Terrorist Strategies and Tactics

Step 2 Understand What Potential Terrorists Wish to Accomplish, and How They Operate. While there are would-be terrorists who are content to create nuisance events - hoax bomb threats for example - serious terrorists aim to cause major damage to people, property, and society, in four basic ways. 

Actions may fit into multiple categories. For example, the 9/11 terrorists misappropriated airplanes, crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, causing fire, mass casualties, and dismption of communications and financial market activity, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending and the lives lost in subsequent military action. 

The advance planning and the associated surveillance provides the best opportunity to deter, detect the attack during the planning stages so that the attack can be stopped before it happens, or to delay an attack to lessen its impact or provide time for military or police response. 

Different groups of terrorists tend to organize their attacks in common patterns. For example, A1 Qaeda favors broad-scope attacks that are technically advanced, but do so much less frequently than Palestinian terrorists who act more frequently - by some accounts more than 20,000 attacks on Israel from 2000 to 2004 - with a single operative, on a relatively smaller scale. 

Therefore, by being aware of the results certain terrorist groups wish to achieve and the tactics used by these groups, a facility owner can better understand how the facility could be used by the terrorist. 

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