This episode deals with a kind of terrorist attack that counterterrorism experts have been dreading since before September 11, 2001. They are preparing against a carefully-planned and orchestrated attack by a team of well-trained, well-armed terrorists with carefully scouted “soft targets,” such as schools, malls, theaters, sporting events, hospitals, and other venues that have a large number of people in close proximity that are relatively undefended.

The attack they particularly fear is an incident where one of these soft targets is assaulted in an effort to draw law enforcement into a pre-planned ambush. Terrorists are well aware of law enforcement’s post-Columbine tactics whereby officers are told to rush toward a mass attack and engage as they can as they arrive. These tactics have been effective against individual shooters with a grudge, but are nearly suicidal against a trained and determined enemy force lurking in ambush.

Tom, one of the members of the roundtable panel, discussed a training scenario his company conducted that pointed out just how poorly law enforcement in the United States is pre- pared to confront this kind of soft target attack.

The scenario featured a team of five “terrorists” with military training taking over a school, with 150 state police officers responding as they have been trained. The officers, coming in individually or in small clusters, walked into a buzzsaw of trip-wires, IEDs, and rifle fire aimed down long school hallways. Fifty of the officers “died” attempting to retake the school.

It was a massacre. But unlike real life, the scenario ended there, once the point was made.

The result of a terrorist attack of this type in real life would have likely resulted in the decimation of the local law enforcement community at the hands of the small team of terrorists, which would then likely disengage and either hit another large target as a coordinated unit to create mass casualties, or scatter to attack individual targets and spread panic and mayhem.