Dan Kaszeta looks at the turbid stew that is the preparation for London’s 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
From fish soup to an aquarium… and back again
T
he London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games have reached an expected watershed. We are
witnessing a truly British phenomenon: a bout of panic after years of bureaucracy and muddle, and it is hard to resist saying “I knew this was going to happen.” Whilst I am certainly not privy to what is going on behind the closed doors of the Olympic Delivery Authority, there are some valuable observations that I can make on their CBRN planning.
CBRN planning at major events always faces the risk of getting lost in the noise, and at an event as large as a summer Olympics it faces any number of obstacles. At a strategic level, security and safety have to fight for resources and attention alongside other valid objectives. At the next level down, within the domain of safety and security, CBRN has to struggle to keep a place on the planning agenda. I’ve been grappling with the issues of CBRNE planning and response at major events for some time, and as such I am in a unique position to delve into the issue of CBRNE preparedness for the 2012 Olympics. An apocryphal Russian proverb tells us that it is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but hard to turn the fish soup back into an aquarium. One might apply this maxim to the current Olympic situation and so, with that in mind, here are my observations about where we are today and where we should be.
Where do we stand right now? It is very interesting to note that, for some years now, the prevailing ethos for many involved in the Olympic security effort has been characterised by a tendency to ‘not do anything special’ and to ‘carry on as always’. ‘Business as usual’ has been the catchphrase in use for several years during the planning effort. After all, Superintendent Alan King of the Metropolitan Police told us as much in the pages of this magazine in 2009 (CBRNe World, Spring 2009, p. 39.) But is that mantra really the operating
procedure we want to enter into the Olympics with? Surely an Olympic games in a city that has historically had troubles with both Irish republican and Islamist terrorism requires something above business as usual.
Lost capability in the police and military sectors
The planning process for the Olympic security effort has been underway for years, but so has an austerity campaign. The UK is operating under a different financial climate now than when the planning effort began, and one wonders how many aspects of that effort have been reduced or eliminated due to the current desire for fiscal rectitude. In the earlier days of Olympic planning, some interesting projects were in the development pipeline. The ‘Scene Assessment Vehicle’ was one such project. Chief Superintendent Andrew Sigsworth, of the Police National CBRN Centre, told CBRNe World (Autumn 2008, p. 40) that the project would “be embedded in good time for 2012”. Readers will be familiar with the fate of the Scene Assessment Vehicle program: cancellation for budgetary reasons. Those of you who read the leader in the Spring 2010 issue will recall the editorial team’s astute note that this cancellation left in its wake a capability gap the “size of Vimy Ridge.” Military capability in the CBRN field is in a similar state of flux in Britain. CBRN in the British military has seen some drama as part of the ongoing general restructuring of the armed forces by way of the Strategic Defence and Security Review and ‘Planning Round 11’. From 1999 to 2011, the primary specialist CBRN capability resided with the Joint CBRN Regiment, composed of four squadrons from the Royal Tank Regiment and one squadron from the RAF Regiment. In August 2011, it was announced that the UK’s Joint CBRN Regiment would be replaced by a Defence CBRN Wing in the RAF regiment. Why? You guessed it… funding problems. The
net effect of this move was to make specialised CBRN support an RAF-only effort. Even if the new RAF Wing develops equivalent capabilities, as promised, we all know that these transition efforts take a long time, and there is no guarantee that the new RAF capability will be a true equivalent to the capability once provided by its predecessor. Is the timing of this realignment helpful to any military efforts to support the Olympics? The answer is probably not.
Conventional security efforts It seems that somebody, somewhere, seriously miscalculated how many personnel would be needed for venue security at the Olympics. The original estimate was 10,000 security staff and then suddenly a figure of 23,700 was floated by the UK government and reported throughout the media. Filling the 13,700-person deficit will take some doing. What is important to realise here is that CBRN preparedness rests firmly on a bed of conventional security. Prevention, deterrence and vigilance are all-hazards tools. Shortcomings in conventional security only serve to make it easier for terrorists to perpetrate evil deeds, CBRN or not. The 13,700-person gap should compel us to question whether other fundamental assumptions and estimates in the planning are incorrect. It is also important to consider the effects of conventional security screening efforts. Screening measures that are too stringent or under-resourced will create queues, which will only exacerbate the large queues already created by various transportation and infrastructure chokepoints. For most terrorists, I think a large group of people milling about near a secured site is just as good a target as one inside it. Having a ‘ring of steel’ around the Olympic village and other major venues only serves to push terrorist target selection and reconnaissance onto softer targets, such as London’s hundreds of hotels, the array of national Olympic houses or the vast
28 CBRNe WORLD February 2012
CBRNe South America 2012, 13-14 March, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. More information on
www.icbrnevents.com www.cbrneworld.com
CBRNeWORLD
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