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Counterattack The West's Battle Against the Terrorists
An in-depth analysis of the struggle between Western democracies and international terrorist organizations, discusses counterterrorist training, armaments, leadership, and tactics
Hardcover
First published June 1, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 8, 2016
Counterattack: The West's Battle Against the Terrorists is my first endeavour in the non-fiction genre after a long time and it was well worth it.
The book was written in 1982 for the first time and describes and analyses different operations, disclosing facts that were not previously known and how special counter-terrorist units are organized, trained, armed, controlled, and led and how the fight against the terrorism started.
The book starts with an insight in those times, how the terrorism was developing across the globe and where the "conflict areas" were located on the map: Northen Ireland, Israel, and Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt to name just a few.
It was very well written and insightful and It brought to me a different understanding of the operations and how conflict is handled.
I have learned a lot about how different countries deal with terrorism and a little bit about those people - elite trained- who are fighting on the first front.
Now I have a different appreciation and respect for them.
This book is outside my normal day to day reads but well worth it and I am highly recommending it.
I received an eARC, from NetGalley and the publisher Endeavour Press, in exchange for an honest review
The book was written in 1982 for the first time and describes and analyses different operations, disclosing facts that were not previously known and how special counter-terrorist units are organized, trained, armed, controlled, and led and how the fight against the terrorism started.
The book starts with an insight in those times, how the terrorism was developing across the globe and where the "conflict areas" were located on the map: Northen Ireland, Israel, and Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Egypt to name just a few.
It was very well written and insightful and It brought to me a different understanding of the operations and how conflict is handled.
I have learned a lot about how different countries deal with terrorism and a little bit about those people - elite trained- who are fighting on the first front.
Now I have a different appreciation and respect for them.
This book is outside my normal day to day reads but well worth it and I am highly recommending it.
I received an eARC, from NetGalley and the publisher Endeavour Press, in exchange for an honest review
June 4, 2016
This is a very dated book, first published in the UK in 1982. So it precedes the events of modern terrorism: 9/11, 7/7 and 21/7, al Qaeda and ISIS. That said, it is an interesting read, not least as a gauge of the thinking of the time.
The IRA, PLO, and state-sponsored terrorism were the order of the day and this book details the early and tentative approaches the Western powers (countries covered include the United States Britain, France, West Germany - the book was written pre-unification - and Israel) took to counter the threats they faced.
Much of what is included in these pages appears in today’s world to be rather quaint. For example, in the section on West Germany we learn that there was a computer system centred in the town of Wiesbaden, nicknamed “The Komissar”, which logs every item of information - addresses, contacts, etc, of every terrorist and other serious criminal. This is divulged to the reader in breathless tones, and to be fair, it probably was a big deal at the time. But now of course this is commonplace, every police force in England has access to the HOLMES system, which does just that, and in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations we can be sure that the world’s security services do much, much, more.
But this book is not just historical trivia. Much of the pages detail the emergence of the counter-terror units that in today’s world we sadly take for granted. The section on the birth of Germany’s GSG9 (the federal police equivalent of the SAS) in genuinely interesting, as is the section on the French experience with Algerian terrorism.
In conclusion, this is a dated but interesting read, well worth the investment if you have a real interest in the origin’s of today’s architecture of counter-terror.
The IRA, PLO, and state-sponsored terrorism were the order of the day and this book details the early and tentative approaches the Western powers (countries covered include the United States Britain, France, West Germany - the book was written pre-unification - and Israel) took to counter the threats they faced.
Much of what is included in these pages appears in today’s world to be rather quaint. For example, in the section on West Germany we learn that there was a computer system centred in the town of Wiesbaden, nicknamed “The Komissar”, which logs every item of information - addresses, contacts, etc, of every terrorist and other serious criminal. This is divulged to the reader in breathless tones, and to be fair, it probably was a big deal at the time. But now of course this is commonplace, every police force in England has access to the HOLMES system, which does just that, and in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations we can be sure that the world’s security services do much, much, more.
But this book is not just historical trivia. Much of the pages detail the emergence of the counter-terror units that in today’s world we sadly take for granted. The section on the birth of Germany’s GSG9 (the federal police equivalent of the SAS) in genuinely interesting, as is the section on the French experience with Algerian terrorism.
In conclusion, this is a dated but interesting read, well worth the investment if you have a real interest in the origin’s of today’s architecture of counter-terror.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews