..........admit now that Beslan was not a one-off. NVD please explain.
Beslan was where the muslim terrorists seized a school and raped and killed hundreds of kids in Russia.
OK, let’s review what happened in Beslan, when the 31, or 34, or 50+ (reports vary) Chechen Muslims took a school full of children hostage and killed many of them, along with most of themselves in a direct confrontation with small arms and small-scale explosives.
The attack was done by selecting a soft target with lots of children and women, ie, people who don’t live in a state of tactical readiness. These people were taken hostage, tortured, raped, abused in all manners. For the savage manner in which this attack was made, the west has largely ignored it as a one-off attack, a tit-for-tat response by Chechens against Russians, rather than seen as an attack by Islamic militants against an easy target with locality to Chechnya. There were non-Chechens in the attacking party, at least two Arabs and one African muslim reported in the attacking party.
The success of this operation (from the standpoint of the Islamists) painted a prototype of a large-scale, multiple-party attack on a soft target. Even in a militarized state like Russia, where civil rights are few and far between and there is nothing like the ACLU to play little yappy dog nipping at the heels of police, the response was confounded by a lack of training, a lack of knowledge of the tactical environment and poor communications up and down the chain of command. Add into all of this the problem that the innocents in the mix were heavily composed of women and children and we have a situation that paralyzes reaction forces.
In Mumbai (Bombay, whatever we want to call it), we have a similar MO - selection of soft targets, hostages, small arms and small scale explosives, coupled with attacks on responding forces, and a high death toll.
The west has used technology to respond to the “bomb threat.” So now if you want to mount a terrorism op with a high loss of life, you’re going to have to choose something other than a bomb for the attack vector. Beslan and Mumbai now show that a small group of attackers with a relatively low capital investment and a game plan formed up-front can wreck havoc and tie a major city in knots for days on end - in both the Beslan and Mumbai cases, about three days.
There is no technology widget that can be used to respond to this type of attack. The only credible response is to harden targets, and not with technology but response training. The US is infatuated with technology as a response to very basic security problems, and this creates a very thin barrier to terror attacks inside the technology barrier.