On November 26th, 2008 ten terrorists infiltrated Mumbai. The response lasted more than 60 hours. Subject Matter Expert, John Spencer, explains what happened and how we should prepare for the future.
Image credit: Telegraph India
John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies for the Modern War Institute at West Point. John is a researcher and subject matter expert for the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks. He is also the host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast.
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Host: John Scardena (0s):
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Host: John Scardena (1m 41s):
Welcome back to the show, everybody at your host, John Scardena. I am so excited for this episode. I have a really special guest, I'm really honored to have him on here, it is John Spencer. He is the Chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He's also a subject matter expert on the Mumbai attacks that happened in 2008. In fact, November 26th, 2008. So it's a 13 year anniversary. John Spencer also is the Urban Warfare Project Podcast host so make sure you check out his podcast. It's really great content. But if you can back up with me for about a month and a half, you remember that I went out to NATO to speak at the urban environment summit there about a month and a half ago. We talked about that on the show. I heard several presentations, one of which was a standout by far, and it was this presentation about what happened during the Mumbai terrorist attacks. John went through all these really good details outlining what happened, what the responders are doing, what emergency managers should be doing. He had several key components. They're really great for our audience. Today is the 13 year anniversary. John, welcome to the show.
Guest: John Spencer (2m 54s):
Hey John. Hey, honored to be here. Appreciate it.
Host: John Scardena (2m 57s):
Yeah, absolutely. Let's just dive into it because when you gave your presentation, we're going to try to take a, what was it, an hour presentation into 30 to 40 minutes with injects and some questions? So it's going to be a little different than normal, but can you give a general perspective to this audience of emergency managers, first responders of what happened from A to Z and kind of a strategic level?
Guest: John Spencer (3m 23s):
I can sure, try John. So you know, that I was there in 2018, which was 10 years after the attacks. This attack happened on November 26th, 2008. The people call it twenty six, eleven, almost like our 9/11. So commonly referred to as the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks or 26, 11 for short. On November 26th, 2008, basically 10 operatives of a Pakistani terrorist group that had been trained and almost conducted like a Navy seal type of infiltration, a seaborne infiltration. They came in, they actually launched from Pakistan, traveled by boat. They had a massive deception plan to get into India. And Mumbai is, is a mega city. So it's a city of about 17 million at the time that sits on the coast of India. But they launched from Pakistan, made it a night C insertion, which was incredibly impressive into two different loading or landing sites. So there's 10 terrorists, they split up into two boats. They actually camouflage even the boats look like fishing boats and they came in on our fishing slums. So as an urban warfare scholar, just the amount of planning that had to take to get these guys into position in using basically the city, the systems of the city and took advantage of basically open gaps in security.
So you had these giant fishing slums in India, there's giant slammed all over in Mumbai, but we're able to insert and not really cause any attention inserted into areas that wouldn't call police basically if they saw them. So they took advantage of all that were camouflage, look like a tourist. So they're dressed like an American in clothes with the classic European backpacks. They even hadn't had the religious braces, which is just mind blowing. We noted that they basically scouted all this plan and this recon years in advance. They even used an American Pakistani named David Hedley who went to all the sites for, for a long time, took photos, do GPS targeting. I mean, this was such a coordinated plan, which we know is coordinated by Pakistani intelligence services and the Pakistan military train some of these terrorists. I think you heard me say as a kind of a military scholar, what I found up-front and foremost incredible was that the actual 10 terrorists weren't like Delta operators or Navy seals, they were actually like privates to my mind, but they each had a satellite phone in their ear, which was connected back in Pakistan through secure telecommunications. They were basically being remotely controlled. So remotely controlled humans to be able to pull this off because they had less than a year of training and they, but still, that was incredible.
Host: John Scardena (6m 23s):
It's also incredible to think about the amount of intelligence that just an earpiece can provide, because when I'm envisioning this and I don't know, this is like how legit, this was, either had open source or they had maybe a satellite imagery or they had, you know, even the news once, once it broke out, but to be able to give direction, blindly, to people with minimal training and that precise is truly scary to think about. You know, and just the amount. So when I think of like the staging of 9/11 and the 9/11 commission, when that was processed, all the terrorists were here, legitimately quote, unquote, legitimately, they use systems to infiltrate the planes to be able to get on.
