Defence Against Terrorism: The Evolution of Military Surveillance Systems into Effective Counter Terrorism Systems Suitable for Use in Combined Military Civil Environments. Dream or Reality?

This paper explores some of the issues surrounding the evolution of existing military capabilities, especially in the area of ‘short-term’ surveillance and threat assessment, where required reaction times may be counted in minutes or seconds and illustrate what can be achieved by reference to the development by AMS of a harbour protection system to address both civil and military requirements. An understanding of the changing nature of the threat is key. The very lack of predictability means that it is much more difficult to bound the ‘battlespace’. This in turn means that surveillance solutions will be required to cover larger areas over long timescales with a much more diverse set of ‘targets’, reliably and cost-effectively. The paper seeks to address to what extent existing military products satisfy these requirements through effective integration strategies and what capability gaps still need to be addressed. The larger scale of the surveillance task is also likely to impose much greater demands on the human operators. This in turn can only increase the pressures to provide increased automation for fusion of data and information from a wider range of sources and automated situation assessment to provide timely warning of threats. These are key areas of research and development both within AMS and in the wider research community and ones where the development of counter terrorism systems could benefit significantly. The development of harbour protection systems, based on a heritage of military surveillance, command and control systems serves to demonstrate the effective evolution of military technologies to meet defence against terrorism objectives. This approach shows how military technologies and the integration skills attained through their development are just as valuable in the civil domain and as dual use systems by civil and military organisations. The key conclusions from this are that in this specific area it is not only possible but an effective approach to evolve civil and military equipments and capabilities to create systems that are effective in countering terrorism. It is also clear that those companies at the forefront of data and information fusion research will be able to contribute to an enhanced large-scale surveillance and threat assessment capability to counter terrorism without hugely increased demands on manpower and budgets. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Whilst terrorism has existed through the centuries, it is often restricted to a region or country, usually involves demands and an escape route for the perpetrators, in many cases infrastructure is targeted and Paper presented at the RTO SCI Symposium on “Systems, Concepts and Integration (SCI) Methods and Technologies for Defence Against Terrorism,” held in London, United Kingdom, 25-27 October 2004, and published in RTO-MP-SCI-158.