EXPLORING FIRST RESPONDER TACTICS IN A TERRORIST CHEMICAL ATTACK

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Republic of Singapore values the importance of multiagency exercises as a
critical part of “Total Defence,” particularly when local, regional and global security
trends over the past seven years require increased vigilance from Singapore’s defense and
security agencies. While Singapore adopts a multilevel approach to implement
counterterrorism measures, its security agencies continue to acknowledge the
complexities of a joint emergency response. These complexities arise out of the need to
take into consideration all dimensions of its society in the creation of counterterrorism
measures, such as military defense, internal security, border and infrastructure security,
civil defense, medical readiness, and psychological preparedness. At the heart of these
counterterrorism measures is the need to establish clear roles and actions for all agencies
during a confirmed incident.

The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), in conjunction with the Singapore Ministry
of Home Affairs (MHA), have conducted three major exercises in the past involving
nonconventional terrorist attacks against an urban population setting, the most recent
being Exercise NorthStar V. The nature of such efforts are neither unique to the country,
nor have they been implemented recently, as many developed countries that demonstrate
established frameworks of emergency preparedness and response, engage in large-scale
emergency exercises. The dynamics and aftermath of the September 11 attacks,
however, as well as the London train and bus bombings, show that no exercise can fully
inoculate a populace against a terrorist event.

A major caveat of large scale, full-troop exercises is that such organized events
alter their test environments by introducing administrative elements and invariably
contaminate exercise evaluation results when troops and exercised elements interact with
administrative elements. In addition, it is common for the political and social objectives
of a public exercise to gain more emphasis than the learning goals of the event, resulting
in these exercises becoming nothing more than a panacea against terrorism.
It would therefore be prudent to accept the limitations of mass exercises and
acknowledge the need to augment their value with additional analysis tools.

Modeling and simulation (M&S) has become an important enabler for military
experimentation. It is therefore timely that the Singaporean National Security
Coordination Centre (NSCC) is also interested in using data mining techniques, such as
the efficient use of information and high-performance computing (HPC), to enhance
national security. This study proposes that, with the use of HPC as a key technology
enabler, a simulation can be generated for urban military and counterterrorist operations,
given a specific terrorist threat (such as improvised explosive devices) and area of
operations (such as high-risk public and private buildings). Findings from such a design
could help improve real incident response.

This study applies a suitable M&S technique to analyze a theoretical scenario.
The intent is to gain additional insights into the interactions between civilian behavior,
the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) of emergency responders, and the impact of
chemical agent effects on both civilian and first responder populations. The objectives
are to apply a suitable computer simulation technique to analyze a multiagency
emergency response to an improvised explosive device with a chemical payload (CIED)
in Singapore. The establishment of a suitable framework for achieving this can extend to
the assessment of installation-specific consequence management, the design of chemical,
biological, radiological and explosive (CBRE) support operations, and multi-agency
planning. The use of agent-based simulation (ABS) allows for the potential observation
of emergent behaviors in a scenario, granted the requirement that the simulation