They didn't come by sea in the middle of the night and that's really interesting that like the tempo of what Pakistani, you know, these 10 individuals had to do in that short amount of time, it was go kill it and die. Right. I mean, that was essentially the mission.
Guest: John Spencer (7m 35s):
Yeah, absolutely. They were all supposed to be suicide bomber, basically suicide terrorist. And that was part of the, basically proxy warfare, right? We call it proxy warfare where one nation is attacking another, but doesn't want to be known that he's doing it. So the plan for these 10 terrorists where they all would die and basically they all did that, but one who made a big mistake. That's really the only reason we know so much about what we know. Yeah. They did intercept some of the communication that was happening from Pakistan to the terrorist. But the fact that this one guy didn't die is where most of the information we know about why, how it was conducted and everything.
Host: John Scardena (8m 11s):
Yeah. Well, he messed up, but good for us. Good for the good guys.
Guest: John Spencer (8m 17s):
Yeah and it was a first responder basically who literally grabbed his weapon and took around to the chest that allowed another fresher, another policemen to tackle him.
Host: John Scardena (8m 27s):
Yeah. A hero.
Guest: John Spencer (8m 29s):
Exactly.
Host: John Scardena (8m 30s):
So they’re now on the shore there. So you're talking about giving this reference of slum dog millionaire and the makeup of the city. Can you talk about using the systems of the city to get into the city?
Guest: John Spencer (8m 46s):
Yeah. So Mumbai is the fourth most populous city in the world. It is extremely dense and we often say that in urban warfare scholars about density per square mile and in some parts of Mumbai, it's up to 86,000 people per square mile. That's because if you've ever read, there's a book called Planet Islams, which is really talking about India, there's over 43% of the Mumbai city population lives in a slum and that's 9 million people. Some of those slums are a million people. So, Slumdog millionaire, the famous movie is about a slum in Mumbai called Novari.
That has over a million people and all along the coast, if you actually see pictures of Mumbai, you see the entire coast is built. It has slums, fishing, slums and actually most people don't understand, even some of the sounds. Like the bar are built on top of basically the trash heaps that were created by the city. So they'd go out and dump the trash and they built homes on top of the trash eats
Host: John Scardena (9m 48s):
Like that's nuts.
Guest: John Spencer (9m 48s):
Yeah it is nuts. So that's like 9 million people who are outside of your city governance system. Right. So that's how you can use places like that, that aren't secure, right? So it's not the, the favelas of Rio that are very dangerous. We went on a tour of the Dabar supposedly to help people see that Dabar is a good place and they have economy. It didn't give me that feeling, but they basically don't have services extended to them. There's some, but there's no pool. There are police kind of in there, but you could see how it would be easy to move through them and there'd be a lot less. Although this plan had multiple basically fail-safes right. So they split up into teams as soon as they hit the ground. So that way, if one team was discovered and stop, the entire operation was still happening. They also use, not only did it use the flows of the city, right? So these open gaps in security that they can insert, they even knew the timing of the city. So at this time on November 26th, 2008, at this time of night, there was a major cricket game between India and England, which was huge to them. So almost like the entire 17 million person city is glued to a TV watching this game. Somehow the terrorist knew that in time, their night see insertion to that net, it's crazy.
Host: John Scardena (11m 19s):
Wild. Yeah. The amount of detail that went into the planning of this, it sounds from like a preventative side. I know we talk about, there's eight steps to terrorism, usually in the US. But like from a preventative side, it sounds almost impossible with a lack of security forces in a 9 million person population slums to, you know, the camouflage essentially. What I found fascinating, was they didn't want to integrate with the people there. They wanted to look like tourists and I wonder why that is, is it because like, I don't want to deal with the tourists. I'm just going to let them go wherever they want to go, or?
Guest: John Spencer (12m 5s):
Yeah. You want to become the clutter, right? You want to become the noise. Clearly. They're not going to look like they had shortcut haircuts, but they're Pakistani, and they're not gonna look like Indians. You know, a group of male, military age males that don't look like you would be abnormal, but they wanted it to like the clutter of the tourism. And we've all seen backpackers and you know, whether you've been to Europe or whatever. So they've had these giant backpacks, which were normal to civilians, but you couldn't insert with that size of a backpack unless you disguised yourself like the clutter. These were basically backpacks from hell, right, John. So they had AK 47’s, pistols, handmade bombs, a little bit of food to survive, supposedly drugs to the hype them up near. They were literally backpacks from hell that they each had on their backs.
