㅡ How much does the dispute matter to the government that the terrorist group oppose?

 

ㅡ A problem for a terrorist group to do this is that in order to maintain a strategy of attrition, they need to survive. And they're going to face an onslaught by a powerful government that invariably has more police, more intelligence, than the terrorist group has members.

And so the terrorist group has to weather that onslaught, and still be able to do attacks.

In addition, the terrorist group's violence is usually unpopular among the very people they claim to champion.

So, especially initially, many people will question whether they need to kill innocents on the other side to achieve their goals.

 

ㅇ Strategies: Building an Insurgency

ㅡ A second strategy terrorist groups use is they try to take their small group and build it into a large insurgent organization that can conduct guerrilla warfare.

ㅡ Such as Hezbollah, PKK in Turkey, Sendero Luminoso in Peru

ㅡ Again, the goal is to conduct a series of attacks that force the government to respond.

ㅡ People lose faith in their own govern, not able to guarantee security for the population

ㅡ Terror groups gain recruits, money, can do more attacks

ㅡ Start to do insurgent ops, attacks on military targets, social service(education, hospital)

ㅡ Purpose of attrition is to create insurgency, and by sustaining an insurgency, it has an attrition effect on the govern in question.

ㅡ 2003 Iraq, population is not secure. many sunni arabs see the govern as ideologically hostile. They believe the United States has put in a Shia dominated government. They believe the United States is there to throw Sunni Muslims out of power. And so, you have elements linked to Al-Qaeda come in. And the population may not embrace all their goals, but it sees them as a group that wants to help protect the community, wants to help the community defend itself. And as the government collapses, as social services collapse, as the police collapse, the community depends much more on itself. There's really no alternative to working with militia groups.

 

ㅡ By having precise intelligence, by losing the support of the population for the insurgents, the United States is able to conduct a very effective counterinsurgency campaign and drive back Al-Qaeda in Iraq, at least temporarily.

• What are the different strategies that terrorist groups use to advance their objectives?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various strategies?

ㅇ Strategies: Propaganda of the Deed

 

ㅡ A third strategy is propaganda of the deed. And this is the use of dramatic, high profile violence to inspire the population to rise up.

ㅡ The key to this is media coverage. And so for propaganda of the deed to work, you need lots of attention to the act.

ㅡ 911 terror

 

ㅡ Now propaganda of the deed is largely ineffective by itself. It is rare that a single high profile publicized event will topple a government.

ㅡ So what we often see as propaganda of the deed linked to other strategies where it's a way of galvanizing the population, but by itself is not sufficient to achieve victory for a terrorist group.

 

ㅇ Strategies: Spoiling

 

ㅡ A fourth strategy that terrorist groups consider is acting as a spoiler.

And this strategy applies when there's a potential peace negotiation.

ㅡ Probably the best, and most painful, example of this in recent times, is the use of terrorism during the 1990s. And the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. This was a time of great hope. Yasser Arafat, who was leading the Palestinians, was negotiating with Israeli officials. And you had a series of bombings done by Hamas, and Palestine Islamic Jihad, to disrupt the negotiations. And after the bombings in Israel, which killed many Israelis, Israelis asked a simple question. Was Arafat able to stop the violence?

But if the answer is yes, then Arafat was complicit in the violence. He's responsible for murder.

If the answer's no, then it raised the question of why negotiate at all.

If this person can't stop the violence, what's the point of having a peace deal?

 

ㅡ So Israel begins to delay implementation of a number of agreements. It does not move forward rapidly on forging new ones. And Palestinians begin to sour on the desirability of peace, because they don't see it producing the results they want. And they begin to support violence more. So you see a cycle which is violence discredits moderates, empowers radicals, and over time this leads to the collapse of negotiations.

 

ㅇ  Strategies: Lone Wolves

 

ㅡ The last strategy I'd like to discuss is the so-called lone-wolf strategy. Where individual terrorists or very small groups acting on their own but inspired by a larger ideology commit violence.

ㅡ The fear is that really anyone, anywhere at any time could conduct violence.

