SecurityDriver News

You’re the detail leader and the Principal is complaining that the security driver doesn’t seem to stop talking while he (Principal) is trying to work while in the vehicle. The Principal states he isn’t going to tolerate this behavior anymore and if you can’t take care of it he will! You’ve addressed it with the driver in the past and explained to him that the standard operating procedures state that, “when driving the Principal, don’t speak unless a security or safety issue is present or he/she (Principal) talks to you directly.” The driver’s response is that he was only trying to make conversation to ensure that the Principal’s needs were being met.

Dr. Larry Nicholson has written a White Paper on an important but often overlooked aspect of the industry – communication.  This is the first paragraph of the paper.

Have you ever thought you could be a more effective communicator and leader   if only your personality hadn’t gotten in the way? The answer may be yes, but if   you possess a high dominant type personality you may not believe so. The purpose of this white paper is to explore the possibility of being a better   executive protection specialist and leader by understanding your personality and how your personality type affects others.

If you would like the complete White Paper you can contact Dr. Nicholson at nnicholson@alallc.us

I’m sure you recognize Dr. Nicholson’s name – Jerry Glazebrook and Dr. Nick Nicholson, are the Authors’ of the industry standard book “The Executive Protection Specialist Handbook”. Both Jerry and Nick belong to the “Quarter Century Club”- security practitioners working in the business for more than 25 years.

Dr. Nicholson’s Bio           Web Site

TSVDI has been and is still working with the Richard Petty Experience (RPE) conducting Ride and Drive programs for the Police Packaged Dodge Charger throughout the US. Through our association with RPE our instructors, Janine, Larry and Dean had the opportunity to push the Dodge SRT Challenger and Charger to its limits on our road course at our home training facility in New Jersey. (Brief bio’s at the end of the article)

The three instructors spend a lot of time behind the wheel of various types of vehicles, but seldom get to push a 392 HP car to its limits. Because of their in depth knowledge of Vehicle Dynamics and better yet their ability to communicate how a car responds to a drivers input (it’s what they do for a living), I thought it would be a good exercises to ask them to act as “automotive writers” (minus the attitude) and express their thoughts on the vehicles performance.

Here’s what they had to say

Janine – I had a great opportunity recently to drive the new Dodge Challenger SRT. My expectations were exceeded! I had never driven a car with that size engine or that much horse power before. I spent the first few laps listening and feeling the vehicles feedback. After that I was off. The car responded to my inputs without hesitation. When I hit the gas pedal that car took off. I was able to get the car up to some pretty high speeds in one of the straight a ways and practiced late braking into the corner, no problem; again the car took what I dished out. It was a blast to drive. I love the whole look of the car as well. Thanks again to the SRT gang for the opportunity. Hope I get to do it again sometime.

Dean – While instructing our 3 day course at Englishtown Raceway I had the opportunity and privilege to slip away with the Dodge SRT Team for a little side action… and action it was.  I got to take out the new Dodge SRT Charger and SRT Challenger for a ride on the road course.  It was pure American Horsepower personified.  The  Charger was modernly sleek with a smooth responsive feel and when your foot decided it was time to get up and go, it had more than enough power to dish out.  Cornering with the Charger was aggressive, but smooth, with outstanding responsiveness from the steering.  The Challenger was pure raw old school rage tempered with the modern technology they could only dream about in the 1970’s.  Acceleration and a sturdy feel engulf you as you get on the accelerator you’re instantly  forced back in your seat and you would swear you were on a crotch rocket if not for the chassis around you.  With the advanced traction control system on, an 18 year old could drive it.  With the traction control off, you’re riding a raging bull that may surprise you how quickly it gives you what you ask for in regards to putting the pedal to the metal.  The brakes on both vehicles were absolutely unbelievable; stopping on a dime is an understatement.  My only wish is that when I “borrowed” my brother’s 1970’s Challenger in 1990, it would have run and handled this well…      

Larry – Had a lot of fun driving the SRT charger and challenger, also drove the police pursuit package charger with hemi and the 6 cylinder. I’ll start with the pursuit package hemi, the power is impressive for a heavy stock vehicle, braking was great with the larger brakes, and the handling is also very responsive and with the stability control on I could not get the car to oversteer. The 6 cylinder is much faster than I would have thought it to be for a heavy vehicle. The SRT charger is also very quick, handles very well and the braking is also very impressive. The new 392 challenger is a beautiful looking car that is very fast handles wonderful and brakes great, not to mention that if the stability control is off you can get the car to over steer in a corner just by thinking about it. Just to mention again if the stability control is on the high setting you can’t get the car to oversteer in a corner, it is a great system for the lesser trained driver. I believe that the stability control on the pursuit package can’t be turn off, but I’m not sure.