Each person was its own basically killing machine. When they basically executed the planet inserted from a preparedness aspect, I think it is important. So the Indian state did do basically like the 9/11 report and it did only, it came out after I visited, which was interesting. You know, I visited in 2018 and walk the ground of every site, but I didn't have this report. So I got to read this report afterwards and of course the intelligence that was coming from across international organizations, you know, all the spooky organizations was that this attack was getting ready to happen. That and the Mumbai police even visited every one of the sites that was attacked and said, hey, you need to do more into preparation for what we believe is this attack. So they really get you to some of the, I think for me, some of the private and public relationships, right? So, there are five sites attacked, two hotels, a private cafe, a Jewish community center, and a public rail station. Four of those are publicly owned, so you can't make them do anything, but so they visited each site, the police didn't say you need to do more to protect yourself. That's a really tough conversation to have with a public organization who has its own security, but it's a, it's complex in a city like this, especially.
Host: John Scardena (14m 21s):
Did, just for my reference, because I knew that they have a history of, I think suicide bombers, they weren't expecting an insurgency, a takeover essentially, or stopping in the city. Do you know the preparation of each of the sites? Did they actually, I don't think the hotel is basically what I hear from the hotel is that they probably didn't do anything, but did any of their sites take that initiative to say, okay, we're going to put up measures here to try to prevent?
Guest: John Spencer (14m 48s):
That was really frustrating and what we tried to get, so it was tough. We went to each site like the two hotels there money-making organizations. They didn't want to talk about 26, 11. Matter of fact, we were quietly rushed to a different private room and they erased all record of it. One of the cafes, which was the first one hit the Leopold cafe it’s not like that. Right? So they still have bullet holes in the walls, holes in the floor. The two owners are very open about it, they talked about being visited. But like you said, so Mumbai had a history of terrorist attacks and bombings, and it has a major one, like in 2003. And they had one in Bangladesh in India recently. So they were on high alert for bombings. So they had actually changed like at that cafe, the protocol, and were searching every backpack coming through, which is really eerie feeling. You're talking to the owner who, his brother, was at the front when the two terrorists, if we walk through each attack, the two terrorists approach, the cafe, they stopped, they look like tourists with backpacks and they would have been searched entering. They stopped, he saw them on the phones and all of a sudden they pull AK 47’s and enter shooting and then you don't have anything against that. Yeah.
Host: John Scardena (16m 3s):
It's nuts. So, okay. So that was, that was the first event, right? Yeah.
Guest: John Spencer (16m 9s):
So let me walk you through the attacks, right? So they land in two different sides of this. If you think of the city is like an island, kind of like Manhattan on two sides, which is incredible, at night, using GPS. Get the ground, they're supposed to sink their boats and there, these are private. So one of them didn't. So we actually have one of the boats, pictures of the boat, and they break up into four different groups, a group of four and three groups of two, and make their ways to the different attack sites. Most of them get in taxis and they leave bombs in the taxis, homemade bombs that are meant to explode when they get out. They take taxis, just hail taxis to different sites.
There are five sites. There was a cafe, the Leopold cafe, there was two hotels, the Taj Mahal hotel which was just the most famous hotel, basically in India, it's iconic, the Oberoi hotel, there was a Jewish settlement house and there was a train station, which is crazy. I think you remember him talking about this, John is, I didn't understand, you know, there's like 7 million people commute into Mumbai a day. There's only three north and south. So most people live outside of the city of Mumbai, just like most major cities. Right and they travel every morning. If you've ever seen a picture of trains in India, you've probably seen a train of Mumbai, which is thousands of people hanging on to trains. It's insane because 7 million people commute in on three tracks. It’s nuts as you think about infrastructure and stuff like that. But there's one called the CST terminals, like the basically grand central station in Mumbai, that was the base of the fifth site. So these terrorists hit the ground break up in a two man groups, basically getting taxes, leave bombs in taxis, and then go to each one of those attack sites. Again, in the beauty of this, the coordination of this attack at about 9:30 PM on the 26th of November, 2008, they all attack. So what we say is basically this mega city, they attack that once with two main groups. But it literally, if you think about EMS, it felt like the entire city was under attack. That was the chaos that they wanted. So not only the five attacks almost happened simultaneously, but five bombs exploded in other locations in these taxis that are just driving around at the same time.