ㅡ  So some Al-Qaeda figures have endorsed it. We saw the Unabomber who was opposed to modern technology, he was a lone-wolf. And in the United States the bombers at the Boston Marathon were effectively lone-wolves. They were not linked to a broader organization. A lone-wolf approach is becoming scarier and more plausible because of the Internet. The Internet allows one individual to communicate with many. And as a result, he or she can promulgate a doctrine and that can be followed by others around the world.

ㅡ There's no rhyme or reason, there's no particular timing. It's just a way of expressing violence rather than link to something broader. Also when violence occurs it's not linked to a broader propaganda apparatus. There's no media or Internet that's explaining why the violence occurs, and trying to link it to a goal that the terrorists believes is noble.

 

ㅡ Instead, the government and the population in general can define the attacks as entirely negative. So while lone-wolf attacks are very scary, and are also very hard to stop, they're not very effective as a strategy.

 

ㅇ Strategies : Conclusion

 

ㅡ And, as I said, many terrorist groups use a mix of these strategies. And it's also important to remember that for a terrorist group, success at a tactical level is often divorced from strategic success. So a terrorist group can do an operation that tries to free hostages and fail

 

ㅡ But in general, the strategies terrorists have at their disposal are flawed. And even the best ones are very difficult. In addition, they depend heavily on the government response. They rely, to be successful, on the government making mistakes. And while no government is perfect, not all governments make disastrous mistakes in response to terrorism.

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ㅇ Tactics and Technology Use: Modern Warfare vs. Terrorism

• Why does terrorism essentially function in a technological vacuum compared with modern warfare?

ㅡThe contrast between modern warfare and terrorism is striking. The vast technological advances that we've seen in the means and methods of warfare ironically have not materialized in the world of terrorism.

 

ㅡ In fact, some could say that terrorism almost functions in a technological vacuum.

 

ㅡAnd compare those means and methods of warfare back then to the means and methods of warfare today.

We have Predator and Reaper drones, cruise missiles, billion dollar strike fighters, nuclear submarines.

By comparison, for more than a century and a half terrorists have continued to rely on the same two basic weapon systems, the gun and the bomb. 

 

ㅡ But nonetheless, the gun is still one of the staples of terrorism today. Similarly bombs today have gotten much smaller, exponentially more powerful. They're made out of a variety of materials, including what's called plastic explosives, explosives that are easily malleable or easily formed, where a few ounces of that explosion can completely blow up a room like this.

But at the same time, we see that terrorists continue to rely on explosives.

They've gotten smaller, exponentially more powerful compared to the sticks of dynamite wrapped together or the canonical round metal bomb with a fuse on top that terrorists lit and threw at people a century and a half ago. 

 

ㅡ But nonetheless, it's remarkable that the gun and the bomb still remain the staples of terrorist warfare.

ㅡ One of the reasons for this is that terrorists seem to prefer the assurance of the modest success that they can achieve with weapons that they're already extremely familiar with than, perhaps, risk the inherent failure involved in using more exotic or more complicated weapons systems.

 

ㅡ So, consequently, what we see is that terrorists generally are not tactically innovative. They rarely deviate from the familiar. And that's awful when we see a particularly novel or unusual terrorist attack, why it generates and attracts so much attention, because it is so different from the run of the mill terrorist operation.

 

ㅡ And this proclivity on the part of terrorists-- or one might say even this inhibition on the part of the vast majority of terrorists-- has tended, over time, to inhibit their resort to high tech weapons, or particularly sophisticated weapons systems, or even, as we'll see in this lecture, weapons of mass destruction.

 

ㅇ  Tactics and Technology Use: Why Terrorists Are Risk Averse

• Why does terrorism essentially function in a technological vacuum compared with modern warfare?
• What are the reasons for terrorists' operational conservatism?
• How do ease and low cost affect terrorist planning and operations?  

ㅡ In that the salient characteristic for terrorists is the desire, indeed the organizational imperative, to succeed.

If the terrorists can't succeed in the attack, if their weapon or their tactic fails, they're not going to terrorize anyone. This is also parenthetically, I would say, why intelligence is so important to terrorist organizations.

