Beslan or Mumbai, bad guys are coming to your country.
We are sending signals of weakness.
Soon, we will have hard decisions to make, and it will get harder if we do not make the right ones.
TR
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...INRG1GCFBT.DTL
U.S. not prepared for Mumbai-like terror attacks
John Arquilla
Sunday, November 21, 2010
It took the 10 terrorists just 10 minutes to overwhelm Mumbai's defenses when they struck in November 2008. They were organized in five two-man teams, and the first waded into the crowd at one of India's biggest railway stations, firing AK-47s and tossing grenades. Soon more than 50 people were dead, a hundred more wounded. While this was going on, three other teams got out of cabs in other parts of the city and walked into two luxury hotels and a swanky restaurant, letting loose with guns and grenades. A fifth team stormed a Jewish community center, killing people and taking hostages.
After the initial wave of attacks, most of the Lashkar-e-Taiba hit men moved on before the police tactical units arrived, and soon five more targets had been struck, including a hospital. Bombs left by the terrorists at other points in the city as they moved around also began going off. It would take Indian law enforcement and military elements three days to bring an end to the crisis, by which time the toll of dead and wounded had reached almost 500.
Today, the concept of attacks by small teams at several sites simultaneously - what I have called "swarm" tactics - has caught on among terrorists. This month alone, we have seen such methods employed in the simultaneous bombings in Baghdad, where over 400 were killed, and in Karachi, Pakistan, two weeks ago, where small teams waged gun battles while a truck bomb went off at a major police installation. Recent intelligence revelations have gone further, suggesting that al Qaeda is planning to swarm cities in France and Germany in the same manner. And there is another hard truth: The next Mumbai-, Baghdad- or Karachi-style attacks could happen in San Francisco. Because, for all these warning signs, there is little evidence that our nation has made effective defensive preparations against assaults of this sort.
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