Host: John Scardena (18m 40s):
Yeah. It's amazing to think of putting on that hat of like social engineering. It doesn't, I mean, this highlights so much. 17 million people, right, live in the city and have 10 people, five different sites. Now all of a sudden between media, between rumor, and between sounds and everything else now a hundred percent of your area feels infiltrated. Now you feel like you're being attacked by an army. I mean, that's really what happened with seven seven attacks. It's what happened with Paris, which is also, I think happened in November. So like there's several events that show that, like, it doesn't really take much to, to shut down major cities, by the way we've built those systems.
I did this in my undergrad, are natural disasters actually happening more often, or is this like the communication technology changed and we're looking at data and that it's just like, yeah, if there's a hurricane in the US but in Japan, they didn’t hear about it then, you know, blue skies. Right. But now because of social media, especially now because of social media, let alone 2008 and because of media, 24 hour news cycle, you're going to shut down major things without a lot of effort, which is kind of scary to think about an implication we have to consider to get on top of very quickly. I mean, how do you decipher between, we should tell everybody and maybe let's figure out how to close this up very quietly so that we don't shut down all of our critical infrastructure. Yeah.
Guest: John Spencer (20m 25s):
It is not easy. You know, even when we're in Los Angeles, we asked, so the Mumbai attacks became almost an ominous around the globe kind of like 9/11 did, is could you prevent it? And even in the US in Congress, there were briefings on, could we prevent a Mumbai style attack in our major cities? That's a tough question. I think we could, and some differences in services from Mumbai, I discovered some of those, and I'm not an expert in Mumbai, but I definitely saw, they have like a colonial British system on purpose. So their natural policemen doesn't have a gun. They're in this attack, there are heroes throwing rocks at terrorists with AK 47’s because they don't have a weapon, but they're the first responder on the ground. So we were talking about preparedness, but then you actually have response and, and how you respond, right. How do you respond in chaos like this? You exercise it, right. So, you know, better than. I do these major exercises so you can exercise your command and control systems and exercise your response systems. I think that's what Mumbai highlighted to this city was, you know, basically the lack of investments in security infrastructure, the lack of they had SLPs for responding to major attacks, but they weren't implemented like they had. Then there was a major gap on basically the echelon of requesting support, but we've seen a tax like this in the past where it was, it's the heroes, that first responders that you want, somebody there immediately with the right equipment to respond.
So here you have, terrorists with AK 47’s and lots of grenades. You have a single man responding with either no weapon, or he has it. He has a handgun and a flak vest that's meant to stop shrapnel and not a bullet and a plastic helmet. All those lessons were learned here and I think from a disaster response, even the EMS control center, there were, they said almost 1,400 phone calls to 911, basically between 9:00 PM and 2:00 AM during this attack. That's basically a call every four minutes, the chaos that they wanted to instill, they beautifully executed.
Host: John Scardena (22m 45s):
Yeah. Unfortunately they took terrorism to it's to its true definition, right? Yeah. When you're talking about that style of tack having here, I think the huge differences, one, I think our intelligence acts, which is really great, but I think Boston bombing. The amount of resources that responded to that, you know, they knew who they were very quickly and they were going door to door. I mean, there was such a huge force to try to eliminate the threat there, but I think it could do this in a second. It took forever to get just resources in play. Who's doing it and what resources do you use? And you know, who’s in control of that here? We had everything from, you know, this house will happen with the Navy yard shooting. I talk about that cause I was, let's just say intimately involved in that response and recovery to after action as well. Our biggest problem is that because it was in the national capital region, you had everyone responding, you had local state, federal, you had private, you had people who had the badge on, had the gear on and you had off duty. I mean, literally everyone was there and they were all armed to the teeth. Unfortunately with Navy yard, the big lesson learned is, I don't know if you've studied that, that the security officer re-holstered his weapon as the most. So just for the audience sake. So there was a security guard with a weapon. He hears what he thinks might be shooting. You can see him on the camera, takes his gun out. He hears the sound stopped because in a building, it sounds very different than outside. So he doesn't know if it's shooting or not clearly. He re holsters his weapon, and that's right. When the active shooter came around and killed him, which is a big training opportunity, unfortunately. But going back to Mumbai, can you give us now the, so we know that the locations, we know that they were getting intelligence through earpieces. We know that they weren't very well-trained, but there was like a seal style training, but it did take forever to, to get things in place. So can you talk about that timeline there for a second? How many hours was it before? Can we actually start backwards from star deficient finish? How many hours was it? And then in the middle of that, what was the chaos that they were doing?
