Counter-terrorism: Encyclopedia - Counter-terrorism

Counter-terrorism

Counter-terrorism refers to the practices, tactics, and strategies that governments, militaries, and other groups adopt in order to fight terrorism. Counter-terrorism is not specific to any one field or organization; rather, it involves entities from all levels of society. For instance, businesses have security plans and sometimes share commercial data with the government. Local police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel (often called "first responders") have plans for dealing with terrorist attack. Armies conduct combat operations against terrorists, often using special forces. Building a counter-terrorism plan involves all segments of a society or many government agencies.

Counter-terrorism - Counter terrorist tactical units

Today, many of the western countries have special units, designated to handle terrorist threats. Besides various security agencies, there are elite tactical units whose role is to directly engage terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks. Such units perform both in preventive actions, hostage rescue and responding to on-going attacks.

These units are specially trained and equipped for CQB with emphasis on stealth and performing the mission with minimal casualties. The units include take-over force, snipers, EOD experts, dog operators and intelligence officers.

Examples for such units are the Israeli YAMAM, U.S. State and Local Police SWAT teams (also known as SRT, HRT, or TRT teams), the British 22nd SAS, the Austrian Cobra unit, Canada's JTF2, and the German GSG-9. However, it is rare that military units such as Israel's Sayeret Matkal, the US Navy's DEVGRU (NSWDG), the US Army's SFOD-D CAG, commonly known as Delta Force and the like actually engage in counter-terrorism operations, as they are largely prevented by either jurisdiction or posse comitatus law from operating in their own country.

Thus, the majority of counter-terrorism operations at the tactical level, are conducted by state, federal, and national law enforcement agencies, or intelligence agencies, such as the US's FBI HRT, the ATF, Mossad, Shin Bet, or ALFA. Obviously, for countries whose military are legally permitted to conduct police operations, this is a non issue, and such counter-terrorism operations are conducted by their military.

The majority of counter-terrorism operations actually take place at the intelligence level, through the use of covert surveillance (HUMINT), signal intelligence (SIGINT), satellite intelligence (SATINT), and electronic intelligence (ELINT). According to the US Army's Anti-terrorism level 1 training brief, the majority of terrorist cells are exposed during their surveillance attempts as it is the only time they are visible. By the time they carry out the actual operation, it is usually too late.

Some famous counter-terrorism actions of the 20th century include the Entebbe raid by Israel, the Waco raid on the Branch-Davidian compound by the US Government, the response to the Achille Lauro hijacking, the Munich Olympics hostage rescue attempt, and subsequent assassinations, and the Battle of Mogadishu, more famously known as the Blackhawk Down incident.

Counter-terrorism - Counter-terrorist units by country

See also

• special forces

Categories: Articles to be merged | Counter-terrorism | Law enforcement | Terrorism | Warfare

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Counter-terrorism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki