Prominent security failures have demonstrated that even nations regarded as the most well-equipped to handle domestic threats are wildly unprepared to deal with drones as tools of surveillance and direct attack.

In countries such as Australia and the United States, drones are not being detected, and, even if they are, authorities and defence forces are not equipped for economically and safely destroying them.

There’s no greater example of failure to handle drones than the 13 July assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump. Intending killer Thomas Matthew Crooks used a drone to survey the area before pulling the trigger. Poor cellular connectivity has been blamed for the Secret Service’s inability to detect that drone and prevent its reconnaissance mission.

Similarly, Chinese national Fengyun Shi plead guilty in July to espionage charges for flying drones around US shipyards and submarines in the past months.

Drones—both small consumer-grade devices and larger units—continue to target sensitive locations globally despite efforts to regulate their use. While Australia is far from geopolitical conflicts and hostile environments, these examples reflect just how easily a nefarious actor can carry out surveillance.

And, as the war in Ukraine has shown, it’s not a long stretch for someone to escalate surveillance into a direct attack by attaching a plastic charge or similar substance to a cheap drone, particularly where highly valuable and confidential assets are concerned.

Since April, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian police have investigated eight such cases for connections to terrorism, with intelligence officials worrying that social media is amplifying political volatility, particularly among youth. Intelligence officials describe the current sentiment as ‘lawful, awful and unhelpful’ and believe there is a heightened risk of lone-wolf attacks in crowded places. Intelligence agencies have reportedly said such attacks will be ‘low cost, locally financed and use readily acquired weapons with relatively simple tactics’. Should an attack happen, the devastation will far outweigh the price of the weapons used.

In the north of Australia, while the federal government is pushing ahead with upgrades to bases and airfields as part of its 2024 National Defence Strategy, these installation are generally even more exposed to the threats posed by drones by the simple arithmetic that they are protected by fewer individuals because of their remoteness. With fewer personnel, there is less capacity for traditional methods of drone spotting, let alone the most effective ones, to the point that personnel are reliant on visual tools alone. The problem will only become more widespread for Australia as we build and host more sensitive installations. Should the new facilities for submarines obtained through the AUKUS agreement fail to detect and thwart drones going near them, the outcome could be catastrophic.

It wasn’t much more than 12 months ago that sources inside the Australian Defence Force advised that they couldn’t confidently determine whether, when or how many drones were flying too close to assets or within restricted areas. Since my conversations at that time, little has changed.

Unfortunately, in most cases, old-hat methods of sensing and preventing drone intrusions come down to manual spotting and hard-kill capabilities. And they’re entirely impractical.

The first issue is that most drones go unseen. The inability to automate detection, particularly for more expensive drones that operate out of eyesight and earshot, welcomes surveillance and espionage. Detection, particularly once laced with artificial intelligence built to see and hear drones at long distances, is far more capable than a human alone. It allows alerts to be issued well before a threat becomes visible or audible to a lone human, triggering a rapid response long before a threat can cause damage.

The second problem is the mindset that we can simply shoot down anything that may pose a threat, whether that’s with live rounds or lasers. Economics and logistical constraints suggest relying on bullets or kinetic counter-drone weapons to stop drones is neither affordable nor effective, as it will take tens of thousands of dollars to take down a drone worth a few hundred dollars. The costs skyrocket when considering the risk of collateral damage from those weapons as well. Firing rotary cannons near our future nuclear submarine bases is not an option.

But even in the case a drone is stopped through traditional means, taking it down often results in a dead end. Drones are popular among nefarious actors because they are disposable. That doesn’t do much for Australia’s ability to determine who’s behind an incursion, where they are located, the information they have collected, and whether there is a broader risk at play on which to act. It’s this type of intelligence that could have alerted the US Secret Service to Crooks preparing his position, or to ensuring that an infantry unit knows a drone is nearby on the battlefield.

