124: Symphony of Terror

Tactical Tangents

For all its chaos, the stereotypical active shooter situation is fairly straightforward: There’s a bad guy killing people, and the good guys need to close with him and stop him as quickly as possible. The events of November 2008 in the Indian city of Mumbai, however, showed us another, complex, kind of active shooter event and Mike takes a look at the takeaways from those fateful days.

The Mumbai incident, perpetrated by a squad of ten terrorists who had been through a rigorous selection and training process, introduced multiple novel problems worth considering. What happens when there are multiple shooters at different scenes simultaneously? When they have access to serious arms, including grenades, possibly provided by a foreign actor? When they use structure fires as a weapon? When they have outside command-and-control monitoring the news and communicating with the shooters via cell phone? These and other complications inherent in an attack like this are examined in this episode.

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Intro music credit Bensound.com