FEAR MANAGEMENT

Last August, in a Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, a suicide car bomb went off near a police station across the street from an open air bus station. Ten minutes later, as people crowded in the station to watch the rescue across the street, another suicide bomber drove his car into the station itself. The carnage was widespread but far from over. Twenty minutes later, as the victims of the first two blasts were removed to Kindi hospital only 200 yards away from the terminal, a third suicide car bomb went off at the hospital's side entrance.

What's interesting to me in this incident is the effort spent by the attackers anticipating where crowds would form. This is clearly a substantial tactical advance over earlier efforts (and like most developments from the proving ground in Iraq, something we are likely to see later). The attackers weren't thinking in terms of a single event but rather a series of events where they controlled the outcome. This series had a synergistic effect that far exceeded the impact of the bombs as single random events. The effectiveness of this attack was seen in how the bus terminal bombing set the expectations (shaped the battlefield) for this later event:

Flash forward 13 days to a bridge over the Tigris packed with Shiite pilgrims marching to a shrine for a religious festival. A rumor that there is a suicide bomber in the crowd created a panic that generated a stampede. 965 people die (in the crush or drowned in the river).

What's disturbing (at least to me) is how this type of "fear management" could be scaled to radically increase the effects generated by simple and somewhat random terrorist bombings. One area of potential application is the planned disruption of crowds fleeing a city. As we saw in the evacuations from Katrina and Rita, our ability to manage mass evacuations are far from adequate even in a benign environment. In an evacuation due to a dirty bomb or even minor biotoxin release, the outcome could be much worse. In either case, if we had a thinking enemy that has planned a series of events that leverage a rudimentary knowledge of crowd dynamics (as exhibited in the bus terminal incident) to disrupt the evacuation, we would likely have a catastrophe. In this situation (as with most system disruption) the crowd would be used to do damage to itself.

As part of my research on the topic of crowd behavior, I found an excellent paper (Helbing, et. al.) published in Nature magazine on crowd panic. It offers a good framework for understanding crowd panic:

• People want to move faster than normal.
• Individuals start pushing (physical contact).
• Moving through bottlenecks becomes uncoordinated.
• Clogging and arching occur at exits.
• Jams build up.
• The physical interactions at the jams build up pressures (physical).
• Escape is impaired by fallen or injured people which serves to build up the pressure to even greater levels.
• The funneling and jamming will be unlikely to dissipate since people tend towards mass behavior and overlook alternative exits.

Most of these items apply to both the local crowd (on a bridge or in a theater) and to the large crowd of millions fleeing a city (due to a hurricane, bio-toxin, or dirty bomb). It may even have applicability to market panic. To boil this down, crowd panic can be amplified or mitigated through the manipulation of the following "fear vectors":

• Acceleration: If the velocity of movement and the number of participants is under pressure to accelerate, movement will slow down. Acceleration is influence by prior expectations, rumor, and individual acts of panic. Media management is important here.
• Funnels: The crowd will congregate on a limited number of known exits which will prove to have insufficient capacity. Funneling is influenced by en-route restrictions (security cordons, disruption of transportation networks, etc.), the availability/restriction of exits, and herd instinct.
• Jams: The press of people at the exit creates impediments to movement (an emergent effect that can take many forms). Follow-up attacks on the arc of the crowd at an exit can increase the propagation of impediments and the potential for stampedes.

One thing we should expect: future attacks on urban areas will likely include aspects of fear vector management. The contest will be between which group can do the better job (the global guerrillas or the first responders).

Comments

[laocoon837]

Creating crowds for the purpose of attacking them is a completely standard tactic. In that most classical of hypothetical conflicts, a large armored thrust from North Korea, disrupting the road network so as to attack clogged up routes is an explicit part of the plan, with all the supporting bureacracy that implies. Examples are in every history book, extending back thousands of years, from all around the world.

So one should not be surprised, or describe it as remarkable innovation. It's just the plain vanilla stuff everyone learns early in their career.

[John Robb]

While I appreciate your input, I think you will find this is hardly plain vanilla stuff. You likely overstate your hand on this. Please post all of the material you have accumulated on the topic. I would like to read it.

[J.R. "Bob" Dobbs]

I think his point is that the use of crowd dynamics is standard fare in warfare. While you're correct that there are novel applications to asymmetric warfare, the use of choke points and fear to engineer a given result is really quite standard stuff; not terribly more sophisticated than seiges.

[tim fong]

John,
I skimmed the article. Alas, my math skills are not up to the task of giving any thorough feedback. But, I wanted to mention that it reminds me of the fire protection stuff an aquainance worked on. If you haven't seen it already, I understand that the Civil Engineering department at Berkeley has done a lot of math modeling on crowd behavior at fires, specifically casino fires.

[dan]

Anyone recall the Chicago nightclub stampede of a couple of years ago? If I recall correctly, some nut used CS gas which everyone took to be a chemical warfare agent, leading to a stampede which resulted in the deaths of a number of people.

I think this is the kind of phenomenon that JR is referring to, not the plain vanilla military manual theories of concentrating your enemy to focus your fire more effectively.

[Adam]

It has already worked in Northern Ireland with the Omagh bombing. Simply give the wrong location for the bomb and the security services will herd people into the blast area for you. This means that the bomb can be placed in a relatively quiet (and less well defended/observed) area, which will become a lot busier when you want it to.

And the nasty thing is that this is a gift that keeps on giving. The authorities cannot ignore the location you give (in case its right) but they cannot trust you (in case its wrong). Whatever they do they'll be wrong.

[laocoon]

JR,

I think J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' comparison to seige is apt: it is a topic both quite basic and quite vast. It's easier to give a half-dozen standard examples than to attempt anything exhaustive.

For example, during the IPB phase, you might look at likely retreat routes and place forces on them. When the paniced troops flee your main attack, they blunder right into the ambush. Slaughter ensues.

You might wish to check out the US Army FM on "Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield", "The Commander's Estimate", "Operations", and various others. There are far more examples than I could possibly begin to list, but the battle of Teutoberg Forest in 9AD is well documented by Peter Wells.

This tactic is so basic that lions use it, where the first group drives the fearful antelope right into the second group. As for driving the pilgrims off the bridge, I think that's basically the same tactic as our ancestors used in driving big game off cliffs. Driving people over the edge to their deaths is no more novel than shooting them with arrows. "Stampede" is hardly a new way of killing, whether it be in a Chicago nightclub, a Baghdad bridge, or a prehistoric hunt.

What is described in "Fear Vectors" is just the intelligent application of classical tactics, rather than the imaginationless, by-the-book tactics so many people expect. I'm reminded of Deptula's concept of "Effects-Based Operations". Many people trumpeted it as a brilliant intellectual revolution, but my team could not figure out what was revolutionary. Finally, we went straight to the source and got this answer: Americans in Vietnam behaved in a mindless and proceduraly oriented way, regardless of whether any effect was achieved or not. He wanted them to evaluate operations based on what effect was achieved, not what procedure was followed, because he was sickened at the pointless deaths in effectless operations. So EBO boiled down, in the words of the founder, to just thinking clearly and creatively about what you are trying to do and how to do it. He just made up a slogan because most Americans won't pay any attention to anything unless you tell them it is new.

Of course, it was brilliant salesmanship, but here in the comments section, I think it won't hurt to be clear in distinguishing between what is old and what is new.

I'm just one of the many folks who think GG is a very good site, and that the basic theme is excellent. The theme of rapid, decentralized tactical evolution (like OS SW) is important, and I'm merely suggesting that we keep clear how the new process interacts with the old tactics.

[John Robb]

Thanks laocoon, that's great input. I see the parallels to EBO too and put a link to that in the body of the brief.

We saw another example of this type of planning today with the triple bombing attack on the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad.

[Dennis]

At the risk of being frivolous, there was an episode of Battlestar Galactica last year that protrayed these sorts of tactics quite well (in conventional warfare).

[Alison Chaiken]

Jon Landis' novel _Blue Widows_ treats a more sophisticated example of using a first threat display to make a second threat much more lethal. Landis describes how a supply of smallpox virus is stolen leading the US government to crank up a major nationwide vaccination effort. Of course the real bioweapon is in the vaccine; the terrorists have no intention of using the smallpox. While the book isn't altogether plausible, the concept is decidedly scary. Happily terrorists have so far concentrated their efforts on chemical bombs.