Guest: John Spencer (25m 15s):
Yeah, so, you know, the five sites, Leopold cafe was a site of a cafe. They basically just shot it up, killed 10 people on the spot and then continued moving to our main target, which was a Taj Mahal. You had the train station, the main, basically Grand Central Station in Mumbai, the Taj Mahal hotel, which is the iconic hotel of India basically. You had this Oberoi hotel and then you have the Jewish center. You didn't have this clarity yet at the time, right? So you just think is a massive attack. So there is a response to all these sites. There are heroes responding to all of them. There is actually a railway police at the railway, throwing chairs at the terrorist just trying to survive. 58 people were killed in basically the 90 minutes they attack. But the plan of the terrorist was basically the besieged, these sites. They wanted like terrorism, they want an international recognition of the attack. Unfortunately they got that. As you talked about within hours within three hours, there's not a security perimeter around these sites, but there is a media perimeter because everybody knows where the attacks are happening now. Especially in the hotels so the two hotels to Taj and the Oberoi, they entered, they shot the place up. Now they're basically holding ground, which was not unusual for any terrorist attack at the time, rather than just attacking them, run their holding ground.
Basically, especially in the hotels, going door to door, which is a kind of a terrorism lesson learned, they're just knocking on doors and hoping that the guests opened and then they, many of them did and they're just killing them as they opened the doors. It's nuts, but so their response is right? So three hours, you basically, you just starting to have the sites identified in the explosions that have happened. You've narrowed down the sites and you have, the commander is actually out in the field and you got a lot of criticism for that. The overall commander is trying to, which I think we were talking about in Los Angeles was, you're trying to kind of understand in disaster response about a common communication system, but maintaining a common operating picture. You'll basically, we say in the military is everybody understands the ground was, was not done in Mumbai because there was so much confusion even to the locations. But some of these locations, like the Taj Mahal, about getting the floor plans and all that caused a lot of first responders to die because it was so complex inside the hotel. We stayed there, it is a labyrinth of old and new structures and hidden everything. So we talked about, so basically the India, once they recognize where the sites are and recognize this is a major terrorist attack there, the command on the ground tells everybody who's in the perimeters to hold what they have basically set up a perimeter around them.
Guest: John Spencer (28m 16s):
And now you have a siege and they are waiting for a national level, forced to respond. It's called the national security group or the, basically the black hats basically think of a Delta force to respond to this terrorist attack. Unfortunately, that that group was in new Delhi on a three hour flight away. Plus we talk about authorizations for a national response like this. They couldn't get everybody thought they were waiting for these forces to come. And there's also, there's a Marine. What they called the Marcos, basically the Navy seals, the Indian Marines, a couple blocks away. They could have jogged to these sites that also needed permission from the federal government to respond to the terrorist attacks.
You had Indian army, Navy, I mean, it was crazy. So three hours after the initial attack, these terrorists are going inside and just killing, people are dying. You have, unfortunately the security force on the outside waiting for a national response. So the black hats and the NSG are trying to make their way to Mumbai. They don't get there until zero eight the next morning. That's nice. Yeah. They only got there by literally taking a civilian aircraft, getting there, and then they couldn't get from the air field to these sites. Then once they, once actually get there, it takes a while to plan their attack. Especially at the Jewish settlement, they try to take a helicopter into the top. They get lit up. I mean, these are, I talk about this, how to eliminate a terrorist that's embedded in some dense, urban train, like this concrete, there are a lot of, and some heroes who almost disobeyed orders and still tried to enter in the terrorist in the basically their 9/11 commission report talk about how the terrorists were prepared for that. As soon as they entered they moved to high ground and the hotels did that for them, they moved to high ground so that anybody who entered through any interest that they knew about would just get a rain about AK 47 and grenades on them. So the tactics they use were crazy. The one that we didn't talk about, which I think is important about, especially for disaster preparedness, so that the two guys who attack the train station. So they entered this train station, which I went to at 9:30, 10 o'clock at night. I'm like, why would you attack a train station at night? And just not understanding the traffic of Mumbai that's rush hour, that's everybody trying to leave. So it was, it was like nine o'clock in the morning for me in New York city. It was crazy at that time. So they go ahead.
