T
he information gathered and gained within the hostile reconnaissance (HR) process is the key to the success of a threat. We must apply a mix of knowledge, skill set, and professional bravery to understand, prevent and, most importantly, learn from those that carry out HR.
As a practitioner in all things ‘hostile’, I believe it’s important to separate the theoretical understanding of hostile reconnaissance (HR) and move it into the realm of reality.
It’s my view that we often fail to see the true reality of the ‘opposition’ threat and fail to prevent further actions or consequence. Hostile Reconnaissance is a live beast: it moulds to site and people vulnerabilities, and it has to be placed against the strong facts as we know them.
It about understanding the true threat is around our people and places at this exact moment.
How can we identify a true threat, if we don’t believe that?
When we review incidents of crime, terror and foreign state activity, we must not continue to strip out the HR as just a learning point: it must not be consigned to the bin of history and lost opportunities.
As a UK Government SME (subject matter expert) within the worlds of Hostile Activity, Detection and Threat Mitigation, I know that many mistakes have been made and many
11 © CITY SECURITY MAGAZINE – SPRING 2024
mistakes continue to be made. My concern is that we are blind to the threat. With this understanding, I recommend an approach that addresses these questions:
• How do we apply the clues and markers that readily identify hostile activity and the associated HR?
• How do we truly attempt to understand the motivation of the threat? Do we ever attempt to think like a hostile operator?
• How do we develop an understanding of the world around us in enough detail?
This is a world of varied threats: Foreign State Actors (FSA), Organised Crime Groups (often proxy for the FSA world), political protest, targeted high-value crime and conventional crime. All play by a similar set of rules – rules that we fail to fully understand.
What we know
Strong, but true assumptions remain the core of our baseline understanding. We know that all persons and groups carry out HR prior to the outcome they wish to achieve. These periods of hostile observations can be as
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compressed as multiple times over 20 minutes or stretched out over weeks or months and even revolving campaigns. Without the information that they gain within their activity, they can’t be successful. If we accept this, then we should also accept that we have all of the advantages against the ‘opposition’. We control the castle.
Mapping the threat
Threats to people and places takes many forms. From the physical – the targeting and attack of site users – to the more strategic cyber and organisational penetrations that see significant if not extreme organisational attack and everything in between. They can all have a tangible effect on business as usual.
Mapping the threat remains key to learning the lessons of the past. If we understand that a venue/person/event is potentially vulnerable to hostile activity, then it is possible to both identify with high certainty where this activity will take place and actually predict the ‘event’ itself. This mapping should happen, but often it doesn’t. Humans fear risk, we fear committing to a statement. I believe we should not miss this critical step. The mapping of the
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