Peace and Security Review, Vol.1 No. 2 - International Centre for ...

94 Peace and Security Review Vol.1, No.2, Second Quarter, 2008
well as the use of black market parts, one can see the aviation system under
tremendous threat.
This article will look at the international situation in order to provide a
context for the South Asian region. Critically the article will attempt to provide
a method to better evaluate the operational environment faced by civil aviation
industry. Through examining the evolution of the threat environment and
applying a risk based approach to evaluation the impact on the system the
authors hope to provide a rigorous view of the problem and realistic solutions.
II. THREAT VS. RISK
One of the ironic issues facing aviation is that while the industry is advanced
in evaluation of economic risks in its decision making, and taking the necessary
steps to manage that risk, it is still focused on responding to security threats
and appears to have great difficulty in developing and articulating a response.
In most of the world the service providers, particular the carriers, are no
longer responsible for security, but lose prevention remains in their remit,
the industry bears the direct and indirect costs of both implementing any
directive, and any failures.
The suggestion here is that instead of looking at threat, there needs to be
a better system to evaluate and respond to risk. The first element in this
approach is to define the terms. Threat faced by a target is an exploitable
vulnerability. When one examines the range of potential targets a modern
aviation offers to a perspective terrorist, the threat appears enormous and
unmanageable. Travel document theft and forgery, attacks against land and
air side, equipment theft, just to name a few, are all rife with weaknesses and
potential gaps for terrorist to exploit. And as the IRA famously stated to
British authorities “we have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky all the
time. So how does a society protect everything it values? It can not, what it
needs to do is shift from responding to threat, and examines the situation for
a risk perspective.
There are many ways of examining risk, but the two critical elements are
the probability of a given vulnerability being exploited, and the consequences
of that exploitation. This simply process helps to order the environment and
allows limited resources to be deployed properly. One can further refine this
model by applying the threats structure to terrorist groups. Evaluating the
threat posed by any given groups rests on knowledge in three areas. The
intentions a given group has, its capabilities to act on those intentions, and
the operational environment it faces. This additional step is critical to assessing
the threat and risk environment, without it, the security community will remain
Vol.1, No.2 2008 pp.95-114