Hostile Reconnaissance: Learning the lessons


threat must include the possible related HR; it is a predictable process in all of its stages: on- line, physical and insider leakage. It’s also highly predictable that it won’t be seen. If we know where to look, why to look and when to look, we will see everything and we would stop most things happening. Significant hostile activity mapping has taken place over many of our private sector and governmental key sites, but in my view it is neither predictive nor anything more than a general cover-all.


Understanding the detail of the threat


The ability to understand the detail of the hostile activity threat and related HR is a critical part of effective hostile reconnaissance. What motivates a specific individual, group or country signposts both what their HR will look like and how it will materialise on the ground.


It is a game of detail – the clothing, the movement, the reaction, the appetite for risk: they all feed into how we perceive and deal with threat. No one group, one country or one person are the same – we are humans, our activity is unique and should be seen as such.


How we perceive the threat


Perception of threat remains the greatest of friends to the hostile operator – it is the cloak of invisibility that allows for constant, directed and highly effective HR against many people and places. Generally, we perceive threat based on gender, ethnicity and over-all appearance. We fail to understand the heuristics and biases of our own lives lived and the structure of our minds that this has created. Our opposition seeks to take advantage of this and nearly always places its appearance of hostile operator in direction contradiction of what we would expect to see as a threat. So most hostile activity is neither difficult nor ineffective, because we don’t see them in the first place.


Developing a skill set to prevent hostile reconnaissance


Skill set development is key in the ability to truly identify, pressurise and prevent those carrying out HR. It is an art to identify hostile threat, it is a constant process of mistakes made and a commitment to learning from those mistakes. Rather than the promotion of hostile activity after the fact (and many events


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fit this profile), we should be obsessed with countering this activity in the first place.


As we stand, we are losing against the opposition


Opposition is the true word that we must use. Rather than an obsession with good and evil (that always depends on individual perception), I believe we should see the countering of HR as a high-stakes game. Remove emotion, remove what we think we know and begin to apply the fundamentals of mapping, threat perception and skill set development – and we can start to begin to win. Because, if done right, this is both an achievable and highly actionable outcome. I’ve always believed that the motivation to protect is greater than the motivation to harm – that is our advantage if wish to counter HR in all of its forms… and the associated outcomes.


Simon Riley CIS Specialist Trainer and UK Government SME


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