Host: John Scardena (31m 12s):
Really blown away actually by that, because I lived in Tokyo a couple of times, and at night it is just as packed. And you said 50 people died right at the train station? 58. Yeah. That I would have actually thought it would have been a lot more if you can cripple it, if you can, if you went into like Shibuya, or if you went into one of these major train stations during a rush hour moment, I mean, that's as crazy as this sounds. I'm glad more people didn't die. I mean, packed. Right. So.
Guest: John Spencer (31m 45s):
Yeah, me too. I mean, you got to think of food. You've got, you don’t have them trained again these are privates in my mind. So they're spraying and praying with their AK 47. So I don't have the numbers of wounded. I had the number of dead. Got it. So yeah, a lot of people want it, but they shoot it, shoot the place up for 90 minutes and they basically go off script. We don't, we're not exactly sure, but they leave the train station and then basically go on a wild rampage. They try to enter a hospital, which is amazing and well, a big lesson learned is this hospital heard about the attack happening nearby. They went into security protocol and locked it all down, locked Every door, locked every patient in the room and then the terrorist tried to get in. They couldn't. So they saved hundreds of lives by doing that.
Host: John Scardena (32m 29s):
That's a good call-out, you know, good for trading of like you what's your coop essentially when something like this happen.
Guest: John Spencer (32m 36s):
The only reason I mentioned that they go on this rampage is that one of the security personnel is a chief of the antiterrorism squad. It was really important in this story is headed to one of the sites, right? Because we're just responding. He's driving to the train station, doesn't notice the terrorist, I've left the train station in his car, just they ambush his car and they kill the head of the anti-terrorism just by a fluke of random, bad luck. But that message goes across the radio, John. And this is, you know, we do this in the military. Like we don't send names across the radio when people die, we send, we encrypt the names, but his name as dead, dead had a huge impact across all of Mumbai’s security forces that were at each one of these sites. It had a huge impact on morale that he was dead.
Host: John Scardena (33m 29s):
Yeah. I mean the event is now winding up to be not just international recognition, but so many call-outs of, you know, psychological warfare, urban warfare, coop planning. I mean, there's a lot of lessons learned here. You know, you're talking about the hotel structure, typically, interestingly enough, we want floor pans to be very complex because that usually saves lives. But when it's taken over that, now it's reversed. Now you have a lot and you have to clear. So like, if people haven't done like active shooter or active assailant incidents, but the clearing of buildings takes forever because you want to go room by room and you're passing over people who are wounded. You have to, because you don't know how many threats are left. So if you have a really complex system, that's also going to take forever just in itself. One thing I thought was really interesting, what you're talking about, how they were told, quote, unquote, these privates for told to take the beds, right. And put them against the windows to light them on fire, to make it even look even worse. Again, psychological warfare.
Guest: John Spencer (34m 49s):
Absolutely. I mean, do you think, what is the purpose of these attacks? They're meant to die in place, but they wanted that international media attention and they got it. They get told that the two of four guys inside the Taj Mahal multiple times, have you started your fires and they hadn't. So they kept getting told to start fires, but taking the mattresses and put them up against the windows and light them. Eventually they do. So as an EMS guy, not only are you fighting active shooters, but now you're fighting a massive fire with everybody's trapped inside their rooms. It's just a nightmare scenario, but they got the image that they wanted, which was basically the Taj Mahal, this iconic, I mean, almost like the world trade centers burning.
Host: John Scardena (35m 31s):
Yeah. So just for the sake of time, we're definitely going to have you come back on and probably dive into this a bit, but we're looking at this situation here. I don't know I've compared it to several events actually for maybe the US perspective that people are understanding those events 9/11, Boston bobbing, but also internationally, you know, 7/7 in Paris and Mumbai is a, I still remember what had happened actually. And just being like confused of like, wait, is this a military takeover? I still remember the images of the Taj Mahal? And I'm like, wait, how is this working? At the time as a, you know, younger guy, I was like, wait, is that a mall? I actually thought it was a mall, not the Taj Mahal, which is one of the stupidest things in the world. But I'm now looking at it from a planning prevention, response perspectives. So in terms of lessons learned, you've already started to highlight several of the lessons learned. Can you go through and say, okay, if I'm talking to an individual who's on this, on this podcast, listening to this podcast and it's their job to do preventative of terrorist attacks, and they're working with the DOD and they're working with all these other groups who response organizations, we even have members of the FBI listening to this podcast. So if you're gonna give them an outbrief saying, you need to do X, Y, and Z in preparation for these kinds of style of attacks, especially when it's so well coordinated, especially when you have intelligence being fed constantly, especially when you know, these individuals are basically giving seal level training and, or, you know, communications surrounding, what can we do to limit the loss of life and you know, how do we protect our systems essentially?
