Detecting terrorist activity: defining the state's "threshold of pain"
- 2005
The war on terror has shown that terrorists and insurgents are highly vulnerable to the states that hunt them once they have been detected. The difficulty lies in acquiring them as targets in the first place. This article draws on ideas contained in "Complex Warfighting" an Australian Army paper published in 2004. Argues that the problem of acquiring terrorist targets needs to be tackled in two ways: first by improved technological processes (ISTAR), and second by using knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of such technologies to get the terrorists to reveal themselves. Notes that the old adage "prevention is better than cure" continues to be true, thus more attention should be given to the preparatory phases of terrorism rather than on dealing with crisis management once terror attacks have occurred.