Security and resiliance are fundamental for economic prosperity. But natural disasters and emergencies come in many forms and are indiscriminate in their impact. Additionally, within the new security environment, man-made security threats are varied, innovative and often designed to cause maximum disruption by breaching social norms in terms of both choice of target and method of attack.
The outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, recently said,“ The [security] threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before.” He was echoed by his then Home Secretary John Reid who, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, stated that the country’s key energy installations and infrastructure are among the likely targets. Terrorists could, he continued, cause devastation through an “electronic attack” on the UK’s infrastructure and that al-Qaeda’s aim was to “bleed us to bankruptcy”.
This means that every aspect of our economy needs to be secure and resilient – not just from physical attacks and hazards but also from electronic – and that security and resilience solutions need to be sufficiently versatile to be able to respond to a plethora of threats.
The difficulty is compounded by the uncertainty of who we’re dealing with. In November 2006, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director General of the Security Services, said,“ My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1,600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas.”
The UK Security Service continues to describe the threat to the UK as severe – or, in other words, that “an attack is highly likely”.
Faced with such serious, long-term and ubiquitous threats and hazards, a coherent national security and resilience strategy is needed. However, those who make decisions about how to make things secure and resilient do not exist entirely in one place. They are spread across the public and private sectors, and are driven by varying agendas and have unique vulnerabilities.
Some aspects of security fall into what David Schmidtz, an author and scholar on history and foreign policy, describes as “collective” or “public goods”. These are goods and services that all individuals want but that cannot be produced adequately in a market system. It is hard, for example, for the entire population to simultaneously individually rationalise to voluntarily do their part to secure comprehensive national emergency services such as police, fire and ambulance.
In such cases the state intervenes, taxes individuals and then provides such services. But, many aspects of security and resilience, such as the provision of secure financial services, and secure and resilient communications systems, operate under market conditions.
The result is a UK security and resilience landscape that is as fragmented as the economic asset landscape. Strategy is highly devolved with those charged with the day-to-day operation of a particular asset, who understand the vulnerabilities best, also charged with devising their own security strategy. Yet to achieve a coherent national security, each strategy element needs to be compatible, both horizontally and vertically, with all the others.
But before calling for centralised control and tighter regulation, it is worth exploring the nature of the security and resilience system that has been created.
Privatisation of many of the economic assets has meant the replacement of rigid hierarchical public sector monopolies with a flexible network of suppliers. When it comes to coping with disruption, networks are inherently resilient. The more complex the system the better: the wider variety of actions offered results in an increased ability to accommodate a larger variety of perturbations. Therefore market forces are creating the redundancy and duplication of many of our economic assets necessary to enable the nation to cope with disruption. Likewise competition is encouraging companies to invest in security and business resilience solutions.
Public sector structure
However, regulation is still failing to create favourable market conditions for the provision of other key assets. These areas are therefore much less resilient as market failure means goods and services aren’t allocated efficiently, resulting in brittle and fragile networks.
With respect to the assets, services and systems that have remained within the public sector, resilience through redundancy and duplication driven by free market forces does not exist. Most public sector bodies continue to organise themselves along the lines described by the German political economist and sociologist Max Weber. They are formal hierarchical structures of power and authority, there is a systematic division of labour and they are governed by explicit and exhaustive rules.
Among the advantages of such structures are impartial decision making and stable administrative structures. However, among the disadvantages are stove-piped processes with information remaining in silos.
Superimposed on this, the tradition of ministerial accountability within the UK reinforces the tendency not to integrate service provisioning across departments. Additionally many of the assets and services systems associated with the public sector are largely to do with social welfare and they have been subject to repeated delegated responsibility to ensure effective local delivery. This not only makes it hard to assemble the requisite information on which to base a unified strategy, as it is buried deep within silos, it also makes it hard to agree on and implement decisive action. If power is divided, responsibility becomes diffuse. ‘Joint decision traps’ proliferate as decisions must be taken at the lowest common denominator because other departments may otherwise veto.
