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Close Quarters Combat
The most important skill to be acquired isn’t what you think it is
Nearly fifty years ago, some members of a small and then-obscure part of the British Army began thinking about how best to combat the growing wave of domestic terrorism that had been spreading across Europe in the preceding years. The IRA in Northern Ireland was waging its campaign against civilians and military targets alike; the Red Brigade in Italy was kidnapping and murdering prominent targets, and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group was likewise instilling fear into ordinary Germans. Smaller groups were playing copy-cat, and the Palestinian terrorist group Black September would go on to wreak carnage at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
The mass media, always eager for revenue-boosting sensation, tirelessly reported on every incident at length, thus instilling fear in the general population, the overwhelming majority of whom would never in their lives even be within miles of a terrorist incident. The threat induced by terrorism therefore wasn’t from the acts themselves but from the society-wide hysteria the mass media created by its sensationalist reportage. In the face of civil panic, politicians felt they had no option but to introduce ever-more draconian measures, none of which made the slightest practical difference whatsoever.
