sacon

Background

The ongoing globalization process towards one world economy offers trade and industry many opportunities. New economic regions arise and former boundaries disappear in order to facilitate this process. Nevertheless this current epoch has revealed the existence of new weaknesses and vitalities in societies several times which endanger not only the globalization process itself but also the public security and inherent the political stability. It is almost certain that new threats will evolve which could easily destabilize the political climate.

The idea about this is that this happens by complex planned attacks by groups with terroristic, extremistic or fundamentalistic motives. However since the attention of intelligence agencies has been intensified it is assumable that future terror actions will be different in terms of preparation. The focus of these groups will possibly transfer to more easy to plan actions with relatively simple means like the use of different types of small arms and/or explosives but still with a deep social impact.

In short, the combat effectiveness of non conformist groups could increase dramatically while there preparations are more difficult to trace in advance. One important reason for that is that the trade in illegal small arms covers many objectives for several parties with different interests like the need for fire power in regional conflicts and the execution of criminal activities in short purposes which could easily be used as cover for terror purposes. SAFOPS fills in the need for specific information in the field of small arms related to terrorism and public security.