Analysis: Woolwich hard to predict for intelligence

A man seen with floral tributes to the dead soldier. Picture: Getty

This poses a particular problem for security services because they will be looking for behaviour out of the ordinary in order to have something to detect and investigate – and there will be plenty of out-of- the-ordinary behaviour going on, much of which will turn out to be entirely innocent.

This highlights the fact that intelligence is only valuable as a predictive tool where the threat is part of an organisational structure where patterns of communications, travel, training and the like can be monitored and analysed.

Low-capability attacks, on the other hand, require little or no planning, preparation or support from other individuals.

In these cases, it is almost impossible to gather effective intelligence that would allow attacks to be predicted.

Individuals in the West who carry out such attacks are likely to have developed personal grievances about the world as a starting point without any external ideology driving them to it.

Radical sources of information are rarely causal events, whether those sources are individuals or materials on the internet. That sort of radical material may be a factor subsequently which individuals use to justify the violence they are planning, or hone the specific target.

Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been calling since the 2009 shooting of soldiers at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, for similar small, low-capability attacks using firearms or knives by western sympathisers.

However, in practice there have only been very few such attacks. Though it is possible, the two attackers were influenced by al-Qaeda’s call for such tactics, it is more likely that their choice of method was simply due to expediency.

• Anna Boyd is a security analyst at Exclusive Analysis, part of IHS Jane’s