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By Shane Croucher
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The Islamic State-inspired New Orleans terror attack used a method of deadly violence the world has seen often in the past decade: Vehicle ramming attacks against crowds of people.
The use of vehicles to attack civilians is encouraged by Islamist terror groups such as Islamic State because it is a low-tech option that is very hard for authorities to detect in advance, so such incidents have become increasingly common.
Ramming attacks such as those by jihadists in Nice, Barcelona, Berlin and New York's Hudson River bicycle path stick in the mind. But it isn't just Islamist terrorists who exploit the security vulnerabilities of mass gatherings to vehicle ramming attacks.
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In December, a Christmas market in Germany suffered a similar attack when a Saudi-born doctor drove a car through the festive crowds, killing five people and injuring more than 200 in Magdeburg. The suspect's motive remains unclear.
A month earlier, in November, a Chinese man drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians outside a stadium in Zhuhai, killing 35 people and injuring dozens more. AP reported that the 62-year-old suspect was upset about a divorce settlement.
Whatever the motivation for vehicle ramming attacks, they present a persistent threat to spaces where people gather in public. Can mass gatherings ever be safe from vehicle ramming attacks? Newsweek asked security experts. Here's what they said.
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Daniel Byman, Professor and Director, Security Studies Program at Georgetown University; Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic & International Studies
Mass gatherings cannot be safe, but they can be safer. Vehicle barriers, crowd control, police monitoring, and other measures all make it harder for attacks to happen.
Bruce Hoffman, Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, Council on Foreign Relations; President, The Hoffman GroupCT
The terrorist evaded police vehicles blocking Bourbon Street to mount the sidewalk. Bollards on sidewalks as well as streets could have frustrated the New Orleans attack.
Paul R. Pillar, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University
No—at least not without the transformation of an open society into a tightly controlled police state.
Harvey Wolf Kushner, Chairman and Professor, Criminal Justice Department, Long Island University
No one can ever rule out the type of vehicle attacks we just witnessed in Germany and New Orleans; however, we can better harden targets with anticipation.
In other words, New Orleans should have had bollards in place prior to the New Year's Eve festivities. Additionally, perimeters of important events should be secured.
New Orleans and the two recent attempts on the president-elect's life are cases of events that could have been prevented with proper perimeter security. But the impossible can never be ruled out.
Michael S. Smith II, Terrorism Analyst and International Security Consultant Specializing in Influence Operations of ISIS and Al-Qaeda
More can be done to discreetly mitigate against the threat of attacks like the one in New Orleans, but none of that will be a panacea in a broader sense. Because an aspirant terrorist like the one who used a truck and gun to kill and injure civilians and police officers can easily adjust their plans.
As with al-Qaida, the directives devolved by ISIS in propaganda tailored to incite violence here in the West emphasize killing as many people as possible.
If Bourbon Street was inaccessible via truck, and the terrorist responsible for the attack decided to find a way to use the truck to kill people—as called for in ISIS propaganda for years—that could have been done at many other venues where there is commonly high pedestrian traffic and little thought given to security, such as parking areas outside the doors of large airports where physical security is similarly light on major holidays.
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Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics; Author of ISIS: A History
Of course, mass gatherings in public can be made safer from vehicle ramming attacks. These events require vigilance, additional security mechanisms and luck.
In the end, all security systems breakdown. There is no such thing as absolute security when it comes to public gatherings.
Lorenzo Vidino, Director, Program on Extremism, George Washington University
The hard truth is that it is close to impossible to do so, particularly in an open society. More measures can always be taken and there is no question that Bourbon Street is not a secondary venue, so some thinking should go to what went wrong there.
But one cannot put physical barriers in any street or open space where people congregate: An elementary school cookout, a shopping street, the exit of a movie theater.
Some vulnerabilities will always exist, best one can do is diminish them and find ways to act swiftly once a danger is detected
Mia Bloom, Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies, Georgia State University; International Security Fellow, New America
The bollards should NEVER have been down before New Year's Eve [in Bourbon Street]. That said, it is impossible to prevent vehicle ramming attacks.
Recall in October 2017 when an ISIS supporter, Sayfullo Saipov, used a truck to mow down cyclists on the bicycle path along the Hudson River. He killed eight people before being shot by police.
Gatherings should have additional protection, but like school shootings, these events are impossible to prevent.
J.M. Berger, Senior Research Fellow, Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Middlebury Institute of International Studies
We'll never be able to prevent 100 percent of these attacks, although there are various things we can do to mitigate the risk.
Vehicle ramming attacks are especially hard to prevent, because they can be carried out with little or no planning, and they don't require any special equipment or training.
We can harden some public spaces, but we can't harden all of them and still allow people to go about their lives.
Fortunately, these attacks are still relatively rare, and most people will never be caught in one. But the risk is there, and it will continue.
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Tricia Bacon, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, American University; Author, Why Terrorist Groups Form International Alliances
This low-tech tactic is particularly effective because it is hard to defend and easy to execute with no training or other suspicious purchases/activities.
For some mass gatherings, there are physical barriers to car rammings, which double as measures to prevent VBIEDs from reaching targets. But it is difficult secure all mass gatherings in this way.
However, tactics tend to follow trends, so vehicle rammings may grow less common as other tactics gain prominence.
Robert J. Bunker, Director of Research and Analysis, C/O Futures
Mass gatherings can almost never be made 100 percent safe from vehicle ramming attacks—though this is highly terrain and avenues of approach dependent.
Simple bollards and barriers can be replaced by dump trucks with sand in them to create far more robust defenses.
The New Orleans failure appears to be some mixture of not paying attention to defending the access points into Bourbon Street and/or an early morning activity in which the barriers were possibly being changed out for later street clean up.
In the video that I reviewed, the perpetrator of the attack was able to slip through a barrier gap and then accelerate and engage in the vehicular overrun phase of the operation (followed by an active shooter component in which he shot two responding officers and was killed at the scene).
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