As legislation pushes forward, from the Defence Strategic Review to the infrastructure requirements, there is no time to sit idle while drones become a weapon of choice for surveillance and direct attacks. We can’t put all our focus on traditional means for protecting the nation and its interests; remit must expand to avoid a deer-in-the-headlights moment in the face of an inevitable drone attack.

The recently released Global Terrorism Index finds that deaths from terrorism around the world fell to 13,826 in 2019, a 15% decrease from the previous year and a five-year low. A total of 103 countries showed improvements in their scores, and only 35 showed a deterioration. The report gives us some reasons to be optimistic, and the fact that Australia currently fares well is one of them.

Despite this, Australia, and the West more broadly, must remain alert. One of the more worrying trends in the past five years is the surge in extremist political terrorism. Even though the absolute number of extremist attacks remains low when compared with other forms of terrorism, in North America, Western Europe and Oceania, far-right attacks increased by 250% from 2014 to 2019 and deaths increased by 709%.

Over the same five-year period, data shows that the intensity of far-left terrorism also increased. However, far-right terrorism tends to be more lethal than far-left terrorism, though not as lethal as Islamist terrorism in the West. There were 89 deaths attributed to far-right terrorists in 2019, 51 of which occurred in the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand. In the West, the number of attacks has climbed from four in 2011 to an average of 52 for the past three years.

There are also signs that socioeconomic and political instability are increasing. Over the past decade, measures of societal resilience have been falling in many economically advanced economies, a trend that’s likely to continue during the extended economic downturn caused by Covid-19. If left unchecked, this kind of instability could boost the background conditions for terrorism.

To better understand the underlying societal factors correlated with terrorism, the index deciphers the socioeconomic and political factors associated with higher levels of terrorism in advanced and developing nations. Using structural equations modelling and correlation analysis, the Institute for Economics and Peace assessed the relationship between a large number of socioeconomic indicators and terrorism. In advanced economies, we found that internal conflict, lack of protection of human rights, social disenfranchisement and inequality—especially the youth unemployment rate—are factors with a high correlation with terrorism.

Data supports many of the stories and images of fractured societies we see regularly in the news. Civil unrest is on the rise. Even prior to the widespread demonstrations seen in 2020, social and political instability had been on the rise in the West, with nearly 70 violent demonstrations recorded in 2019, compared with only 19 in 2011. Europe had the largest number of protests, riots and strikes over the period, totalling nearly 1,600 events from 2011 to 2018. There are signs that political violence is becoming more publicly acceptable as the level of polarisation in society grows: polling data from the United States shows a large jump in the proportions of both Democrats and Republicans who feel that violence for political ends is at least partially justified.

Research into global levels of positive peace over the past decade shows that the US has deteriorated substantially in this area, while in Europe the attitudes that underpin peace have deteriorated. Our research into this concept analyses the underlying societal factors that sustain peace and strengthen resilience within a country. In the US, the considerable deterioration has mainly happened over the past six years. Key drivers include an increasingly polarised political debate, growing tensions between socioeconomic or racial groups, and a deterioration in the quality of information available to the public, with opinion and propaganda often masquerading as news. In Europe, economic progress has been made over the past 10 years, but increases in political polarisation and social fragmentation and a deterioration in the quality of information disseminated to the public have also been recorded.

While Western countries must remain on guard, looking at the threat of terrorism from a global standpoint provides worthwhile perspectives. The 10 countries most impacted by terrorism are developing countries, half of which are mired in conflict; they are Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, India, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Philippines.

The largest increase in terrorism occurred in Burkino Faso, where deaths rose by 590% between 2018 and 2019. Islamic State has been territorially defeated in the Middle East, but its affiliate groups remain active, with 27 countries recording an attack by IS or one of its affiliates. Sub-Saharan Africa has been hit the hardest and has become the terror group’s new centre of gravity—41% of all IS-related deaths occurred in this part of Africa.

ASPI is hosting the Australia and Asia–Pacific launch of the Global Terrorism Index 2020 at 6 pm AEDT. The annual index, now in its eighth year, is developed by Institute for Economics and Peace and provides comprehensive information on global terrorism trends and patterns over the past 18 years.

