BOMBING SYSTEMS IN BOMBAY

Global guerrillas set off seven bombs in quick intervals over a 20 minute period during rush hour on Mumbai's (a city of 16 million and India's commercial hub) commuter rail system. At least 163 people died and a thousand were wounded mostly in first class cabins, on a rail system used by 6.5 million people a day. Cascading systems effects included jammed phone systems and an indefinite suspension of all commuter train service (which will in turn cause jammed highways and reduced business activity).

The radical improvement in technique, targeting, and coordination demonstrated in Mumbai is yet another example of how the innovation generated by open-source warfare is now global. Hacks on warfare's source code generated in Madrid, London, and Thailand have now made their way to India.

As anticipated, this attack is also a sign that future attacks will increasingly target systems rather than low yield targets of symbolic terrorism. As methods of system disruption improve, attacks will be aimed at more precise systempunkts that underly modern economic activity, particularly in highly populated urban zones. One key vector of activity will be to use repetitive attacks to push urban centers to lower economic equilibria (see Urban Takedowns for more) -- it is potentially possible, once the data is developed, to calculate how many attacks are needed to achieve the seven percent "terrorism tax" that will accomplish this descent. Another vector will be aimed at improving the effectiveness of cross system cascades of failure to maximize total levels of disruption (these early demonstrations are fairly crude in this regard).

Update: There's perhaps a little confusion on this analysis. I point to the Mumbai attacks as an example of a trend line on the evolution of warfare not as a singular event that will rock India to its core (far from it). Also, to Thomas Barnett's critique of 4GW and systems disruption: I believe that global guerrillas will not collapse the West any more than the Internet collapsed Microsoft's monopoly. Their emergence will, however, change things. Don't think Vietnam. Think Israel.

Comments

[Prasenjeet]

I agree that Madrid, London and now Bombay show that it's now open season on public transport around the world.

However given this I wonder why Al Qaeda passed up on the NY Subway ( http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/06/journal_why_al_.html ). That it was too low-value a target sounds odd to me-- a gas attack there would have had very cascade effects as today's attack in Bombay.

[John Robb]

Zawahiri was likely then (and probably still is) in symbolic mode. He, like Basayev and Zarqawi, are relics that have outlived their utility.

[Devang]

If this is correct, the attacks weren't the work of home grown terrorists.

http://ia.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/12sheela.htm?q=np&file=.htm

If the attacks (logistics and otherwise) were co-ordinated and mastered overseas, I would think it would be much easier to combat and prevent in the future. I'm not so sure political motives can be achieved this way, if there are any motives. The attacks were crude, and could've been much worse.

[dan]

couple of points - FWIW LeT explicitly denied involvement in the attacks, so I don't know where you're getting the idea that LeT claimed them. I suspect that this will follow the pattern of no explicit claim for quite some time until a video pops up on the internet, if it's a franchise operation, or it never gets claimed at all, if it's an ISI or other intelligence service operation.

It's also not the first time that Bombay's transport systems have been targetted - a similar attack was perpetrated in, IIRC, 1993; train attacks are, in general, not uncommon in India as a whole - so in some respects London and Madrid were developments of tactics and techniques first applied in India ( and Paris in the mid-90's ).

Apparently the Bombay rail system was operational again within 3 hours of the bombings! So, as with both the Madrid and London attacks, the disruption aspect is being overplayed at this stage.

[John Robb]

Devang, the analyst quoted in that article claims that the attacks were too sophisticated for locals and that it must have been a state special ops team. As we have seen again and again, that isn't the case. This folds into Dan's point about LeT. A more sophisticated approach is to never claim anything. Also, railway bombings are common. Systemic attacks that cover large geographies with tight timing are not. The system will bounce back, but there is a decline in usage and a cost. Repetitive attacks increase those costs substantially without much of an increase in required damage.

[John Robb]

LOL. ;-> A troll named tank.

[vox]

Did anyone else notice the black humor in bombing India on 7/11?