Without good intelligence, terrorists understand their operations cannot succeed.

ㅡ Now there are two other reasons why I would argue this technological vacuum or aversion to sophisticated or complex weaponry exists.

One is ease and the other is cost.

 

ㅡ For most terrorists, the sophistication is in the simplicity.

And this is what was exactly so evident on September 11, 2001, when terrorists used a time tried, time proven tactic such as airline hijacking, and yet with a very clever tactical modification, turn those same passenger airliners into human cruise missiles.

Now this point about ease and cost, or cost effectiveness or cost benefit, is really born out not so much even in the September 11, 2001 attacks-- although those were a canonical example-- but even more so in the first terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center that occurred in February 1993.

ㅡ Then, four terrorists constructed what the FBI later called a witch's brew of homemade, commercially readily available materials that they turned into a powerful explosive mixture.

At the heart of that bomb was urea nitrate, an element extracted from ordinary lawn fertilizer. This bomb that they put together not only killed six persons and injured more than 1,000 others, but it gouged a six story deep,

 

ㅡ But what really demonstrates the simplicity and the cost effectiveness was the repercussions of this explosive device of this bomb.

ㅡIt's estimated that that attack cost Al-Qaeda no more than $10,000 to mount.

That's including the construction of the bomb, the transport of key operational personnel to Aden, the surveillance, the purchase of the life raft, everything else, didn't cost more than $10,000.

Yet for a $10,000 investment, they succeeded in killing 17 American sailors, wounding 39 others, and costing the Navy $250 million in damages that needed to be repaired on the USS Cole.

 

ㅡ why terrorism has become such a popular form of warfare at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Because a small number of people-- four individuals in New York with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a handful of terrorists operating in Aden-- for a very modest expenditure of money, time, and effort can inflict disproportionate exponentially more costly damages using these very simple but crude bombs.

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ㅇ Tactics and Technology Use: Technological Evolution - Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)

• Why do terrorists avoid sophisticated technologies when they innovate?

ㅡ In other words, for all terrorist organizations, they will seek to use what works.

 And when it ceases to work because of government responses or barriers placed in their path by governmental counter measures or actions,  they'll then modify or change in order to obviate or overcome those same counter measures.

 

ㅡ So for example, in the late 1960s, the first generation of PIRA bombs were extremely crude and unsophisticated. It was essentially some sticks of dynamite stolen from rock quarries or from construction sites that were lashed together with some electrical tape, attached to an ordinary alarm clock as a timer, or sometimes with an ordinary fuse that had to be lit.

The bomber himself often had to reveal himself to actually throw the bomb at the target.

And that obviously created tremendous risk, because the bomber, by revealing himself, left himself liable to be shot and killed by the British soldiers or by the Northern Irish police against whom the attacks were being directed.

 

ㅡ The IRA embarked on a quest to develop a safer means, a standoff means, to deliver that same explosive attack. And what they initially used is what's called command wire detonation. In other words, they took a bomb, they placed it alongside a road, let's say. They waited for a police car, or a police Land Rover, or an army convoy to come by. 

ㅡ Because immediately upon an explosion such as that, the police and the army got smarter.

There would always be a chase car, or a second car, or a helicopter overhead, that then immediately following the explosion would descend on the bomber, and perhaps the team supporting him, and apprehend everyone.

ㅡ So what was the IRA to do, or what was PIRA to do?

 

ㅡ This was the old adage, necessity is the mother of invention.

And someone had the idea of going into an ordinary hobby shop where they sell model airplanes that were radio controlled. Well the IRA took that same off the shelf technology, and they put the radio receiver that was in the small plane, model plane, they attached that to the bomb. And then from a distance, they took the control box that was in essence the radio that sent the signal. And therefore, from a distance, without using a command wire, very cleverly concealed, they were able to detonate their bombs through radio signal. Presented with this threat, the British Army and the British Ministry of Defense responded with a very effective countermeasure to jam those radio signals. 