Guest: John Spencer (37m 27s):
Oh, that's not a hard question. I'll drop.
Host: John Scardena (37m 30s):
It was a long winded one too. So that's good.
Guest: John Spencer (37m 32s):
But it's like, look, I'm not, I'm not an expert in security magazines, but I've studied this attack in detail. I think it was important that we visited 10 years later, really in the same locations. Could this happen again in the same city, unfortunately, based on what we saw it could. Some of that's based on, on echelons above us, basically national and city level investments in infrastructure investments in EMS. So one of the ways you prevent this, that one is the Intel sharing aspect of it and I think that was happening. Was it happening at the level that it should have, but the Intel was being pushed down in this case. It was not of course being action, right? Cause you can't action every bit of intelligence, but what you can do, and I think is important is layered security aspects, right? So you can't militarize your security and escorts that public versus private via the public. These hotels don't want an image of a security state, but we have figured out ways to do basically hidden security aspects. But this started, this started out in blue water in the Navy. And how did they get through the Navy, the coast guard in the shore police? Most of that was because it was under investments, right? Like 20 boats out there that weren't there at the time, you have good heroes that are hiring fishing boats to do patrols because they don't have gas for their own boats. And go ahead. That's ridiculous. Yeah, it is. It’s still a fact today. So the coming, you have all the solutions, right? The commission and the investments you're going to do to change this, you know, that you're supposed to buy more boats, but they don't have the gas for them. You're supposed to buy helicopters to get people, right. So you're not going to respond in New York city over the ground. Right? So either you have people on motorcycles or they do, or do you have air assets that can move your immediate response personnel quickly in a mega city like this, you're not going to drive there. That was the lesson so that you need helicopters. Oh yeah. But you need to invest in the money. It's going to take, to keep them maintain and to keep them gassed and ready to go. Cities decide well, that's a risk I'm going to take, I'm not going to invest in that. This is what we saw happening to the layered security system. Right. We had this in the United States and I really looked at the Las Vegas shootings, the shooter. We had, you know, a hero with a gun on him within a minute. Not, this was a three-day siege. There are many reasons for it, but I'm against you. You have to invest in training all the way down to the individual man on the street. Right. This is what we saw, even if you had a gun in Mumbai, you're a policeman with a gun you hadn't fired in two years. They didn't have ammo. Ease, no ammo, no training. No. Yeah. So the list is long, right? And I'm not criticizing, like I said, heroes in this event, all across the board, this is about investing in your layered security systems. Right. But if you have to understand the culture, right. From pacifism, your Buddhism, all those aspects, you had to have this layer of response. So even if you had the layer preparedness, you had to have your exercises in place on who's going to respond immediately. In lesson learned here is you can't wait, right? Because people are dying by the minute. People will have to even endorse disorganized fashion, have to respond, right? So we see that first respond your first active shooters across the world, right? Your school policemen. You have to move forward and close the distance and engage the enemy. Even if it's just to know where he's at. Right. That, that was another huge aspect of this. I think they learned that, but they created basically a Nash, basically that NSG, that black hats, they created one in Mumbai and they have first response teams, the recon one, things like that, that will respond faster. I still arguably think it won't be enough if this happened again, but it's all about how much you care to invest in your EMS.
Host: John Scardena (41m 42s):
There's several highlights there in my world, the emergency management world, we call that a business impact analysis where we go through and we say, what's the risk versus reward. The couple of examples I give people is that we have, the technology. We can put parachutes on planes on commercial planes, but we don't because the cost of maintaining parachutes and gas and weight and all that stuff, they basically unfortunately looked at it and said, you know, the rarity of a plane going down versus putting a parachute on every plane. It's not, it doesn't equal out in terms of financial perspective. The really brutal side of emergency management of, you only have so many resources, where can you put those resources you don’t have. People sometimes forget we don't have unlimited resource and so resources, personnel, resources, maintenance, resources, cost. So that’s a factor, I will say, in the US some of the things that you're highlighting, thankfully we already have in place. The fact that the black hats are like, oh, maybe we should have a group here in the fourth, largest city, or one of the top four largest cities in the world. Maybe that's a good idea as that's kind of nuts that that even had to happen. I like how you you've noted. I've been hearing you throughout this conversation, you've called every single person who's tried to do something, a hero. I agree with that. I agree with that a hundred percent, anytime somebody puts themselves in danger, whether they're trained, they're not trained, is a big deal. You're talking about rocks being thrown, going back to the Navy yard shooting. A person saved 30 people with a blow horn. When an active shooter came into a stairwell and pointed off pointed a shotgun, which is craziest shotgun versus a blow horn. The guy throws a blow horn and he misfires and then runs away. And there's 30 people behind them unarmed. And so doing something is always better than doing nothing, creating your own version of chaos.