This online event will begin with a pre-recorded keynote address from Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Leanne Close, head of ASPI’s Counter-Terrorism Program, will then be joined by Steve Killelea, chairman and founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace; Commander Sandra Booth from the Australian Federal Police; Peta Lowe, principal consultant at Phronesis Consulting; and Dr Julian Droogan from Macquarie University to discuss the key findings from the report. Click here to register.

Mass shootings such as those in El Paso and Las Vegas and terror attacks such as those in New Zealand and Norway, along with the rise of nationalist, anti-immigrant, populist political parties, have put the spotlight on right-wing extremism.

In the United States between 2008 and 2017, far-right extremists or white supremacists were responsible for 387 fatalities. Over the same period in the US, Salafi-jihadists were responsible for 100 fatalities. In the UK, concern over right-wing extremism has led to the issue being placed under the jurisdiction of MI5 instead of the police.

The problem for many Western security services is that, unlike the jihadi movement, right-wing extremism is difficult to define and challenging to stop.

In 2000, Cas Mudde identified more than 25 different definitions of right-wing extremism, ranging from a focus on racism, xenophobia and nationalism to more complex definitions that include militarism, ethnocentrism and anti-pluralism, among other things. The quest for a definition stems from the need to set out not only what right-wing extremism is, but also what it is not.

It’s important to distinguish between those who advocate radical ideas that call for drastic changes to the political, economic and socio-cultural system and those who promote extremist and often anti-democratic views. Right-wing extremism doesn’t adhere to a singular political ideology, nor does it have a clear goal, such as the establishment of a caliphate. And in many democracies the early signs of extremism are masked as protected speech.

Contemporary right-wing extremism is a cacophonous, dispersed, transnational network, composed of at least four main streams that developed primarily in the US. The network itself is essentially made up of individuals who feel they’re part of an ‘in group’ and see themselves as enlightened. They believe that they have shed their false consciousness by taking the ‘red pill’.

The first stream is composed of avowed white supremacists. Mainly neo-Nazis, they draw on racial supremacy theories and cite pseudo-scientific texts like Crania Americana, an 1839 publication by American anthropologist Samuel George Morton. Morton looked at skull sizes and argued, without evidence, that Caucasians have larger skulls and therefore are more civilised than other people.

A second strand within right-wing extremism has a strong religious component, emphasising the superiority of the Christian faith and referencing the importance of the rapture, as seen with the Ku Klux Klan. Some within this strand, such as German political movement Pegida, contend that Christianity and Christians are under threat mainly from immigrants to Western countries. Its members claim that they want to prevent Islamisation and unchecked mass immigration.

Right-wing populists form a third strand that’s probably the largest of the four groups. It includes anti-immigrant political parties such as Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, as well as more virulent ‘nationalists’ or overzealous patriots like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, otherwise known as Tommy Robinson, leader of the English Defence League; Australian Blair Cottrell; and American Richard Spencer.

These individuals may subscribe to the ‘great replacement’ theory, though they are often careful not to preach violence, which allows them to play a role on the margins of mainstream politics. Over time, however, their ideas may be slowly adopted by mainstream parties or may become the mainstream, as seen with the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord in Italy, the Austrian People’s Party, and Alternative for Germany. Interfused within this movement is a fundamental rejection of traditional political parties, which are portrayed as liberal elitists adhering to an internationalist, globalist agenda.

The fourth strand of right-wing extremism is best seen as ‘others’. They include incels, sovereign citizens, the alt-right and identitarians.

A common feature that unites the various strands is emotion, most commonly anger, infused with irrational fear of and hostility towards the ‘other’ or the ‘out group’. Beyond the emotional aspect, Mudde and others have pointed out that right-wing extremism encapsulates characteristics including nationalism or nativism; racism; xenophobia; anti-democratic tendencies; support for a strong, often militarised, state; anti-establishment sentiments; and misogyny.