Keep in mind the background of these instructors

Janine – Janine was a driver training instructor at the Secret Service Training Facility in Beltsville MD. Like Dean she has had to get into an unfamiliar vehicle and find its limits, a good example is her familiarity with armored cars, which can be ill handling beasts that can surprise the driver at a time when the drivers surprise basket is filled. Same thing – she has to find the limit and communicate it to the student.

Dean – Dean has travelled the globe conducting training programs in vehicles that he has never seen and has a hard time pronouncing. Before he pushes students to the limit in these vehicles, Dean has to drive them and figure out what the limit is. If he does not do that – bad things happen.

Larry – For eight years Larry was the lead test driver for the Army Evaluation Center (AEC) at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. If it has wheels at some point in time Larry has tested it, and has tried his best to destroy it.

Edgar Mosquera, Esq – General Counsel – Intel Manager Protection Resources International

Imagine what would be the result of the IRS slapping your principal with a huge fringe benefit tax bill for protective services. Do you know what could happen to your company if one of your security drivers doesn’t get enough rest between assignments and then has an accident? Are the people you hire for protective services independent contractors or employees? These are just three examples of seemingly minor issues that could add up to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in costs, fines, damages, taxes and penalties. It could devastate your security company or department. This seminar will be presented by an attorney with operational experience in executive protection, who will guide you through, and demystify, the important legal and tax laws and regulations that govern executive protection providers and apply to both in-house personnel and contractors. It also includes steps you can – or must take to ensure that you are compliant with existing legal and tax statutes, and how you can protect yourself with documentation. This is an interactive session that will include small group exercises and actual case studies.

 Edgar R. Mosquera Jr. Esq. will be giving a presentation on this important subject at the PSC conference. Edgar is corporate counsel for Protection Resources International LLC. Edgar has a unique skill set and has an expertise to that is hard to find – he is a practicing attorney with EP operational experience. A former police officer, he is admitted to the bar in Illinois and has practiced in both state and federal court.  In addition to his role as corporate counsel, Edgar is responsible for PRI’s Threat Assessment and Protective Intelligence Program. He has also spoken at a number of conferences on legal considerations for executive protection providers and corporate executive protection functions. His experience in the field includes protection of high-net worth individuals, corporate executives, and foreign diplomats.

You can contact Edgar at edgaresq@protectionresources.com

Many training programs teach the PIT maneuver and some teach the counter PIT. Like everything we do, including the PIT we measure – evaluate – and test the techniques we use, the results are interesting. This is a pictorial of what can and cannot be accomplished when conducting the PIT.

We will, at our discretion, email the detailed report “The Achilles Heel of the PIT Maneuver” to qualified individuals. If you are not a former student, associate, or friend of TSVDI please explain your need for the report.

Image 1 – The CONTACT vehicle is approaching the TARGET vehicle. Neither driver has turned the steering wheel at this point. 

Image 2 – The CONTACT vehicle has turned the steering wheel to the right and has made physical contact with the TARGET vehicle. 

 Image 3 –  1/10 of a second after initial contact, with the steering wheel still turned, the CONTACT vehicle has begun to climb up the side of the TARGET vehicle.

Image 4 – After another 2/10 of a second – literally the blink of an eye – the right front tire of the CONTACT vehicle is even with the handle on the driver’s door of the TARGET vehicle.

Image 5 – Less than a half of a second later, the CONTACT vehicle has reached the top of its climb while the driver has rotated the steering wheel to center. At this point, the driver of the TARGET vehicle could cause the CONTACT car to rollover.  

PLEASE NOTE: The exercise depicted and described in the text was conducted by professional driving instructors on a closed course following prescribed safety procedures and utilizing properly equipped vehicles. No individual should attempt to perform the exercises or maneuvers depicted or described without proper training, properly equipped vehicles and adequate safety equipment. Any attempt to perform any specific driving technique shall be undertaken at the sole risk of the individual or individuals participating in, or performing, such activity.

To receive the complete report - Comment or Provide Feedback, Contact the Authors at: 

Joe Autera – jautera@vehicledynamics.net

Tony Scotti – tonyscotti@msn.com

High CG Vehicle- High G Lane Change - Must know limit of cornering power

Handling expresses controllability, and is defined as how the car responds to the driver; Handling is the car and driver working together. A recent article that appeared in Car Driver Magazine, engineers from several of the car manufactures said this about the definition of handling.

Handling is about predictability – The car has to be stable up to the limit of adhesion.

Handling is what happens when it reaches the limit of adhesion.

When the car starts to lose grip – the traction should not fall off the end of a cliff – should not create a surprise

Handling is communication between the driver and the car –good handling cars are linear.

The engineer’s are all seem to be saying the same thing – what happens to the vehicle’s output at or approaching the limit of its cornering power is what defines handling.

Good handling cars communicate there approach to the limit of adhesion – good drivers understand this communication – good driving instructors teach and coach their student to understand the communication between the vehicle and the driver.

TRAINING AND HANDLING

Handling is the result of the vehicle/driver combination reacting scenarios such as – driving around a corner – accident producing situations – moving through a driving exercise – and for us security guys, an ambush. Basically handling is how much speed and steering can the driver apply before anxiety (Engineers way of saying fear) sets in and impedes the driving process.

Research has shown that the driving process slows down at 40 to 50% of the vehicles available cornering power. The instructor’s job is to coach the student to “handle” more than 50% of the vehicles cornering power. Part of that process is training the student to anticipate when the car is going non linear (Approaching the limit of the vehicles cornering power).

A good training program separates and measures cornering power and handling. In every exercise or scenario a student drives through a good instructor knows and can compute when the car is approaching the limit of its cornering power. If they cannot do that – it’s not driver training its entertainment.

This is the first in a series of short articles on Vehicle Dynamics and Driver Training. Vehicle Dynamics are two words you often see in RFP’s, brochures, web sites, and job descriptions.  Most people, even some instructors, don’t quite understand what the words mean and how vehicle dynamics affects driving and driver training. As an example, many of the government’s solicitations for driver training ask the bidders to include a “vehicle dynamics exercises”.  If the student drives to the bathroom that is a vehicle dynamics exercise. In fact, Vehicle Dynamics is not just “an exercise”, it is the foundation of any driver training program. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines Vehicle Dynamics as “the application of the laws of physics to a vehicle in motion”.

If a driving instructor disagrees with the above, I suggest that they teach something other than driving.  If a driving instructor agrees with the SAE definition but feels they do not need to know and/or understand the Laws of Physics regarding the motion of a vehicle that’s okay, but in my opinion that instructor is relegated to being an average or below average instructor.  

HANDLING – CORNERING AND TRAINING

Handling and Cornering are often used to describe the same vehicle/driver characteristics, but they are two separate issues and, while conducting training, these issues must be approached separately.

Handling can be qualified and quantified as how the car responds to the driver, handling expresses controllability. This will be discussed in the next in the series of articles. This article will focus on Cornering Power.

CORNERING POWER

Cornering is the amount of centrifugal force the car can generate measured in Gs, and expressed as Lateral Acceleration. As an example in a recent Motor Trend article the BMW 740i was measured to have .91 G of Lateral Acceleration/Cornering Power (high for a sedan).  Gs are a measurement of the force exerted on the center of gravity of the vehicle. The higher the Gs, the more force the vehicle can absorb, which in turn means there is more cornering power available to the driver – more on Gs in a future article.

Most magazines get their cornering power number via a Skid Pad, which is driving in a circle with a known radius, and increasing the speed until they cannot keep the car on the radius. To ensure accurate results the magazines instrument the cars with computers that measure Lateral Acceleration/Cornering Power. The instrumentation used by car magazines tends to get expensive, but for very little money, $170, you can get an accurate device called a G Meter that will measure the vehicles Lateral Acceleration/Cornering Power. Or for 99 cents you can download a G Meter to your Smart Phone, and/or you can apply a simple equation (5th grade math required) to a slalom exercises and get accurate results. I use all 3 methods and compare the results. There is no excuse for not knowing a vehicles cornering power.

TRAINING AND CORNERING

A driving instructor has to know the Lateral Acceleration/Cornering Power of the vehicle, measured in  Gs. If the instructor does not know what the vehicle is capable of – how would they know what the driver is capable of? When attending a training program ask the instructor “What is the vehicles cornering power?” They should have an answer.  There are some exercises that you would find in a security driving program, ramming being one of them, where this information is not needed. But if the course has a slalom – evasive exercises – lines and apexes – high speed driving for example, and the instructor has no knowledge of the vehicles cornering power capability, or worse, has no knowledge of lateral acceleration, cornering power, and how to measure it, any critiquing by the instructor relative to those exercises is a guess and not even an educated guess.

As an instructor, the understanding of these aspects of Vehicle Dynamics is crucial in presenting a quality training program.  With these aspects applied properly in the training program and conveyed properly to the student, everyone will better understand what each vehicle can and cannot do, and most importantly what the student is capable of doing with that vehicle in these situations.

Ed is a TSVDI alumnus and business associate. He is the Director of Operations for Protection Resources International a Chicago based company. They supply security services, which include secure transportation to high net worth individuals and their families. They also are working with US-based corporate clients, some in the Chicago area. Edward is responsible for PRI’s executive protection, estate protection and Secure Transportation services. He develops the policies, plans and protocols for PRI’s customer base.

Ed took on the challenge of writing an article explaining the need and benefits of Executive Protection. But unlike most articles written about EP Ed’s article was written for the potential client. Explaining EP to those who have little knowledge, or worse yet a negative perception of EP was daunting task. In my opinion he did a great job. He did such a great job that the Magazine Sheridan Road published the article.

On its web site Sheridan Roads, describes the magazine as a “Luxury lifestyle magazine that delivers a colorful and passionate telling of neighboring events, fashion, beauty, finance, and the pursuit of leisure. This unique publication observes the social scene with intelligence, glamour, and style.” Basically it is a magazine for High Net Worth individuals, living in the Chicago area.

Edwards email –  edward@protectionresources.com

If you would like to talk to Ed via the social media you can reach him on LinkedIn -  Twitter

Ed is also on Facebook – to find him do a search for Edward Limoges

A summary

In a vehicle ambush, the terrorist needs to plan and organize the attack. Such planning and organization require intensive surveillance on the intended victim. That surveillance is the key to the terrorists’ success, and detecting surveillance is the best way to foil their attack. Although the technical skill in the Herrhausen incident was impressive, the real key to the terrorists’ success was meticulous planning and surveillance.

Detecting terrorists’ preparation requires the protection team to become intimately familiar with the environment near the executive’s home and office. The team must notice and act on anything that is the slightest bit unusual. The protection team must be as meticulous and organized in its effort to detect the ambush as the terrorists are in setting it up.

The original idea behind using an armored car and bodyguards was to harden the principal to the point where the terrorist would think twice about selecting him or her as a target. That idea works if the threat is kidnapping, but if the threat is assassination, then armored cars and bodyguards are only part of the security package.

To complete the security package, the protection team needs to understand the basics of counter-surveillance. In a protection detail, counter-surveillance means more than simply watching to see if the convoy is being followed. Everyone involved with the protection of the executive needs to be on the alert constantly for signs of an ambush.

Looking for terrorist surveillance should not be left to chance. Members of the protection team must be able to describe and record accurately anything unusual they see. They therefore need to increase their powers of observation. In Herrhausen’s case, the terrorists were obvious enough when setting up the ambush that it aroused the suspicion of a neighbor.

For this type of attack to be successful, terrorists must have certain environmental factors in their favor. The ambush must be laid on a road the target can be expected to use; assuming that normal precautions are taken and routes are varied regularly, the ambush must be laid close to the target’s home or probable destination (usually the place of work).

The protection team should examine the area around the executive’s home and develop a danger zone log. Carefully examining all possible routes is essential, and pointing out the many routes available once the car or convoy leaves the area of the home and the office. Unfortunately, near the home and office the route options are fewer.
Key defensive measures to take are the following:

In a high-risk environment, the developing of alternate routes that begins as close as possible to the executive’s home.

If routes into and out of the work and home areas are limited, the team must perform meticulous reconnaissance of all two lane roads that, for whatever reason, the executive must unavoidably travel along.

All terrorist attacks are preceded by surveillance. These surveillances are not so sophisticated that the average person with some reasonable training could not spot them.

In all the cases mentioned, little thought was given to changing the routes. Route planning needs to be an intricate part of the security plan. The higher the risk, the more important it becomes.