The challenge is to create broad consensus across many different elements, which all have unique vulnerabilities and agendas. Launched on 1 February 2007, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) is an excellent first step toward such a strategy. It is the government authority that provides protective security advice to businesses and organisations across the national infrastructure and has been created by the merger of the National Security Advice Centre and the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre.
Likewise the MOD Counter-Terrorism (CT) Science and Technology Centre established to manage the MOD’s CT science and technology programme and to work across other government departments takes a bold step toward a unified approach.
However, the sheer volume and variety of entities – public, private and some a mixture of both – that now constitute the critical national infrastructure (CNI) means that the advice is largely confined to security of the system ‘as is’, rather than tackling the big strategic issues such as structure and ownership of the UK’s critical assets, services and systems. As a result there is a strategic gap that, unless filled, may constitute a significant national vulnerability.
There is no better time than now to take a more strategic long-term view of the security and resilience of our critical national infrastructure. On 29 March, then Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the formation of an Office for Security and Counter Terrorism designed to bring together domestic, foreign and defence affairs into a single approach to the management of the security threats facing the UK. Later the same day, former Home Secretary John Reid launched the Security and Resilience Industry Suppliers Council (RISC) at RUSI. The formation of these two bodies means that the UK can begin to take a strategic and integrated approach to reducing the security threats to the UK.
However, managing risk does not simply mean reducing threats: even if a threat or hazard exists it does not constitute a risk unless it can penetrate vulnerability and that penetration results in an undesirable consequence. My recommendation is to create an advisory body, made up of leaders from across both the public and privately owned parts of the CNI, to start to tackle this critical issue. Such a body would be able to work across the public and private sectors to reduce our vulnerability.
ASSESSING THE THREAT
Man-made threats
International terrorism: It is thought that the most significant terrorist threat comes from al-Qaeda and associated networks. Although the UK has faced terrorist threats in the past, the global reach, capability, ambition and sophistication demonstrated by al-Qaeda and its associates makes this threat unique. Al-Qaeda’s networks comprise of groups who are intent on attacking US and other Western interests, as well as replacing regimes that are not deemed pious enough. This network is known to be active in the UK where a sophisticated programme of recruitment and indoctrination is well established.
Northern Ireland-related terrorism: Dissident republican terrorist groups, who have rejected the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, still aspire to mount attacks in Great Britain.
Espionage: Espionage against the UK did not end with the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. In today’s high-tech world, the intelligence requirements of a number of countries now include new communications technologies, IT, genetics, aviation, lasers, optics, electronics and many other fields. Intelligence services, therefore, are targeting commercial enterprises far more than in the past. It is estimated that at least 20 foreign intelligence services are operating to some degree against UK interests. Of greatest concern are the Russians and Chinese.
Weapons of mass destruction (WMD): The proliferation of WMD, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, presents another danger to the UK’s security. In spite of numerous international treaties and export control regimes, a number of countries continue to develop WMD programmes.
Man-assisted and natural threats
Fire: An everyday occurrence, but a fire has the potential to escalate and cause widespread crises and loss of life, typified by incidents such as the Bradford City Football Club stand fire in 1985 that resulted in 56 deaths and the fire at a 15-storey block of seaside flats in Ramsgate in 2001 that required an RAF Sea King rescue of residents.
Transport accidents: Statistically the most common cause of major disaster in the UK, frequently blamed on the overcrowding of ageing infrastructure.
Structural collapse: Such as the collapse of the Ferry walkway at Port of Ramsgate in 1994 that resulted in six fatalities.
Industrial accidents: Such as the explosion at a plastics factory in Glasgow in May 2004 that claimed nine lives and injured more than 50 people.
Storm/flood/weather: Including tornadoes (for example Birmingham 2005), torrential rain leading to flash floods (North York Moors 2005), severe storm causing widespread flooding (Carlisle and Boscastle 2005).
Landslides: Another danger to life, examples include the 6,000-ton landslide that crashed into the Shanklin Beach Hotel in March 2001. As a result, 170 people were evacuated from a nearby hotel and a number of neighbouring flats.
Avian and pandemic flu: The impact on the health of the population could be dramatic, although the country’s resilience has not yet been truly tested, despite a couple of recent
well-publicised scares.
BECOMING INVOLVED IN TERRORISM
Understanding the process of becoming a terrorist may help us to develop counter-terrorism tactics, says Dr John Horgan
Why does one person become involved in terrorism and another not? This is a very difficult question to answer but there are a series of predisposing risk factors, which include:
> Personal experiences of victimisation (which can be real or imagined)
> Expectations about involvement (eg the lures – excitement, mission, sense of purpose) associated with being involved in any ‘insider’ group
> Identification with a cause, frequently associated with some victimised community
> Socialisation through friends or family
> Opportunity for expression of interest and steps towards involvement
> Access to the relevant group
Individually none of these factors explains why people become terrorists but, taken in combination, they do provide a framework for understanding why one person might become involved in terrorism.
Avenues for counter-terrorism
How people move between different roles within terrorist organisations is poorly understood. Becoming involved in terrorism is a complex process, made up of discrete phases in a gradual process of accommodation and assimilation. In other words, there is a sense of gradual movement into, through (and sometimes out of) different roles and functions.
Some individuals appear to become involved more quickly than others, but a constant quality across all terrorist movements is gradual progression.The notion of there being a ‘moment of epiphany’ that explains some assumed conscious decision to become a terrorist is both naïve, misleading and unsupported by empirical evidence.
Terrorism will always be a product of its own time and place, and multiple motivations will co-exist for members of even the same movement. However, the most obvious common denominator influencing individuals’ embracing of their own radicalisation (at any level) towards a terrorist movement is a sense of positive expectation.
The terrorist mind
We do not engage in behaviour unless we view it as having some distinct benefit to us - the same applies to the terrorist. Sometimes that might be expressed in terms of expectations about achieving a sense of status, authority, acceptance, mission, and so forth.
As long as commitment and dedication to one’s socialisation further and further into the movement remains positive for the follower, this eventually results in the formation of a new (or at least, effectively consolidated) identity.
If we want to appreciate what, if anything, is the ‘terrorist mind’, it is probably best thought of as the product of the increased socialisation into a terrorist movement and engagement in illegal activity and behaviour that is increasingly relevant to the context of a terrorist movement.
From a personal and social perspective, this often means that a socialisation into terrorism, and those associated with it, sees a socialisation away from non-‘relevant’ friends, family and the person’s former life.
One of several consequences of distinguishing between these phases is that we might begin to develop phase-specific counter-terrorism initiatives, depending on what we ascertain is the most effective intervention point. For example, we need to understand whether we should be aiming to prevent initial involvement, disrupt subsequent engagement, or help to facilitate disengagement.
The disengagement phase
Although the disengagement phase remains the most poorly understood and least researched, I would argue that it is during this phase that practical counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at both facilitating disengagement and preventing involvement are more likely to succeed.
Terrorism is ultimately a group activity and that group will always comprise individuals who each have a role to play in the movement. Current counter-terrorism programmes don’t tend to focus on individuals. However, in my view, it is by understanding individual radicalisation, and its associated social and psychological qualities, that we can get a sense of the dynamics we need to understand in order to develop ways of promoting disengagement*.
Dr John Horgan is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence. He is also a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Prior to this appointment, he was a Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at University College Cork
* Work on this issue has begun at the University of St Andrews and will be published in 2008. See Horgan J, ‘Walking away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements’ (New York: Routledge, In press)
Dr Sandra Bell is Director of Homeland Security and Resilience at The Royal United Services Institute. Visit: www.rusi.org for more information