 

ㅡ What they did is, following developments in the United States, for example, where in many magazines you see advertisements for radar detectors. They would get one of these radar detectors that, of course, you put on the dashboard of a car. And when it detects the radio signals of a speed trap, it immediately beeps. Well they would attach the radio detector to the bomb. And then they went out and bought an ordinary radar gun. Exactly the same type of radar gun that police forces throughout the world use. They would position the radar detector on the bomb, park it wherever they want or bury it wherever they want, and then from a safe distance switch on the radar gun and fire what's an invisible, almost instantaneous beam of light to detonate the bomb.

ㅡ So what this tells us is that the quest for terrorists to constantly overcome or defeat the counter measures put in their path is a perennial aspect of terrorism today. And the terrorists themselves don't have to be terribly technologically sophisticated. They know that they only have to remain a step or even a half step in front of the counter-terrorism technology curve to succeed. And that's what tends to drive sophistication and innovation.

 

ㅇ Tactics and Technology Use: Publicity

• What role does publicity play in fostering terrorist innovation?

ㅡ The fundamental imperative of all terrorist groups is to act.

 

ㅡ And here we come to another paradox in terrorism, in that even unsuccessful attacks that may not even succeed in destroying the target, or even killing anyone, can nonetheless be enormously successful to terrorists, in terms of the publicity, and also in terms of the fear and anxiety that even unsuccessful attacks can generate.

 

ㅡBut nonetheless, the front page headlines that morning was not Prime Minister Thatcher's stoicism, was not the fact that the bomb didn't go off, but the fact that the IRA nearly killed a serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And this also gave the IRA to utter, I think one of the most famous aphorisms in terrorism, where they said to Prime Minister Thatcher, you have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.

ㅡ And it's that playing of the odds that also drives terrorists to try, and try, and try again.

And hope that eventually they'll be successful.

 

ㅡ Two other brief examples-- at the height of the 1991 Gulf War when US and British and other Allied forces were fighting in Kuwait to dislodge Saddam Hussein's forces from that country, the IRA staged a mortar attack on Number 10 Downing Street, the official home and the official meeting place of the British Prime Minister.

 

ㅡ The mortar bombs fell harmlessly into the back garden of Number 10 Downing Street.

No one was killed. No one was injured. Basically a bunch of turf was dislodged.

But nonetheless, the fact that the IRA was able to get close enough to Number 10 Downing Street, exactly at the moment when the British War Cabinet was meeting to discuss developments in Iraq and Kuwait, was nonetheless  important.

And consequently the headlines the next morning were not necessarily about the effort to liberate Kuwait, but rather it was about how the IRA nearly killed, then Prime Minister, John Major.

 

ㅡ On Christmas Day 2009, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, dispatched a bomber aboard a Northwest Airlines flight in route from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The bomber had concealed in his underpants a new and novel device, that had no electrical material at all.

It was a plastic explosive bomb, that was sort of shaped, contoured, to fit his body, that would be detonated by injecting a syringe of sulfuric acid into the explosives compound, and hopefully triggering the explosion. 

 

ㅡ But the point is, even that unsuccessful attack nonetheless reaped for Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula almost unparalleled publicity.

It was the first attack directed against the United States that was nearly successful.

 

ㅡ More than that, it had a profound effect on security, particularly aviation security, and especially on expenditures and security at airports, on board aircraft, and so on.

 That was incomplete disproportion to the amount of money that was spent on creating that bomb.

 

 

ㅇ Tactics and Technology Use: Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Terrorism?

• Why are terrorists rarely attracted to more sophisticated technologies and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)?

ㅡ So one can see, given some of the challenges that terrorists have faced in using more sophisticated or more novel types of weapons and explosives and their rate of failure,

And here we see that as far back as 1992, Al-Qaeda first began its quest to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Osama bin Laden sent his emissaries in 1993 and 1994 to various places throughout the world to try to obtain strategic nuclear material, enriched uranium with which to fabricate a nuclear bomb.

 

ㅡ Because we know in 1998 that bin Laden issued a proclamation, declaring that Muslims are entitled to use nuclear weapons and that it was every Muslim's duty to acquire a weapon of mass destruction for use against the United States. 