Even if the potential target is transported in a two or three car armored convoy with bodyguards, the protection team cannot become complacent. The problem of transporting the executive from point A to point B has not been solved–it has simply been changed.
If security is raised to the level afforded Herrhausen, the possibility of an attempted kidnapping is virtually ruled out. Thus, if a vehicle ambush takes place, it is more likely to be an assassination attempt, and lately that type of attack has used a roadside bomb.

Our upcoming Surveillance Detection Program

This is the cover of the Nov 1990 issue of Security Management Magazine. It is an article I did for the magazine 20 years ago -A CALCULATED ASSASSINATION

On November 30, 1989, an event took place that will forever change the way we think about personal security. The incident will become a learning tool for all involved in executive protection.

On that day Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of the Deutsche Bank, was riding to work in his chauffeur-driven armored vehicle. Herrhausen’s normal routine was to travel to work in a three-car convoy, and he was riding in the second car. He was accompanied by four bodyguards, two in a lead car and two in a follow-up car.

When Herrhausen had gone approximately 300 yards from his home, his car was destroyed by a remote-controlled car bomb. The full blast of the bomb hit the rear door of his vehicle. The bomb was detonated when Herrhausen’s car broke a light beam generated by a photoelectric cell. Interruption of the beam caused a flow of electricity that detonated the bomb. The bomb consisted of about 44 pounds of TNT and was packaged to look like a schoolchild’s knapsack. The knapsack was affixed to the luggage rack of a child’s bicycle that was left alongside the road.

The type of bomb that killed Herrhausen was a roadside bomb, a bomb placed along the road and detonated as a vehicle drives by. Although that type of trigger device (a photoelectric cell) had not been used before in a vehicle ambush, it had been used in other ways as an assassin’s tool. Until this incident, however, most roadside bomb attacks had not been successful. To understand why, we need to look at attacks similar to the one that befell Herrhausen.

Case 1: The Texaco manager. On September 28, 1981, about 7:00 p.m., the manager of Texaco Petroleum TN Colombia, John Butler, was attacked in a similar fashion as he drove from his office to his home in the northern part of Bogota.

Butler was driving in a two-car motorcade. He was in the lead car, which was armored, and his bodyguards were in the follow-up car. Within 300 yards of his home, his car was hit by a powerful bomb that immobilized his vehicle. The bomb, concealed under a vendor’s push cart, was remote-controlled and activated through a telephone line. A wire coming from a light pole detonated the device.

The terrorist was attempting to detonate the bomb at the precise moment Butler’s car drove by the cart. Fortunately, the bomb was detonated prematurely. The full force of the blast hit the front of Butler’s car. Although the car was damaged extensively, Butler survived.

The attack on Butler appears to be similar to that on Herrhausen, but actually the two incidents differ tremendously. The blast that hit the Herrhausen car was detonated by the car’s breaking a light beam. The bomb that hit Butler’s vehicle was detonated manually and set off prematurely. Although the bomb was detonated prematurely, there is no doubt Butler would have been at least seriously injured and probably killed if he had not been in an armored car.

Case 2: The Colombian minister of defense. The terrorists tried again in Bogota. This time they tried to assassinate Guetrero Paz, the Colombian minister of defense. On November 23, 1989, Paz left the Defense Ministry in a large protective convoy. As the convoy drove by a lamp post, a terrorist detonated a 20-pound charge. Again the terrorist activated the bomb prematurely. It was set off so early it did not even damage the car, and the defense minister escaped uninjured. The driver immediately drove the armor-plated Lands automobile back to the

Ministry of Defense
In both cases, the accuracy of the bomb depended on a person’s detonating the bomb at precisely the right time. Until the Herrhausen incident, most roadside bombs were inaccurate. The inaccuracy can be explained with some simple mathematics. For a road-side bomb to be successful the full energy of the bomb needs to be focused directly on the intended victim; it must hit the door where the intended victim is sitting.

For example: If the victim is in the back seat opposite the driver, the full energy of the bomb needs to hit directly on the back door. The bomb that hit Herrhausen’s car was so accurate that it killed Herrhausen, who was sitting in the back seat, and only injured the driver. The terrorist whose job it is to detonate the bomb needs to press the button at the precise moment the car door is adjacent to the bomb.

