Early results from the latest attack on London's mass transit system are in. The bombs, built in a fashion similar to those used in the earlier attack, failed to fully explode (only the detonators exploded). Despite this, the city was quickly drawn into a massive security lock-down that rippled across the world (NYC and Boston increased security measures). There are some factors that indicate that systems disruption may be have been the primary goal of the bombers. These include:
- Simple rules of city-wide disruption were used (north, south, east, and west). Looking at a subway map, police officials were struck by the geographical layout of Thursday's attacks, three senior investigators said. Like bombs in the July 7 attacks, Thursday's bombs appear to have been placed on the four points of a compass. (via the NYTimes and Valdis Krebs). The selection of targets is a crude rule of thumb for high value node selection (for disruption) rather than symbolic locations.
- Repetition of the attack is more important than the quality of the explosions. "The first question you need to ask is whether this was really an attempt at four more serious explosions, or an attempt to say, 'We can do it again,' " said a former senior military official with access to British intelligence reports. "It is less probable that this was a bad batch that didn't go off, and more likely that they did it this way on purpose." An important goal of urban takedowns is repetition of effort. This demonstrates that an attack wasn't a black swan (an extremely rare unexpected event), but rather something that should be a factor in economic planning.
- Suicide terrorism was trumped by rapid swarming. ... investigators said their leading theory was that the latest attempted bombings were a copycat-style attack, possibly by a group of people who admired the terror strike two weeks ago by four British bombers from the West Yorkshire area of northern England. The rapid perpetuation of the disruption effort was deemed more important than the message of moral resolve a suicide attack would have made. It is easier to recruit guerrillas/terrorists from the emergent community for simple system disruption (the attacks are easier too).