The difference between an insurgency when they have their ear pieces in a typically an active shooter, active shooter is psychologically broken and they want body count. We have found more than one, which is absolutely disgusting that hey have a euphoric experience that, you know, bodily fluid, whatever they get excited. They don't want confrontation, this was very different. They were okay with confrontation. They were prepared for conversation, they were constantly being fed information to be able to not become psychologically broken. Right? So you have two totally different aspects of active shooter versus terrorists. This is why sometimes FBI designates active shooters and terrorists differently, even though they kind of have the same goal, sometimes that notoriety of what they've done. The last point that you're really making very strong here is training. I don't care where people stand on the issue of how armed security forces are Mumbai attack is a pretty obvious answer of maybe where you should fall. But training training, training, training means everything and the resources of training our company, Doberman, pushes training very hard. We have the Readiness Lab, which has these podcasts, which allow people to think about it. But we also go to the urban search and rescue trainings and we go, and we do trainings for first responders. We do trainings all over the place because, you need to understand a coordinated response in this stuff. Really great call-outs, so I'm going to leave you with the last word, talking about your perspective of Mumbai, and also just because I'm a fan of what you're doing and the work that you've done, if you can just happy to give a pitch, I'll even put this in the notes for the Urban Warfare Project podcast. So tell us about Mumbai and tell us about your podcast.
Guest: John Spencer (45m 55s):
Yeah. So Mumbai again, a fascinating study, not just because of what happened and actually walking the ground, and which is amazing. I tell everybody I had the dream job to do that because I did envision the most dystopian mega city of just complex, like downtown mega city aspect. That's actually, when you walk the ground, now, the feeling that I got with each site was actually pretty open. So that was something different that you just don't get unless you are. I have a dream job that I get to study this stuff and get paid to be a student. Right. I agree with you on training, you have a job, everybody and especially, even in the military, we value so strongly leaders and training that you're basically a student of life and you're always studying or training in preparations while you're doing your job. We saw that, especially you and I did in Los Angeles with this SWAT team and their training schedule was there either on an operation or they're training? I can't value that. So my podcast is just that it's my studying of the full spectrum of operations from the disaster repair, you know, disaster response to, you know, high intensity warfare. So I have X other experts come onto my show and I think that the whole world, we all have to continue to learn.
Host: John Scardena (47m 17s):
Yeah, good call out it. This is obviously a, a good moment to note that emergency manager dealing with 90% of what I deal with is natural disaster, hurricanes taking out critical infrastructure and populations, 10% doing with terrorists and the really, really big stuff of a nuke one-off in a city, whatever. But this is where the worlds collide. If you have an insurgency or you have, you know, a war happen, a good example of world war II, who's doing the recovery more to well DOD, but the DOD has really taken on an emergency management function of restoring critical infrastructure. So there's so much emergency managers can learn from historical events, whether it's Mumbai attack or otherwise, you know, war events. This is a, again, a huge fan of the work you've done and the Urban Warfare Project podcast definitely check it out if you're one of our audience members and we want you back on some time a job, because lack of time, oh my gosh. I just want to talk about this for like the next four hours. So just for everyone listening to the show, I already told you about the podcast, we'll put it in the show notes. If you have questions for John, you can reach out to him through our social media channels. We'll tag him in all of our stuff. You can also start listening to his podcast, which I'm sure he has contact information there. If you don't want to ask it to the general population, which you should, because there's going to be a lot of really good response there. But if it's an individual request, you can always send us an email at at info@Dobermanemg.com. We'll send it over to John and we want you back on every week. So, John, thanks again for coming on and for the audience, we'll see you again.