That is not an easy task. A car traveling 30 mph moves about 45 feet per second. In a tenth of a second, the car moves 4.5 feet. The average car door is 4.5 feet-long. Thus the terrorist must be accurate to within a tenth of a second for the bomb to be effective.

As the graph shows, a 15-foot car traveling 10 mph takes a little less than one second to drive by the bomb. Although timing the explosion to within a second is still difficult, the terrorist has a much better chance of being accurate. A car traveling 30 mph takes less than a quarter of a second to drive by the bomb. At that rate, it is difficult for the bomber to be accurate.
Therefore, the speed of the car is important. The faster the vehicle is driven, the less likely it is that the vehicle will get hit by the bomb. However, as the chart shows, there is a speed at which going any faster does not make an appreciable difference in the period of exposure to the bomb.

Where the bomb hits the vehicle is also important. If the vehicle is hit any other place than where the executive is sitting, his or her chance of surviving is good. Since the energy of the bomb is so focused, a misjudgment of a tenth of a second means the difference between success and failure.

Every tenth of a second a car going 30 mph moves 4.5 feet. In Butler’s case, if the bomb had been detonated a tenth of a second too early, the blast would have occurred 4.5 feet in front of his vehicle. If the bomb had been detonated three tenths of a second too early, the blast would have occurred about 14 feet in front of the intended victim, as was the case for the Colombian minister. In that attempt, the terrorists missed the car completely.

However, it would be naive to think terrorists could not solve the problem of inaccuracy. The system used to detonate the device in the Herrhausen incident was the answer.

Since it appears humanly impossible to detonate the bomb at the right moment, the answer was to eliminate the human factor. The Herrhausen bomb was set off when Herrhausen’s vehicle broke a light beam set across the road. The terrorists’ ingenuity did not end with using a photoelectric cell to detonate the bomb. They also had to be sure the bomb was detonated at the location that would cause the most destruction-that is, precisely at the door where the victim was sitting.

Since they knew the bomb would explode when the nose of the car broke the light beam, it was a simple matter of placing the bicycle carrying the bomb the same distance from the light beam as the door of the car would be from the light beam.

The ingenuity continues; they had an additional problem to solve. Because Herrhausen was using a three-car motorcade, the terrorists had to make sure the first car did not set off the bomb when it broke the light beam. Therefore, two switches had to be closed for the bomb to be detonated. One switch was closed as the vehicle broke the light beam, and the other was closed by a terrorist. They had to plug the human factor back into the equation.

The terrorist operating the switch had a much easier job than the terrorists in the other incidents described. He or she had to wait for the lead car to go through the light beam, and then close the first switch. When Herrhausen’s car broke the light beam, it closed the second switch and detonated the bomb.

The switch operated by the terrorist was not closed until the lead car drove through the light beam. That assignment still required good timing. If the cars were moving at 30 mph (about 45 feet per second) and were separated by 45 feet, the terrorist had less than one second to arm the bomb.

The Herrhausen incident seems to be an example of protecting for A when the problem is B. He and his staff appeared to be ready for a classic vehicle ambush, but they got a roadside bomb.
What can be done to protect against a device as sophisticated as the one used in the Herrhausen attack? The key lies in the word sophisticated. Something that complicated takes time to set up. Four weeks before the assassination, a neighbor raking leaves had actually handled the arming cable, yet had no idea what it was and forgot about it. The more sophisticated terrorists get, the more preparation they require.

In a vehicle ambush, the terrorist needs to plan and organize the attack. Such planning and organization require intensive surveillance on the intended victim. That surveillance is the key to the terrorists’ success, and detecting surveillance is the best way to foil their attack. Although the technical skill in the Herrhausen incident was impressive, the real key to the terrorists’ success was meticulous planning and surveillance.

Detecting terrorists’ preparation requires the protection team to become intimately familiar with the environment near the executive’s home and office. The team must notice and act on anything that is the slightest bit unusual. The protection team must be as meticulous and organized in its effort to detect the ambush as the terrorists are in setting it up.

The original idea behind using an armored car and bodyguards was to harden the principal to the point where the terrorist would think twice about selecting him or her as a target. That idea works if the threat is kidnapping, but if the threat is assassination, then armored cars and bodyguards are only part of the security package.

To complete the security package, the protection team needs to understand the basics of counter-surveillance. In a protection detail, counter-surveillance means more than simply watching to see if the convoy is being followed. Everyone involved with the protection of the executive needs to be on the alert constantly for signs of an ambush.

