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What drives terrorist innovation? Lessons from Black September and Munich 1972

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Abstract

Understanding terrorist innovation has emerged as a critical research question. Terrorist innovation challenges status quo assumptions about the nature of terrorist threats and emphasises a need for counterterrorism policy and practice to attempt to not simply react to changes in terrorist tactics and strategies but also to try to anticipate them. This study focused on a detailed examination of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack and draws on the wide range of open source accounts available, including from terrorists directly involved but also from among the authorities and victims. Using an analytical framework proposed by Rasmussen and Hafez (Terrorist innovations in weapons of mass effect: preconditions, causes and predictive indicators, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Washington, DC, 2010), several key drivers are identified and described, both internal to the group and external to its environment. The study concludes that the innovation shown by Black September was predictable and that Munich represented a profound security failure as much as it did successful terrorist innovation.

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Notes

  1. As recorded by the START Global Terrorism Database which included incidents from 1970 to 2017: http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/.

  2. For an indication of just how cost effective terrorism can be, it is worth looking at how much it costs to advertise on television during the Olympics. On average during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it cost advertisers $750,000 for every 30 seconds in the US market alone. The $90,000 (in modern prices) BSO spent on the Munich attack would have bought them barely 3 seconds. The actual media coverage the attack received on September 5th was potentially worth in the order of $1.8 billion (in modern prices) if not more. It is worth remembering that this figure only applies to US coverage. Worldwide the total worth was probably closer to $3 billion.

  3. Some sources attribute this communiqué to George Habash, the leader of the PFLP, but the majority view is that it did indeed come from Black September.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cranfield Forensic Institute, Cranfield University, Shrivenham, UK

    Andrew Silke

  2. Centre for International Security and Resilience, Cranfield University, Shrivenham, UK

    Anastasia Filippidou

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  1. Andrew Silke
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  2. Anastasia Filippidou
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Correspondence to Andrew Silke.

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Silke, A., Filippidou, A. What drives terrorist innovation? Lessons from Black September and Munich 1972. Secur J 33, 210–227 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-019-00181-x

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