0415423511.Routledge.Understanding.Terrorist.Innovation.May.2007

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ant detail is that bombings of airliners in mid-course flight were hardly an
innovation in light of the increasing difficulty of successfully hijacking air-
planes in fact, at least 46 such incidents had taken place during the 25
years prior to the installation of the first metal detectors at airports.
As we can see from all of the points mentioned above, it would be diffi-
cult to accept the commonly cited claim that the sabotage of airliners has
been an innovative terrorist response to tightened security measures at air-
ports. At the same time, it is true that after the bombing of Pan Am flight
103 over Lockerbie, the overarching perception was that the role of hijack-
ings as a terrorist tactic had greatly diminished, and that the focus of avia-
tion security had shifted from hijacking to sabotage bombing.162 This has,
unfortunately led to a misguided assessment of future threats, directly con-
tributing to increasing the openings in the anti-hijack security system. For
instance, prior to 9-11 it was perfectly feasible to bring items such as knives
and other bladed weapons overtly on board domestic flights in the US, under
the condition that the length of the blade did not exceed four inches. On 11
September 2001, 19 hijackers using the process of backward innovation
exploited our misjudged dismissal of the hijack threat, and by using a tactic
that has already been overlooked as nearly obsolete, they succeeded in perpe-
trating the most destructive terror attack in history.
Conclusion
Chapter 2 has attempted to provide an overview of the different types of ter-
rorist tactics and technologies, along with covering the basic trends in their
employment in various contexts. What we have witnessed is that this scope
is relatively limited and remarkably unchanging. In fact when one surveys
the last 50 years of terrorist operations case by case, very few incidents strike
the observer as creative in any way. This seems to confirm the observation
cited in the introduction that terrorists are conservative by nature. The main
advances that we have seen in both tactics and technologies have consisted of
incremental innovation, in the sense that terrorists have arguably improved
in using traditional tactics and have made a better use of already existing
dual-use technologies. In this sense technological innovation in terrorist
campaigns has been a direct result of what Rosen terms technology push -
the situation in which advances in civilian technologies drive military inno-
vations, as opposed to the demand pull the scenario in which military
innovations drive advancement in civilian technologies.163 Additional points
of incremental innovation have included the increasing range of homemade
artillery, miniaturization and improvements in detonation of explosive
devices, and the greater incorporation of commercially available technologies
such as the Internet, mobile phones, computers and GPS into terrorist
operations at the planning and execution phases. Another important tactical
trend has involved the synchronization of attacks and the incorporation of
Terrorist tactics and technologies 57
various tactics into a single operation. Somewhat surprising may be the
observation of another emerging trend, and that is the increasing emphasis
of modern terrorism on technologically crude modes of attack, as documented
by the global rise of suicide bombings, the emerging preference for televised
beheadings, or the hiding of roadside explosive devices in corpses of dead
dogs and sheep. This suggests that the current global wave is not moving in
the direction of high technology, confirming Hoffman s earlier prediction
that terrorist devices will be innovative in their simplicity. 164
Several important implications stem from these findings. First, as we have
seen above, the business approach to innovation arguing that terrorists
always seek new technologies in order to boost the ever-increasing lethality
of their attacks is fundamentally flawed. Moreover, the example of attacks
against civil aviation further documents how non-linear the trends in terror-
ist innovation have been and how vastly the approaches selected by different
terrorist organizations have varied. Consequently, it seems difficult to paint
an abstract global picture of terrorist innovation without losing a great deal
of accuracy and representativeness in the process. This is the main reason for
the selection of a case study approach for this book: it is simply impossible
adequately to assess what form the terrorist threat will take in the future by
treating terrorists as a single entity. Individual organizations have fol-
lowed their own specific innovation trails. On the one hand we have groups
like PIRA, which can pride itself with many innovations such as the inven-
tion of the car bomb, the pioneering work in time delay and remote detona-
tion, and the employment of blast accentuators and booby traps.165 On the
other hand we have groups like Sendero Luminoso, whose greatest invention
was a home-made grenade produced from a drink cans packed with gunpow-
der and nails and fired from huranos traditional sling shots.166 Exploration
of the reasons behind the differences in the approaches of different terrorist
groups to innovation will be the objective of the upcoming chapters, where
four case studies will explore the innovation patterns of four very different
terrorist organizations in detail, followed by an evaluation and explanation
of the factors responsible for the variance in the level of innovation
demonstrated by each individual group.
3 Aum Shinrikyo
The purpose of the case studies presented in this section of the book is by no
means to provide an exhaustive profile of the given group. Rather, the cases
are structured in a way that allows the most efficient examination of the
phenomenon in question. The first part of each case study is designed to
provide the background in operational progression of the given group, with
key focus placed on identifying the significant points of shift in modus
operandi. The second part of each case study then consists of an analysis of
the relevance of each individual variable, followed by an overall assessment
of the factors that played the most critical role in the innovation patterns
demonstrated by the respective group.
Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) was a Japanese apocalyptic cult
that operated in 1987 1995, gaining worldwide notoriety after its 1995
sarin gassing of the Tokyo subway, which became the deadliest terrorist
attack with nonconventional agents to date. Aum s violent activities,
however, went much deeper than this one alarming incident. Between 1989
and 1995, the group perpetrated a number of assassinations of internal and
external enemies as well as at least 20 attempts to release chemical and bio-
logical substances, killing a total of some 100 people. The importance of
Aum Shinrikyo stems not only from the fact that it was the first organi-
zation to use an actual warfare agent for terrorist purposes, but also from its
unique desire to kill indiscriminately anyone not belonging to the group.
Armed by a cosmic doomsday ideology consisting of a millennial mix of
Hinduism, Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism and the prophecies of Nos- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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