The three main types were conventional low impact (CLI), conventional high impact (CHI) or chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) (Sinai, 2007). Terrorist also have cyber-warfare as an additional type of warfare in their arsenal (Sinai, 2007). You can view it in two different ways knowing about the types of warfare and understanding them. Whatever type the terrorist decide to use it ends up empowering them by getting their message a crossed while instilling fear.
We will start off with CLI which would be bombings and shootings against a soft target resulting in a few casualties (Sinai, 2007).
The locations could be a school or public transportation such as the Thalys train which was in route from Amsterdam to Paris on the 21 of August 2015. The point of such an attack is to harm and kill people as the terrorist know that there is a good possibility that the attack could be over very quickly.
The CHI attacks are planned out extensively where the method of attack will create great harm and kill as many people as possible.
This type of attack could use explosives or a detailed plan for a deliberate attack. They can also use other means such as September 11th, which is considered to be a CHI due to the mass casualties the Airplanes created (Sinai, 2007) or using a bomb in a populated area such as the Boston Marathon and the coordinating attack in Paris back in November 2015.
The third one being CBRN being the worst of them all, this type of attack is to produce the maximum amount of harm to many individuals as possible.
Such an attack would have a prolonged affect not just on the people where the attack took place, but on the world. The recent chemical attacks that have taken place in Syria resulted in strategic attacks on specific facilities. Now nuclear attacks are deadly not only to the people, but to the land where an attack may take place. These type of attack will kill hundreds even thousands and will make the area unlivable for a very long time. Now Cyber-warfare being the addition, this could be used as an antecedent to the other methods talked about above (Sinai, 2007).
These attacks should never happen, but as we all know and have seen in recent years many of them do. They all have lasting effects to thousands of people for many years to come. The attacks can vary in outcome such as cause chaos within the local population to war with other countries. They can also create economic disarray to many countries throughout the world. People will not feel safe while terrorist continue to carry out these types of attacks just because they do not agree with someone’s religious or political ideas. Terrorist evolve and will find different ways to conduct attacks, we also need to evolve to stay ahead of them and on top of our security. We need to ensure we have properly training individuals to combat and counter terrorist attacks.
I definitely disagree 100 percent that terrorist’s actions are considered to be a explainable and they are “rational” actors (Gerstein, 2010). These actions are unacceptable and should not even be considered to be acceptable in any way. I understand the reasoning behind the attacks regarding lost land, others taking over their country. Even with that said, what right mind thinks its ok to create deadly weapons for bodily harm get your point across or because you don’t share the same views.
If we sit down and have a civil conversation with them, maybe would be able to understand the reasoning behind these attacks, but just because you understand them does not make it right. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, built a database of three hundred and fifteen suicide attacks and there was a clear conclusion: “What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal of remove of modern democracies and withdraw of military forces from their homeland (Lemann, 2010). Once you take terrorists to be rational actors, you need a theory about their rationale (Lemann, 2010).
It is impossible to predict a terrorist’s behavior, we can never really understand or know what one is thinking. No matter what happens in the world when it comes to beliefs or political views people will always disagree and some may want to prove a point. We have seen it even here in the United States when it comes to disagreements with views and politics. Rather than hoping that President Trump succeeds in making the country great again, they want him to fail.
Now terrorist believe that killing people will change minds and that they’ll get what they want. Killing is an effective way to get attention, but it is far from the right direction to go when you want to change the people’s mind. You will never be in a society where everyone has the same views and you must be willing to except that in order to coexist. There will always be that one group of people who see things differently, which means there will always be some form of terrorism.
Prior to 9/11 terrorist attacks were far and few between, now these days they are becoming common occurrence. There are too many different groups to be able completely defuses terrorism all together. I do believe we will be ab le to get it back to where the acts of violence are again far and few between, but the War on Terrorism will grow before it gets smaller. This will start to force other countries to get involved, this will force countries such as German to grow their military forces. Using the “rational” actors is a means to justify their reasoning for killing. No one will ever be able to understand them fully or predict their actions.
