How to Stay Alive in a Terrorized Hotel
jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com
jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com
Challenge #1: The hotel has hundreds of exits. You have, in the instant case, two men. At best, what, a dozen? Two? If you gave the Secret Service their pick of two dozen men, anybody they want, and ordered them to protect the same entrances, they would say "It can't be done". And preventing egress is every bit as hard.
Challenge #2: It takes high levels of training to hit a moving target by anything but luck. Your men likely don't have it.
Challenge #3: You can't pursue anyone who runs from the scene. You don't have the manpower and it crimps your kill-the-innocents game plan.
Challenge #4: Minutes after the incident starts armed adversaries start arriving. They have effectively infinite reinforcements. And you're totally cut off.
So the question for the terrorist game theoretician: how do you kill someone running from the scene of a terror incident? You don't. Your best bet is to herd, trap as many as you can, and slaughter at a leisurely pace while the cops set up a perimeter outside and wait for someone who knows what the #$'( they are doing to take command.
So if you're ever a civilian caught in a terrorist attack, and your primary objective is getting away: pick a direction, preferably away from other people. Run in a zigzag fashion. Make it behind cover (like another building), change direction, and beat feet -- nobody ever dies more than a block from the scene (except of injuries sustained at the scene).
Now, if you were a civilian whose primary goal was stopping the terror attack rather than individual survival: there are several hundred of you and two of them. They're holding guns, not the Spear of Destiny, and they're busy getting their jihadi high on. Run at the closest bad guy screaming bloody murder, tackle him, and stab him in the eye with your car keys. If there are two of you, split to two angles and do it. Hopefully other folks will follow your example -- if they do, the terrorists will end up with their faces stomped in (guns don't help much when you're on the floor getting kicked by 20 people) and most of the civilians in the building will not.
If you're the first cop on the scene, great, use what they've figured out about school shootings: the priority is NOT to contain the incident. That is the TERRORIST'S priority. YOUR priority is to get in there and start putting as many bullets in his general vicinity as possible, to give him other things to think about rather than "How do I take hostages, secure my position, and turn the inevitable rescue operation into a total bloodbath?" Terrorists who are busy taking cover behind an interior wall to avoid getting their heads blown off are terrorists who are not killing anyone presently. And remember, all you have to do is keep it up a few minutes for the civilians to bug out and the cavalry to arrive.
Even zigzagging won't help against a hail of bullets. You're likely to get a few hits.
That said, if you jump out the window and break both of your legs, you are going to be the dead person. I haven't actually tried this, but I imagine it's pretty easy to finish off someone that can't move with a machine gun.
Even so, you're pretty much guaranteed to be killed like livestock if you stay, so running away is still the better strategy. Hitting the fire alarm may also be advantageous, as it will make it harder for the baddies to see and hear (water, flashing lights, loud klaxons), and it might help others feel that natural instinct to get the hell out.
Let's also not forget that gunshot wounds are not guaranteed fatal; the shock of being hit is far more severe than the actual damage caused by the bullet. Not that being shot is all that much fun, of course, but you're statistically likely to survive.
Since I'm rambling, let's also bring up the oddity that normal people can be coaxed to riot with surprisingly little provocation, yet when their lives are directly threatened by a small number of aggressors, many will cower in fear and be led like cattle.
Since I've never been in that position, I don't know how I'd handle it.
Movie theaters have a limited number of exits, a large number of people who are conveniently sitting down, and they are easy to get into.
For this reason there are some countries where movie theater bombings were popular who would lock the viewers in when the movie starts to prevent a bomber from planting a bomb and going to the toilet while it goes off. Of course, that doesn't work well if you have suicide bombers.
Overall once you start thinking about soft targets like this you realize that they are easy to attack if you have motivated killers. If you then go down the path of this article and start worrying about those attacks then your priorities are all screwed up.
Would be interesting to know if this writer who worries about a terrorist attack on his hotel enough that he barricades himself in and carries extra supplies and weapons took the time to put his seat belt on on the cab ride from the airport.
What has dental flossing your laptop (which appears to be a strategy copied from Sean Connery in 1960s era Bond movies with a strand of hair) got to do with a terrorist attack on a hotel? Because terrorists who are about to launch an assault on a hotel have first popped up to your room to take a look to see if you've got a .pr0n directory.
And thanks for the advice on slipping a knife past TSA. Great idea. Hey, advise readers to try to get a knife past a TSA agent.
Also, the whole thing about high floors is BS. Why? If I was a terrorist my next move in hotel attacks would be do go with a repeat of the Brighton hotel bombing. Book rooms months in advance, plants bombs in those rooms, set them off months later destroying the hotel. This article is a typical example of planning for the attack you've just experienced.
Frankly, he should take Schneier's advice and just not worry about this stuff.
If it is easy to get a knife past security, I want to have mine so I can fend off the terrorists that smuggled them in too.
The TSA is very bad at screening. I have smuggled in liquids on all of my recent flights. The reason they yell at you 50 times in line to take the liquids out of your bag is because they cannot detect them when you sandwich them between electronics. (Recently, a friend of mine accidentally went through security with a full CamelBak of water. Guess what, the x-ray machines don't detect water.)
That way you'll actually be able to disarm the attacker without breaking the TSA rules and without having an extra knife for someone to take off you.
Sorry, mate, but this rose to this level for me. It's someone who's obviously been faced with the possibility (indeed, having stayed at three hotels that have been bombed) and came up with a solid plan to work his way out of it. Interesting and hacker-worthy, to me at least.
Plus, he didn't say high floors. The height constraint is very specifically laid out, including considering how good the local fire department might be. Having watched a bakery fire in Ecuador's second largest city and then watched a pickup truck with a 12 foot wooden ladder show up, his reasoning immediately resonated with me.
So either he finds it relevant or is a karma whore. I like to give the benefit in general, so I'm going to go with the former.