What has made right-wing extremism so dangerous and so difficult to counter is the internet, which allows people to connect much more easily and anonymously. Moreover, the extreme paranoia of the ‘in group’ means that they are committed to remaining anonymous until it’s time to take things to the next level.

The security community faces three key challenges in its attempts to tackle right-wing extremism. First, the disaggregated nature of the community means that it’s hard to identify nodes and hubs. By contrast, when security services seek to disrupt, for example, the dissemination of Islamic State propaganda, they can identify and then target nodes or hubs that are engaged in the creation of content or its dissemination.

Second, the lack of definition of the movement and the fact that many of its members operate within the boundaries of what is legal, and often defend their actions under protected speech or freedom of speech rights, means that it’s difficult to demand the removal of content from online platforms.

And finally, the transnational nature of the community means that its members can find homes in countries that have more permissive legislative regimes or are sympathetic to extremist ideas.

If we are to move forward in countering the growth of right-wing extremism, we must develop a better understanding of what the term encapsulates.

We should begin with a focus on extremism, trying to define what it means within the confines of our society. When we look at the far-right, we need to understand what type of a society they want to create and how they wish to do so. By understanding the goals of extremist groups, we can use democratic values to challenge them.

The shocking involvement of three families in a wave of bombings across the port city of Surabaya has announced the arrival of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), a loosely organised Islamic State (ISIS) affiliate that may well become a more dangerous version of the Jemaah Islamiyah network that terrorised Indonesia in the early 2000s.

Certainly, given the fact that one of the three families involved only returned from Syria last year, it has provided proof that with many of their Indonesian fighters dead or missing, radicalised dependents are willing to sacrifice their lives in small-scale terrorist attacks.

Formed from among nearly two dozen jihadist splinter groups in 2015, JAD may not be targeting hotels and embassies. But in sustaining a campaign of violence over the past week that began with a bloody prison riot in Jakarta, JAD’s followers have taken the government unawares and left counterterrorism authorities scrambling to respond.

Terrorism experts say if last year’s siege of the Mindanao city of Marawi wasn’t sufficient evidence, the latest violence demonstrates ISIS’s ability to mount operations as far afield as Southeast Asia despite the destruction of the Syria–Iraq caliphate. As one former investigator put it, ‘That is the big issue coming out of this.’

The involvement of returning mothers and children, whom authorities initially paid little attention to, has added an insidious new dimension to a threat that will only get bigger as hundreds more returnees from Syria melt back into JAD’s network of independent cells across 18 of the country’s 34 provinces.

The Surabaya death toll now stands at 28—some 13 bombers and 15 civilians, together with more than 50 wounded. The most casualties were around the three churches that were struck within minutes of each other in the deadliest terrorist incident since the 2005 Bali bombings and the worst since the JAD-inspired gun-and-bomb attack in Jakarta in early 2016.

The Surabaya attackers assembled 25 pipe bombs—two of which are still missing—using the highly explosive chemical TATP, or acetone peroxide, which has been employed before in pressure-cooker devices, including one that was found on Indonesia’s first would-be female suicide bomber last year.

Indonesia’s elite Detachment 88 counterterrorism unit, which has just doubled in size, continues to do a sterling job in tracking down militants. But the government doesn’t have the manpower or the capability to monitor the estimated 500 returnees, let alone the 600 who are thought to remain in the war zone.

On top of that, efforts at rehabilitating the homegrown militants are failing. Look no further than the 9–10 May siege at the Police Mobile Brigade’s headquarters in Depok, where 156 inmates—who were detained in temporary quarters there as part of a deradicalisation program—shot and stabbed to death five Detachment 88 officers, most of whom had their throats cut.

The rioters also seized 88 weapons, including assault rifles and light machine guns, and a staggering 28,400 rounds of ammunition stored in an unsecured evidence room. The only reason the siege didn’t turn into a bloodbath was that the rioters couldn’t contact three coordinators on the outside.

