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The Role of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom in
Securing the State Against Terrorism
Jonathan Stevenson ∗
The horror of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to worldwide condemna-
tion. All parts of the world mourned the victims of the attacks with a sense of shared
loss that was heightened by the fact that many of the victims were of nationalities other
than American. Allies rushed to the support of the United States, and NATO promptly
declared that the attack on the U.S. could be considered an attack on the entire nine-
teen-nation alliance. But while the U.S. chose to hike defense spending and intensify
its efforts on homeland security, the effect on European countries was somewhat dif-
ferent. The terrorist attacks constituted a watershed in threat perceptions in the U.S.,
but to a large number of European countries the threat seemed less novel.
Terrorist activities within national borders are not new to many states in Europe.
Indeed, the continent’s history is scarred by a relatively large number of terrorist ac-
tivities and groups, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque
separatist organization Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Greek far-left group No-
vember 17 Organization, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and the Red Brigades in
Italy, to name but a few. Europeans did recognize that the “new terrorists”—that is,
transnational Islamist terrorists—posed the threat of mass casualties, and were gener-
ally uninterested in bargaining or other modes of formal conflict resolution. But Euro-
pean governments also had more experience than the U.S. with terrorism, and they
tended to see the new terrorism more as a continuation of old forms of terrorism than
did the U.S. At least initially, for instance, European officials were less inclined to
think that terrorists would use weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Furthermore, the U.S. was perceived—justifiably—as the prime target of Al Qaeda
and the transnational Islamist terrorist movement over which it loosely presides. There-
fore, threat perceptions did not change as dramatically in Europe, and the sense of an
urgent need to boost homeland security was not as strong as that prevailing in the
United States. For most European governments, existing counter-terrorism measures
were seen as basically adequate, although some adjustments were made to deal with
the perceived threat of terrorism from WMD. Yet because the proportion of Muslims
in European populations—especially in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—
is far higher than it is in the U.S., and Muslim populations are generally less integrated,
the challenges in terms of technical counter-terrorism (intelligence collection through
surveillance and penetration, pursuit by police and/or special operations forces) in
Europe are in some ways greater than they are in the U.S. However, falling military
∗
Jonathan Stevenson is a Senior Fellow for Counter-terrorism at the International Institute for
Strategic Studies in London.