Looking for terrorist surveillance should not be left to chance. Members of the protection team must be able to describe and record accurately anything unusual they see. They therefore need to increase their powers of observation. In Herrhausen’s case, the terrorists were obvious enough when setting up the ambush that it aroused the suspicion of a neighbor.

What can be done to decrease the possibility of being a victim of a roadside bomb? For this type of attack to be successful, terrorists must have certain environmental factors in their favor. The ambush must be laid on a road the target can be expected to use; assuming that normal precautions are taken and routes are varied regularly, the ambush must be laid close to the target’s home or probable destination (usually the place of work).

Also, the bomb must be detonated as close to the car as possible. Ron Massa of Lorron Corporation in Burlington, MA, has done a great deal of research on roadside bombs. Massa has developed a computer program that can determine the effects of such a bomb on a car. According to Massa, the difference between success and failure can be as little as four feet from the blast.

Thus a two-lane road is (from the terrorists’ point of view) better than a four-lane road because it forces the driver to stay close to the curb. Prominent people commonly live in areas of two lane roads and work in areas of four lane roads. An ambush is therefore more likely to be laid on a narrow road near the target’s home than near his or her place of work, as the likelihood of finding narrow roads near work is low.

The location of the Herrhausen assassination had all those ingredients. The terrorists chose a site only 500 yards from his home. It was a narrow, two-lane road bordered by woods.
The protection team should examine the area around the executive’s home and develop a danger zone log. Carefully examining all possible routes is essential, and pointing out the many routes available once the car or convoy leaves the area of the home and the office. Unfortunately, near the home and office the route options are fewer.

Key defensive measures to take are the following:

In a high-risk environment, the developing of alternate routes that begins as close as possible to the executive’s home.

If routes into and out of the work and home areas are limited, the team must perform meticulous reconnaissance of all two lane roads that, for whatever reason, the executive must unavoidably travel along.

All terrorist attacks are preceded by surveillance. These surveillances are not so sophisticated that the average person with some reasonable training could not spot them.
In all the cases mentioned, little thought was given to changing the routes. Route planning needs to be an intricate part of the security plan. The higher the risk, the more important it becomes.

Even if the potential target is transported in a two or three car armored convoy with bodyguards, the protection team cannot become complacent. The problem of transporting the executive from point A to point B has not been solved–it has simply been changed.
If security is raised to the level afforded Herrhausen, the possibility of an attempted kidnapping is virtually ruled out. Thus, if a vehicle ambush takes place, it is more likely to be an assassination attempt, and lately that type of attack has used a roadside bomb.

This is a phrase you see often in books – magazine articles – and on power points presentations – “85 % of all attacks against the principal happen in or near a vehicle” – the number may vary, but never lower than 50%. So does that mean that 85% of EP is moving the principal from point A to point B in a vehicle? If it is – how much of your time and training is spent planning to protect the executive while in a vehicle? And what skills do you need to accomplish that goal?

To answer the question “What skills do you need to keep the principal safe while in a vehicle?” – I have put together a collection of corporate security driver job descriptions. Keep in mind that this is not what I – Joe Autera – or TSVDI thinks. This is what the people who do the hiring think. Since this is coming from various corporations and high net worth details some of the below is redundant.

Skills Needed
Master vehicle dynamics and defensive and evasive driving skills at an evaluated training program.

Attend annual training and successfully meet requirements.

Participate in training on general executive protection and security related driving techniques: surveillance detection, pre-attack recognition and avoidance

Receives training and understands the concepts of
Route Advances
Alternate Routes
Route surveys,
Identifying safe havens and emergency resources
choke points
danger zones
zones of total predictability

Learns and practices surveillance detection and pre-attack recognition and avoidance skills.

Understands the “defensive use of force continuum” doctrine of the organization (Optional)

Masters non-lethal defensive skills and equipment (Optional)

Certification in American Red Cross Standard First Aid and CPR techniques

These are my observations – nothing has changed in the 35 plus years I have been doing this. Corporations are interested in people who know, and have been trained in, how to avoid problems. In my opinion surveillance detection is the most underutilized and neglected skill in the industry, and it is obvious that those who do the hiring believe in the principle – “surveillance detection is not just the best protection in many scenarios it’s your only protection”

Surveillance Detection Training

This is the first in a series of articles on Protective Driver and EP Training.