While bullets and explosions continue to be heard in Indian's capital city of Mumbai, police and military counter terrorism (CT) teams work feverishly to seek out the remaining terrorists and rescue their victims, this after at least 10 locations, to include a police station were attacked by a small but deadly wave of terrorists who indiscriminately fired AK-47s and threw grenades as they swept through the financial center of this city for the last three days. The total number of dead and wounded will likely surpass 500, with more victims likely to be identified once the final terrorist holdouts are arrested or killed and a search can be conducted for additional dead or injured victims. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies from across the world are working with their Indian counterparts in an attempt to identify those responsible for these horrific attacks and to better understand how the attackers were able to conduct this operation without being detected.

Some sources suggest the terrorists had previously rented rooms in one or more locations in Mumbai prior to these attacks, perhaps in the massive Taj Mahal Hotel itself, with the attackers knowing their way around the two victim hotels better than the police and military units deployed in response to the attacks. Indian forces are using flash bang diversionary devices and explosive breaching to enter high threat locations in their attempts to rescue the many hostages held by terrorists. It is hard to believe that Indian, a country with possibly hundreds of nuclear weapons and a standing army that numbers over 1 million, had not anticipated and trained concerning such situations, especially noting that that country had suffered at least 4,000 incidents of terrorism in the past five years alone. In the U.S. and other countries, police and military CT teams have electronic blueprints of most major buildings and maps of such such geographic locations. In many venues they have computerized pictures of every floor and every room in high risk buildings, something that allows CT teams to walk through a location via a laptop before they ever have to enter such a building under fire by terrorists. India's response appeared almost ragtag in comparison.

It appears that an estimated 10-40 terrorists may have traveled to the ocean front capital city of Mumbai, many of them on a hijacked freighter or "mother ship," and then used rubber boats to stealthfully travel to the city's water edge. Once on shore they hijacked cars and trucks and began their coordinated attack on citizens and visitors in the second largest city in the world. If sketchy intelligence reports are correct, the terrorists had the benefit of an advance team that was already in place and in position to facilitate the attacks on both people and property, what some soon refer to as "a massive intelligence failure" that allowed an attack without precedent to take place for which the authorities were ill-prepared to respond and almost helpless to stop.

This attack, one that may have taken months to plan and carry out, was far more complicated to put together than "simple" suicide assaults with bomb laden cars or "martyrs to-be" wearing bomb vests to blow themselves up, taking as many victims as they can with them. Such singular incidents, terrible as they are, are usually over in the blast of a bomb and cleanup of the carnage. In this case, the attack continues to go on and on, with terrorists moving across town or from room to room in large hotels as they play a deadly run, duck and hide game with authorities, movements orchestrated to insure that the terrorists remain on the world's media stage for as long a period of time as possible. If attention is what they sought, the attackers surely accomplished their goal in their attack on Mumbai.

A new face of terrorism has now been unveiled to the world, one that appears larger than life, creating untold human suffering while at the same time insuring the terrorists get the maximum "bang for their buck." Most of the dead and captured attackers in Mumbai are described as young, likely in their late teens and early 20's at most, the usual worker bees of international terrorism. The young are the ones most willing to follow a suicidal doctrine, willing to sacrifice their life for a cause they may not fully understand. That said, there are many ocean front cities across the world and around the U.S. that would be just as vulnerable as the coastal city of Mumbai, cities that could be approached by an international ocean going mother ship with heavily armed attackers taking to light rubber boats to avoid passing through national ports of entry. Terrorists around the world will be glued to their satellite televisions, watching the success their brothers in arms have apparently achieved in India, plotting their own way to commit a similar attack against an already identified target country.

No matter the motivation of the attackers, although probably designed to further erode the relationship between India and Pakistan (where the attackers are believed to have originated), as well as to attack the emerging financial base of India, a new picture of successful terrorism has emerged from the smoke and fires in the Taj Hotel. Although the attackers would have known they were likely to die, they went in to achieve maximum mayhem, running and gunning with the personal goal to either fight to the death or, when they could fight no more, throw down their guns, change clothes, and blend in with the many victims fleeing from these locations, hoping to escape to fight yet another day. When other similar terrorists have been interviewed, they expressed the belief that a small percent of them would escape, with each terrorist believing beyond belief that he would be the one to avoid the bullet with his name on it.

The FBI, Scotland Yard and many other international law enforcement agencies and intelligence services have dispatched teams to help their Indian counterparts and to better understand the planning and implementation of these attacks by the terrorists involved. In the near future we are highly likely to see similar operations directed against cities far outside of India. In the case of the FBI, they have sent an Evidence Response Team (ERT) from the FBI Laboratory to assist the authorities in India in identifying and collecting forensic evidence that will help to both ID the group responsible for this attack and assist in the prosecution of those terrorists now in custody. They will also learn from the methods employed by the terrorists as we need to know how this operation was planned, who the planners were, how they financed this attack, how they traveled to India, how they recruited the terrorists, how they communicated with each other, how they established their command centers prior to the assaults, and how they managed to command and control their attacks over a three-day period, etc. As far as both domestic and international terrorists are concerned, this attack was a monumental success, one that will likely be copied by groups across the world.

Police, military and intelligence organizations will need to learn from the pain and suffering of the people of Mumbai with the hope of stopping similar future attacks. Few cities have SWAT or other CT teams capable of dealing with such a large situation, especially one that takes place at multiple venues at the same time. We have learned from crisis situations in the past of the difficulty that multiple agencies have in working, much less communicating with each other. An American respond to an attack of this magnitude would require local, state and federal SWAT teams, working in conjunction with U.S. military teams like U.S. Army Delta and U.S. Navy SEALS to successfully respond to such a major attack. Should the number of actual terrorist be small, it, like the case of the two Washington, DC area snipers in Oct 02' that killed 10, will once again highlight how just a few people dedicated to murder can succeed in terrible ways. We can only hope that responsible agencies are quick learners as once the class is concluded the real world takes over, one that gives no quarter for the failure to plan and prepare for the worse case scenario.