[g510]

As somone involved in the telephone industry for @ 25 years I should comment on the item about "jammed phone systems" that has arisen here and in similar incidents.

Any practical system for point-to-point communications necessarily depends on switching to connect any point with any other point. Switching is necessarily a limited resource: it is simply not practical (i.e. the costs would be not only "unprofitable" to carriers, but "enormous" in absolute terms) to provide switching resources to enable 100% of the terminals to be engaged in communication simultaneously. This is true for circuit switching (traditional telephony) and for packet switching (as used in Internet Protocol telephony).

Thus, there is always a limitation in the amount of traffic that can be accommodated on a network at any given time. In conventional telephony, the limit of 10% of stations is common, and equates to a call blockage rate of approx. 1 call in 1,000. (This does not scale proportionally, i.e. you can't add and drop decimal places interchangeably from each side of the equation.)

Thus, in any significant emergency, to the degree that large numbers of individuals suddenly attempt to use the telephone, the switching resources will fill up and additional requests for service (handsets off-hook) will queue for dial tone (access to switching resources). This is why civil defense and emergency preparedness instructions emphasize not using the telephone during disasters except to obtain help when life is threatened: the goal here is to prevent delays to essential traffic.

In fact there are standard practices in the industry to forcibly assure that essential traffic can get through. All telephone systems have a set of variables called "class of service" (COS, for which the plural is COSs; not the same abbreviation as the plural for "CO" for Central Office, which would be writen as "COs" with lower case "s"). COSs are categories to which individual subscriber numbers are assigned. The contents of any COS include such items as assigned feature-sets, billing/rate plans, and so on. They also include categories that assign relative priority of access to switching resources. That is, the telephone numbers assigned to an emergency-relevant subscriber (emergency agencies, hospitals, fire stations, doctors' offices, etc.) can be assigned to a single COS that grants higher priority access to switching resources than the COSs pertaining to other residential and business subscribers.

Thus it becomes possible for central office technicians to rapidly impose order on communications in the midst of chaos. The value of a variable can be altered in each COS to control the queuing for switching resources; and in extreme cases all telephones in specified COSs can simply be blocked from making and/or from receiving calls.

In other words, central office personnel can selectively disable telephone numbers other than those belonging to emergency priority subscribers, and this can be done in a matter of minutes from the time that an emergency plan is put into effect.

The outcome will be that normal residential and business subscribers will find that they cannot get dial tone and that their calls will not go through. They will of course complain bitterly about "the phone company going down." Meanwhile police, firefighters, paramedics, hospitals, doctors, and so on, will continue to have entirely normal levels of service and will not experience any significant change (except perhaps on calls outside of their own area).

If COS prioritization is in effect, it will appear to the casual member of the general public that the phone network has "crashed" when in fact it has not. My point here is to demonstrate that complaints of this nature are generally not justified, and to reinforce the point about not using the telephone in times of disaster except to save lives.

To be blunt about this, the general public have become terribly undisciplined in this area, immediately grabbing the nearest phone to call each other for nothing more than emotional relief from anxiety (by which I do not mean checking to see if loved ones are alive, but calling to merely talk about the disaster for the sake of talking, to "feel better" about it). In the era of unbridled decadence of the "consumer society," where mere wants become confused with real needs, it is almost heresy to suggest that people behave with some degree of self-discipline. Yet that is exactly what is needed. Not only with respect to not using the telephone needlessly during disasters, but with respect to conserving fuel imported from unstable regions, with respect to increasing taxes during wartime rather than foisting debt upon future generations, and so on.

An intelligent and self-disciplined population will not saturate its phone lines with nonessential chatter during disasters, will not saturate its roadways with cars during emergencies, will not engage in brawls in the parking lots of lumber yards and hardware stores as hurricanes approach, and will not elect governments that look the other way when such behaviors occur. Many systempunkts become so only because (or perhaps only when) grownups behave like spoiled children and citizens behave like sheep. A little self-discipline on the part of the vast majority would deny terrorists the ability to disrupt a number of essential systems. Or to put it slightly differntly, in the era of decentralized warfare, victory is everybody's business and everybody's responsibilty.

