The Role of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom in Securing the State Against Terrorism

Abstract

The horror of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to worldwide condemnation. All parts of the world mourned the victims of the attacks with a sense of shared loss that was heightened by the fact that many of the victims were of nationalities other than American. Allies rushed to the support of the United States, and NATO promptly declared that the attack on the U.S. could be considered an attack on the entire nineteen-nation alliance. But while the U.S. chose to hike defense spending and intensify its efforts on homeland security, the effect on European countries was somewhat different. The terrorist attacks constituted a watershed in threat perceptions in the U.S., but to a large number of European countries the threat seemed less novel. Terrorist activities within national borders are not new to many states in Europe. Indeed, the continent’s history is scarred by a relatively large number of terrorist activities and groups, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque separatist organization Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Greek far-left group November 17 Organization, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and the Red Brigades in Italy, to name but a few. Europeans did recognize that the “new terrorists”—that is, transnational Islamist terrorists—posed the threat of mass casualties, and were generally uninterested in bargaining or other modes of formal conflict resolution. But European governments also had more experience than the U.S. with terrorism, and they tended to see the new terrorism more as a continuation of old forms of terrorism than did the U.S. At least initially, for instance, European officials were less inclined to think that terrorists would use weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Furthermore, the U.S. was perceived—justifiably—as the prime target of Al Qaeda and the transnational Islamist terrorist movement over which it loosely presides. Therefore, threat perceptions did not change as dramatically in Europe, and the sense of an urgent need to boost homeland security was not as strong as that prevailing in the United States. For most European governments, existing counter-terrorism measures were seen as basically adequate, although some adjustments were made to deal with the perceived threat of terrorism from WMD. Yet because the proportion of Muslims in European populations—especially in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom— is far higher than it is in the U.S., and Muslim populations are generally less integrated, the challenges in terms of technical counter-terrorism (intelligence collection through surveillance and penetration, pursuit by police and/or special operations forces) in Europe are in some ways greater than they are in the U.S. However, falling military