September 1984, was when the largest bioterror attack happen. The location of the attack was Oregon, a brown liquid was pour into the salad dressing and salsa buckets at a Taco Time salsa bar. The group that carried out the attack was the community of Rajneeshpuram, they had moved in to central Oregon towns and were causing trouble between the locals. Tensions boiled for many years prior to the attack then it happened. The leader of Rajneeshpuram was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh an Indian guru that bought 64,000 acres of land to start a community.
Salmonella being used as a weapon is something most people would never think about. It is kid of genius if you think about it, salmonella poisoning is an effective to harm as many people as possible. Having a way of using salmonella from meats and eggs, then putting it into the salad dressing knowing it would be used in restaurants took a lot of planning. If you eat food that is contaminated by salmonella there is a very high possibility that you will get sick. Now, to retrieve salmonella from meats or eggs and put it into a liquid to get people sick, you have to really hate the people you are targeting. When this attack happened it poisoned more than 751 and 45 were hospitalized with salmonella poisoning.
The reason this attack is a threat to the US and other country’s is because it doesn’t take much to obtain salmonella and it can be easily put on other foods or in water. Although no one died during the attack, if they would have gone with their original plan of using salmonella typhi, or typhoid fever, it surely would have resulted in numerous of fatalities (Thuras, 2014). Salmonella is highly effective and will get the person sick that consumes it. If someone decides to add something stronger into it such as the original plan of the Rajneeshpurams it could be very deadly.
When it comes to Novichuk agent it is developed into a a ultra-fine powder rather than a liquid or vaper (Moore, 2018). There are over a 100 formulations in the Novichok family that was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s (Moore, 2018). Due to the chemical agents being related to pesticides, their development was sometimes cloaked as an agricultural effort (BLOOMBERG, 2018). The biggest reasons this agent was developed so easily is because its components are not on any of the banned chemical list.
There have been two recent attacks using the nerve agent, one was against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. They were found in a park in the UK with their eyes wide open and completely white (BLOOMBERG, 2018). The second attack was against Charles Rowley and his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess. Novichok can enter the body several different ways contact with the skin, it can be inhaled or even eaten.
One of the reasons that Novichuk is so dangerous is because there is little known about this nerve agent compared to others such as sarin. Professor Sella stated that it can be detected, but you will have to know what you are looking for (Neville, 20018). If little is known and first responders do not know what they are looking it makes Novichuk one of the most if not the most dangerous agent around. There have also been some Novichok agents created to resist standard nerve agent antidotes therapy.
Learning about the Novichuk agent is frightening knowing that people are really willing to use this type of attack. This type of nerve agent is something you truly will see in the movies and we have to move very quickly to catch up with it. What really disturbs me is how we have so much information on when it was created, who created it and the “Super Power” countries are having difficulties detecting it.
Chlorine is used around the world for many things, it is widely used for water purification, sanitation, and the manufacture of modern medicines (Sparrow, Syria: Death from Assad’s Chlorine, 2015). It is essential for human well-being in today’s world and we have known that for a very long time (Sparrow, Syria: Death from Assad’s Chlorine, 2015). Chlorine has is being used to decontaminate water to make it safe to drink, there are many water treatment facilities that don’t have the security to guard chlorine. Department of Homeland Security has many jobs and one of them is to protect certain facilities.
Bashar al-Assad is known around the world and one of the biggest reasons if for using Sarin gas in bombs on the people in his country. There has been many countries offering to help with chorine to teat water and vaccinations for kids which he has rejected the request just because of different political views. The neglect for his people and his actions has caused concern such as polio and lice as well as other diseases in his country. With someone willing to treat the people of his own country in this manner, we have to find a way to deal with him and it will take not just the United States. We will be dealing with Assad until he is no longer in power.
There are security measures in place to protect water treatment facilities, but we need to ensure that we continue to improve these measures. We also need to ensure we monitor the transportation of large amounts of chlorine within the United States. This will prevent chlorine from getting stolen and used in a negative manner. As long as we can protect our facilities and monitor how large amounts of chlorine are being used, we shouldn’t have a problem with it getting into the wrong hands. Like in the military you should always improve on your defenses no matter how good you believe they are. Someone is always looking to get past them.