How Corporate Security Can Face Down Fourth-Generation Warfare
Just because your enterprise is not operating in a warzone does not make you immune to fourth-generation warfare.
Historically, corporate security professionals have been responsible for making sure the cameras watched cars in the parking lot, access control systems allowed for authorized employees and the alarm system was turned on at night. Add to this, ensuring the security officers stayed awake and the occasional investigation was conducted; and you have a fairly straightforward job description. Recent events though, have redefined the job description for the security profession. To operate in the modern, globalized environment, senior security staff needs to be cognizant of a variety of boardroom level concerns that bring risk to their company; and a new paradigm of thought when it comes to viewing those threats.
This new paradigm was explored in 1989, when experts on military affairs, while preparing for an article in the United States Marine Corp Gazette, postulated that nation states have, or will soon, lose their monopoly on being the primary war fighters in the world. This theory came to a realization over a decade later as the first major assault on United States soil since Pearl Harbor, was carried out on the nation’s most preeminent financial center on a clear morning in September 2001. The attack was borne out, not by a nation state that was seeking to overthrow the United States or retaliate for attacks on their foreign soil, but by radicalized members of a religious sect that wanted to cause harm to the United States, both on government and private entities that operate inside, and outside of her borders. For the private sector security professional, the business of security, changed from access control, alarm systems and security officers, to being thrust into the world of national defense by enemies that span the globe. In other words, security is moving into being part of the next generation of warfare.