 

ㅡ So we see that, even while Al-Qaeda was in the process of executing the most historically important attack in the movement's history, it was already thinking and planning ahead, and already trying to move to even a higher level of death and destruction than we saw at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

 

ㅡ On the one hand, for example, you have the discovery of ricin, actually a poison, a bio weapon, but a poison, in London in early 2003. Not necessarily to kill people, but the idea was to use the ricin to poison individuals and hopefully to cause a nationwide panic. Completely unsuccessful, but nonetheless very interesting that the terrorists themselves understood the psychological repercussions of even an unsuccessful attack using some novel or new type of weapon, such as a poison like ricin.

 

ㅡ But then a year later in Amman, Jordan, the famed Al-Qaeda terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, decided to stage not just a conventional terrorist attack, but an unconventional one, as well. He chose three targets-- the prime minister's residence in Amman, the headquarters of the Jordanian intelligence agency, and the U.S. Embassy. 

And the idea was to drive huge trucks loaded with explosives in suicide attacks against each of those three targets, but then to follow those conventional explosive attacks with the release of deadly toxic chemicals into Amman's atmosphere.

 

ㅡ So here we have a fundamental paradox. Terrorists haven't completely lost interest in these exotic weapons, whether they're chemical or biological or poisons or what have you, and we see them using, or attempting to have used them, in recent years in two different ways.

One, more for psychological impact, to poison a few, to scare many. But then also in the more traditional context of weapons of mass destruction, to actually destroy lots of things and kill and harm lots of people.

And this, I think, are the types of attacks that we have to be vigilant against in the future, as well.

 

ㅇ Tactics and Technology Use: Conclusion

 

ㅡ In the main, the vast majority of terrorists do not deviate from established patterns.

ㅡ As I said earlier, as politically radical or as religiously fanatical as they might be, paradoxically they are operationally very conservative. 

ㅡ And this is because of their fundamental desire to succeed. Because they know if they don't succeed in an attack they're not going to terrorize anyone.

They're not going to appear formidable and threatening but rather inept and incompetent.

For that reason, most terrorists seek to remain just in front of the counterterrorism technology curve.

ㅡ So, the changes we see are more and clever adaptations, or clever fixes, or adjustments to existing technologies rather than the embrace of any new exotic or truly novel weapons or technologies.

ㅡ Terrorists will always seek to exploit new vulnerabilities in their targets, and consequently will always adjust and adapt attack plans and tactical preferences to enable them to get in and reach those targets.

ㅡ they just have to be sophisticated or clever enough to still access those targets and either destroy them or inflict death and destruction amongst their victims.

ㅡ as technologically savvy and advanced as it is, is that the sophistication of terrorist devices is in their simplicity.

 Terrorists continue to rely on what they know will work, what they're familiar with, technologies that they've already mastered.

 

ㅡ For the terrorists there are a number of advantages of these commercially available materials.

ㅡ But from the terrorists' point of view they're just as destructive and just as effective. But we cannot rule out that there are aberrations, that there will not be some terrorists and some terrorist groups that will persist, as we've seen in the case of Al-Qaeda, to attempt to use various forms of weapons of mass destruction, that despite all odds will seek to develop a nuclear capability, or obtain a nuclear weapon, or, indeed, to develop and deploy chemical and biological weapons.

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The "Strategies, Tactics, and Technology Use" section of the course was designed to help you understand the following:

• The different strategies that terrorist groups use to advance their objectives;
• The strengths and weaknesses of the various strategies;
• How terrorism essentially functions in a technological vacuum compared with modern warfare;
• Reasons for terrorists' operational conservatism;
• How ease and low cost affect terrorist planning and operations;
• Why terrorists avoid sophisticated technologies when they innovate;
• The role publicity plays in fostering terrorist innovation; and
• What inhibits the terrorists' use of sophisticated technologies and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

By completing this section of the course, you are also moving toward accomplishing the following course-wide goals:

• Understand the strategies and tactics of terrorist groups.