CBRN defence issues in law enforcement and counterterrorism

Defence against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) hazards has spent decades as, principally, a military discipline. Great effort has gone into developing an industry devoted to protecting military personnel from CBRN hazards. However, CBRN threats are, in recent decades, just as relevant in a civil protection and law enforcement context. CBRN terrorism, as well as accidents and disasters that cause the spread of hazardous materials, drives the need for some level of CBRN readiness in police and security services.

CBRN defence has over a century of being considered as subject in the military sphere of influence. Civil protection or civil defence has largely been considered a secondary area of concern. Even when it has been considered in a civil context, law enforcement and criminal investigation agencies have often been regarded as secondary players after fire, rescue, and emergency medical services. There was a lot of concern in the late 1990s after several incidents in Japan involving nerve agents, which drew a lot of broader concern to CBRN counterterrorism. But, again, much of this concern and effort fell upon fire and rescue services more than police services.

This correspondent, who owes much of his career to the post-Tokyo rise of CBRN antiterrorism, witnessed the spectacle of US Army Chemical Corps soldiers trying to teach military CBRN defence, verbatim from US military doctrine, to American firefighters and paramedics. My own take is that the effort went down poorly, needlessly sacrificed some good will, and resulted in little actual improvement to public safety. The general lesson learned by many was that you cannot simply take military CBRN defence, paint it blue, and give it to police. Yet it precisely this that the CBRN defence industry sometimes attempts to do.

Key differences

In order to understand this subject, we must comprehend the numerous major and minor differences between military CBRN defence and the policing and security services sector. First, there is the issue of organisational responsibility. In a civilian environment, CBRN incidents are far less common than but often very similar to accidents involving hazardous materials. Dealing with hazardous materials accidents in commerce, industry, transportation, and scientific situations is usually the province of firefighters, with police as only a supporting role.

Law enforcement and firefighters work in a civilian environment, which takes a different approach to risk management than the military. This translates into a number of legal, regulatory, and practical differences in things like procedures and equipment. Personal protective equipment (PPE) for civil-sector use has to adopt an occupational health and safety approach, mandated by laws and requiring tests and certifications for equipment. This approach, which takes a stronger view towards reduction of possible harm, results in PPE that is heavier, hotter, more expensive, and ultimately more protective than comparable military kit. Furthermore, civil hazardous materials hazards provide a broader spectrum of threats and conditions than military CBRN agents. Compare a military gas mask with a firefighter’s breathing apparatus and compare a military CBRN suit to a Hazmat technician’s suit, and you will see what I mean. Military CBRN equipment makes design compromises that favour operational endurance (such as spending a day or a week in CBRN kit instead of an hour), logistical simplicity, and the ability to conduct warfighting over survivability. Military CBRN kit has never been designed to negate 100% of a particular hazard. Such an attitude does not work in a regulated civilian workplace and leads to a situation wherein it may actually not be legal for a police officer to be issued with a military CBRN mask.

Operational deficits and how to fill them

Where does one start? At the beginning of a rational process, it is necessary for governments to either define or refine what it is that they expect police and other law enforcement agencies to actually do in the event of CBRN terrorism or a hazardous materials release. These two threats are necessarily combined because CBRN terrorism may present itself under the guise of a hazardous materials incident. A rational analysis of the mission can be translated into tasks that police are expected to accomplish in a CBRN situation. A set of tasks then drives the training and equipment needed. Indeed, training and equipment are co-dependent, as CBRN response is an equipment-intensive sector and much CBRN training is, in fact, equipment-oriented. But fixing the operational deficits in capability requires an earnest effort to analyse just what it is you expect your people to do.

It is actually quite important that the process be followed in the correct order. All too often, an emergency services department or agency gets this process backwards. There have been many instances of a police department being sold a particular bit of equipment, only to be following by the spectacle of working out a mission for it and how to train people on its use. This correspondent, more than once, was tasked with developing training classes for equipment based on the fact that management liked a particular sales pitch but had not actually figured out what to do with the equipment.

In most places, the details of the output of a mission analysis may vary considerably. However, in practice, these efforts broadly settle into two categories: offensive and defensive missions and tasks. Offensive tasks will require deliberate entry into a hazardous environment, and will likely include things like raiding a suspected laboratory or storage location, body retrieval, and collecting evidence after an incident. These will likely be the domain of specialist teams. Defensive tasks and missions will be things like supporting corridors and perimeters around incident sites and the ability to immediately protect oneself while retreating from an incident to a safe distance.

A mission analysis effort will run up against the issue of interagency cooperation and coordination, and fall afoul of tensions and rivalries. The general practice around the world is that firefighting services (or more rarely a dedicated civil protection service, such as the Singapore Civil Defence Force) tend to deal with industrial and transportation accidents involving hazardous materials. But as pointed out above, a CBRN incident often presents the same way. By necessity, police will have to work with firefighters. Firefighter training facilities will be better equipped and trained to conduct basic CBRN training. In many places, ancient rivalries exist and interagency cooperation is poor. Fixing these parochial issues is important to addressing CBRN threats in the civilian environment. Unfortunately, the track record in this area varies from excellent to abysmal around the world. We need only look at the sad spectacle of New York City police officers and firefighters getting into fights with each other at the World Trade Center site in November 2001 to see that such rivalries exist.