[John Robb]

Thanks g510. That was an excellent analysis. Excellent conclusion:

"Or to put it slightly differntly, in the era of decentralized warfare, victory is everybody's business and everybody's responsibilty."

[Mike]

Tank,

You do have a point, assuming the purpose of the bombing was straight up mayhem and murder. In that case, the cascading system failures were just icing on the cake.

However, what if, instead, the murder and mayhem were the icing on the cake, and the system disruption were the purpose?

All the (additional) attention that the train system is now going to get is going to draw resources away from other areas that might be of interest to whomever did this. Easier to transport people and material into or out of a country when eyes are elsewhere.

Got any ideas who might be behind this? AQ?
LeT? ISI hitting India for their (alleged) support of the Baluchistan Liberation Army and the havoc they are wreaking? Russians? Turkish mafia? Israelis? Kind of weird how the whole world seems to have gone up tempo.

That, to me, is the more interesting discussion thaan whether or not John links to his archives.

[salsabob]

Two key considerations. The first, as mentioned by Robb, is repetition, or more exactly, frequency. Even the power of 9/11 has diminished without a repeat. The problem with repetition for the GG, however, is that targets will harden and the probability of failure and/or capture increase. And that brings us to the second key consideration.

There is a difference between physically bringing down a system (i.e., making a system partially or totally disabled by attacking its nuts n’ bolts) and bringing down a system through mass psychological impact ( i.e. causing people to be too fearful to engage the system as either users or as providers). Physical disruptions are difficult to sustain, that is why several bombs were needed with near simultaneously explosions at several points to impact the Bombay train system, AND that's what makes it difficult to repeat without increased probability of failure and/or capture.

Psychological types of attack, however, have the potential to overcome the inherent limitations of physical disruptions. Drawn from observations and theories of public risk perceptions, a critical factor is randomness. Randomness, strategically applied, attacks the basic drive toward finding new paradigms of security (e.g., I’ll be safe in second class, I’ll be safe on the AM trains, I’ll be safe on this route, I’ll be safe using alternative transportation). That same randomness that heightens the perception of growing risks in targeted groups is the same randomness that provides higher probability of success and lower probability of capture to the perpetrators.

The sustained terror of having those seven bombs explode individually in a well thought-out random way over a 3-month time period could have greatly impacted the security beliefs of that system’s users and providers resulting in a greatly destabilized train system in Bombay, possible in India, and would have greatly increased sustained worldwide fear of such attacks. As it is now, without a repeat (very unlikely; for they probable “shot their wade”), the incident will be a historic footnote in India’s struggle with GGs and likely soon to be less thought about in the rest of the world than either the Madrid or London bombings.

Perhaps, as suggested, the potential direction that GGs are headed is away from the symbolic to the systemic target. However, further evolution may occur when strategies begin to fully recognize that the critical systempunkt is not a system's nuts n’ bolds, but the world belief systems (i.e. sense of personal security) of the soft targets that use or provide the system.

[Marcello]

"The problem with repetition for the GG, however, is that targets will harden"

Sorry, I disagree.Many of these systems are either obscenely expensive to harden or just practically impossible.For example buried power lines can be an order of magnitude more expensive to build than conventional ones.
The rail system in particular is a saboteur paradise.A small size explosive charge (even just a couple of Kg of plastic) placed on a switch or a railroad curve and detonated under a train will create a mess that will take hours to clean up and repair (and this is just scratching the surface). There is no practical solution to this.A sufficiently sustained sabotage campaign will make the system untenable.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0301/p04s01-woiq.html

"Insurgent activity has stopped most train travel between the Iraqi capital and the south and to western Iraq, according to Iraqi railways spokesman Khames al-Rubai."

[Cavolonero]

Cancelling an attack is a demonstration of your control within and organization too. ( Your boss scrapped your project ) These guys have to contest with each other in addition to fighting the great satan. I bet these guys have mondays too.

[gmoke]

Could there be any connection to the Bangla Desh bombings?

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