So I'm still unsure if you think a lack a multiplicity of attacks is due to their not wanting to attack despite their statements or if or their inability or curtailment due to current methods of mitigation.
I understand we can expect more attempts and sadly more attacks and we need to take more innovative measures, but I wonder if you think current methods have been a complete failure or have succeeded in thwarting other attempts we are mot privy to. For one plans dont go from 0 - 100 instantly, they develop over time. So any plans could be intervened any time in between and we may only get to hear about the late stage interventions, or, perhaps were ineffective and the terrorists kind of really lazy baddies who aren't opportunists.
I suspect their resources - boots on the ground if you wish - ready to be activated are rather limited even though the supply of potentials is very large. This attack apparently featured 9 people, that's a relatively large number and it would not surprise me at all if that's a substantial portion of the resources that they could activate right now. But given time new idiots will step up to fill the vacancy. Give it a few months or a year. Just long enough to get everybody to forget to be more watchful.
Sleeper cells are a very old concept. Go about your daily business and wait for a pre-arranged signal, go to a place, pick up instructions and weapons, do the deed. It could go from 'innocent dude working in a bakery' to 'hey, that's my brother that blew up 20 people' in less than 48 hours.
And that's precisely how they should do it if they wanted to stay under the radar. This recipe could be repeated just about forever without much chance of interference, and even that wouldn't matter much as long as once every year or so a group would make it through.
The window in which one should catch a would-be terrorist is between 0 and 19 years of age, not in the last 2 days before they execute a plan. That is playing very bad odds.
Given their stated intentions, why would there be so few "boots on the ground"? Are our current intelligence strategies and mitigating policies keeping them at bay?
One possibility is they only catch people at T -1, or not caught at T 0, or there could be many more caught at T -X.
In the U.S. the ATF isn't disbanding just because we haven't seen manor action by supremacists. And just because we haven't seen any announcements does not necessarily mean the ATF aren't doing their work or aren't successful.
Because radicalized youths that are brainwashed enough that they are willing to blow themselves up are fewer in numbers than radicalized youths that may one day be brainwashed enough to blow themselves up. It's a process and it takes some time and I'm pretty sure plenty of them fail to 'graduate'. The biggest group that poses serious risk are the ones that have been to the training camps and return to their old home-grounds. The ones that have never left are much lower on the risk scale, and those exist in much larger numbers. Not totally without risk, but nowhere near as bad as the ones that spent months with IS, AQ or whatever other group of idiots there is out there in some trainingcamp where they learn to shoot their AKs and how to set off your bomb vest.
Look at it another way: if they could field let's say 100's of attackers simultaneously, don't you think they would? Or do you think they'd keep them in reserve for the next 10 years possibly being discovered? I can't rule it out, obviously, but I think the time between insertion and activation would have to be kept small to avoid losing control of the assets once placed. I'll do some reading up on this, it is an interesting question.
I don't know about that. Or, in other words, it remains to be seen. So far there have been thousands of Europeans or at least European residents who have been willing to travel thousands of miles to do battle (with pretty high odds of becoming casualties) so it's not so much that they have not been "brainwashed enough" and, additionally there are thousands in the ME who would dearly desire to do harm in the EU and elsewhere but are and were thwarted. Or else they are pretenders who don't match their rhetoric.
If they want but can't field hundreds in the EU (or other non ME/NAf regions) does that not speak to current intel and ops being successful?
Your original assertion was "But if anything the attacks prove that the whole surveillance thing isn't effective, not that we need even more of it." To me, your responses seem to indicate the opposite [however that does not speak to the future]
I understand we can expect more attempts and sadly more attacks and we need to take more innovative measures, but I wonder if you think current methods have been a complete failure or have succeeded in thwarting other attempts we are mot privy to. For one plans dont go from 0 - 100 instantly, they develop over time. So any plans could be intervened any time in between and we may only get to hear about the late stage interventions, or, perhaps were ineffective and the terrorists kind of really lazy baddies who aren't opportunists.