Fixing both the capability deficit and interagency coordination problems has, in fact, a common solution. Training, exercises, joint procedures, and personnel exchange are all very useful. Every task, mission, and piece of equipment identified will take training in order to perform. Such training will be more effective if it is joint, and ambulance service and fire crews are alongside for much of it. Indeed, it may be the fire training academy in a particular locale that is already best suited. Exercises help people find ways to work together in an environment that is less stressful than actual incidents, but in many places, it is rare for police, fire/rescue, and emergency medical personnel to hold exercises jointly.

 

All of this takes resources. Time, labour, and money are required to sort out the mess, and not every department will have the requisite resources. The sad reality of CBRN planning and response is that, all too often, things are done in haste and panic after an incident. A modest capability before an incident is inevitably superior to the combination of no capability before the incident and ample capability three years later due to learning a harsh lesson.

Finding pockets of existing competence and building upon them is one way to build capability. A systematic analysis of the actual mission requirements for CBRN response by law enforcement yields a set of tasks, skills, and required equipment that is actually very similar to that need for two types of niche law enforcement teams that already exist in places. Specialist investigators that pursue environmental crimes and specialist teams that conduct raids and high-risk searches on clandestine drug laboratories both have a lot of what it needed for CBRN response. In some places, such teams are scarce or non-existent, but where they exist, they can be the seed for future growth. What if a police department has a clandestine narcotics laboratory enforcement team that is capable of raiding a fentanyl or methamphetamine laboratory without causing death, injury, or environmental disaster? That is, in fact, a de facto CBRN response team, given its already existing equipment and mission, and it will need only minor adjustment.

Often the largest CBRN-related deficit in law enforcement is the issue of forensics. Collecting, storing, and analysis of evidence from a possible CBRN-related crime scene is likely to be necessary to discover the perpetrators, identify the causative agent (which, in turn is useful for medical treatment and recovery of the affected area), and prosecution of offences. It would be a political catastrophe anywhere a terrorist group escaped arrest, avoided prosecution, or was acquitted at trial due to lack of evidence or evidence being tainted. [Note: This subject is much more heavily explored in ‘CBRN forensics: Proving an incident occurred and proving who did it’, published in ESD 02-2025.]

The issue of equipment needs three things. It needs resources, principally funds. But spending money on the wrong things does not help capability or capacity. The correct equipment items need to actually be available for procurement. For industry to develop equipment actual suited to this market segment, two things need to happen. Occupational safety and health regulators that govern PPE need to lean a bit towards emergency responder use cases in the understanding that there are emergency situations which are not the same as a normal workplace that uses industrial hazards.

 

On the other side of the equation, manufacturers need to do more than just paint the products blue and slap a ‘for police use’ decal on them. There needs to be a better understanding that CBRN incidents in the urban environment are not necessarily the same as military use cases on the battlefield. In the US and Western European CBRN markets, there has been some progress on both of these fronts, but it has been glacial and practitioners have long been having to make improvisations. Much of the equipment used early on for clandestine lab raids or environmental investigations, mentioned above, was improvised and adapted from other sources. Use of military equipment can be a useful stop-gap, but needs to be used with caution. Also, there are certainly legal and political issues with militarisation of policing and blurring the lines between the military and civilian police in many countries. But there is actually a lot of improvement in CBRN technology in recent decades and police CBRN protective clothing, for example, does not have any technical reason to need to look like military CBRN protective clothing.

One area of particular concern, however, is detection equipment. CBRN detection has improved greatly in recent decades and several articles over the last decade in this publication have attempted to survey these developments. However, the fundamental reality is that urban environments, which is where policing tends to be concentrated, has a wide variety of background interference that can give a lot of false positives on CBRN detection equipment. The operational penalties for false alarms in a civilian environment are different than in a military environment. If an artillery battery has to put on masks for an hour while an alert from a chemical detector is investigated, of course there is some operational penalty and degradation of performance. But in a modern military this is, to some extent, ‘baked in’ and it is better to have that false alert than lose some soldier’s lives. But false positives in civilian environments can get buildings evacuated, cause widespread disruption, or get someone arrested wrongly because a chemical detector alerted to dry cleaning fluid or a leaking fire extinguisher or some similar scenario. Your correspondent does not see widespread adoption of chemical detection equipment in routing policing any time soon due to inherent limitations in design and the engineering trade-offs that have been made in chemical detection. On the other hand, there are numerous useful examples of radiation detection being used in policing and law enforcement, particular in customs and border protection scenarios.

Closing thoughts

If modern society wants to protect its citizens and safeguard its critical infrastructure, then the issue of CBRN response to policing needs to be seriously addressed. Relegating the CBRN protection mission solely to the military may work in some places, but generally speaking, modern democratic societies can and should do better, and military forces are often quartered far away from much of the likely civilian populace and infrastructure that would be most likely involved in terror incidents. The gulf between military and law enforcement CBRN response is not insurmountable, and a systematic analysis can address this gulf. Indeed, in many places, significant process has been made. None of this progress will be fairly evaluated without having been challenged, and we hope such challenges are rare.

Dan Kaszeta