Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

One of my audience at a speech I did last month said he was glad "to get some of that history" from events that occurred in the 1990s.  It was hard to see that time as "history" unless you are under 30.  Yet, when we look around today, the terrorists are very much the same, and driven by the same kinds of perceived wrongs.  We haven't learned from history, and we need to do more before we have an incident that will make Orlando look small.  

The Baadar-Meinhof Gang was shooting people ind the streets of Germany in the 70's.  They were getting support from the East German Stasi, the well-known secret police, now joined with the new German government.  [for a longer account see BBC's report from  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6314559.stm ].  When they were finally captured, a group of Arabs sympathetic to their cause, or so they said, captured a plane load of German tourists and offered to exchange them for those that were imprisoned.  I remember that very well, because I was just getting into hostage negotiation and was trying to learn from current events.  There was no negotiating with these kinds of people.  They were motivated, heavily armed, and they had hostages that we had to take into consideration.  Killing hostages was one of their objectives, so it is difficult for a negotiator to win any kind of concession.  They don't want to give up people whom they really want to threaten or kill.

In 2002, Moscow was traumatized by having 40 gunmen, mostly Islamic extremists who were Chechens, took over the Dubrovka Theater where 850 people were out for an evening of entertainment.  Over 170 of them did not make it back home.  The Russians tried gas, which I thought at the time, was a pretty good idea.  It just turned out that the concentrations of gas killed as many people as the terrorists.  These kinds of extractions need planning and practice.

The Orlando shootings fall into a similar vein.  An extremist shoots lots of people to demonstrate that he is willing to kill.  The police reacted quickly, engaged the person, and he retreated.  They tried negotiating but it didn't go well and they had to go into confined space to get him.  In that small incident, 49 people died.  Want to guess what the casualty totals would have been if 40 gunmen had showed up there?

We are not prepared to deal with the scale of terrorism that is going on everywhere in the world.  Twenty or thirty attackers take on defenses in many countries, and they do it almost every day.  Our FBI and Intelligence Services have done remarkably well in spite of government neglect of their programs.  They always do, because they put their country over politics.  We need to put some money into advancing the approaches to mass hostage situations.  There seems to be few new ideas.