The uprising leader, Wawan Kurniawan, head of the Pekanbaru, Riau, chapter of JAD, is a close associate of the organisation’s founder, Aman Abdurrahman, who was already incarcerated in a different part of the prison. Abdurrahman is currently on trial for his role in masterminding the 2016 Jakarta attack from behind bars.

Counterterrorism experts say no effort was made to classify the inmates into those who were possible candidates for deradicalisation and those who weren’t. In that sense, the program was doomed before it started. All prisoners have now been moved to the Nusakambangan island prison off the south coast of Java.

With national elections less than a year away, President Joko Widodo is now demanding a revision of the 2003 Anti-Terrorism Law to allow police to detain terrorist suspects longer in the pursuit of further evidence, and to prevent citizens from travelling overseas to overthrow a legitimate government.

Alarming for human rights activists, however, have been moves to legislate the involvement of the armed forces in the anti-terrorism effort. For those with a memory, even using military intelligence—which the police chief, Tito Karnavian, says he wants to do in the Surabaya investigation—is seen as the thin edge of the wedge.

Although there have been few large-scale attacks on the scale of the now-disbanded Jemaah Islamiyah’s protracted bombing campaign in 2000–2009, the National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT) recorded 172 terrorist cases last year, continuing a steady rise from 163 in 2016 and only 73 in 2015.

Former BNPT chief Ansyad Mbai has criticised politicians for tying the hands of police, claiming that jihadists who have returned from Turkey, Syria and Iraq have been using social media to renew networks while counterterrorism authorities have failed to monitor their activities.

Spurred on by the deputy House Speaker, Fadli Zon, a key associate of presidential aspirant Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s social media has been alive with criticism of Karnavian for failing to prevent the prison uprising or the latest wave of bombings in Indonesia’s second largest city.

Karnavian’s appointment in March 2016 over the heads of several more-senior officers led to a rift with his deputy, General Syafruddin, who is close to the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) director, Budi Gunawan, a confidant of Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle leader Megawati Sukarnoputri.

Widodo’s failure to promote Gunawan, then deputy police chief, to the top job in early 2015 owing to corruption allegations brought the fledgling president into conflict with Megawati, which finally appeared to have been resolved when Gunawan was made head of BIN in September 2016.

While Gunawan is also copping a lot of heat for not anticipating the bombings, the president is unlikely to remove either him or Karnavian less than a year out from the presidential and legislative elections scheduled for April next year, where he’s the clear frontrunner in the polls.

Struggling with a lagging economy and a failure so far to attract foreign investment, the sudden rise of JAD was the last thing Indonesia’s president needed.

This week in Sydney, Standards Australia, the peak national standards development body, will host over 100 leading security experts from 45 countries. The security and resilience conference aims to make progress on standards to reduce the threat from malicious actors. It’s the biggest event ever of its kind in Australia.

The gathering couldn’t be timelier. The range of threats that businesses and governments face continues to evolve. From cyberattacks on major companies and critical national infrastructure to the threat of terrorist attacks in crowded places, the need for effective identification and management of security risks has never been more important.

The Sydney meeting of security experts comes hard on the heels of the creation of the Department of Home Affairs. The new department underlines the need for a comprehensive and cohesive Australian national security strategy that can’t afford to be ‘siloed’. Security is now increasingly interlinked, with responsibility falling across government and business.

In this environment we need an international, standardised approach to protective security. Understanding what it means to manage risk when trying to protect against malicious acts is very different to managing risk from a broader ‘all hazards’ approach such as natural disasters or a pandemic. Malicious acts—driven as they are by the intentions and capabilities of humans to do harm—are more difficult to predict.

When it comes to terrorism, protective security management seeks to prevent the attack. That requires an understanding of the target, an organisation’s areas of vulnerability and the risk factors associated with any collateral damage.

Both government and business have an interest in creating security solutions through international standards that enhance their adaptive capacity. But there will be challenges. To give any new standard meaning, it will need to be applied universally across large, medium and small companies in a range of operating environments. If the standard is too complicated, the rate of adoption by businesses may be low.

But the development and implementation of a best practice protective security standard will improve collaboration between businesses and government by providing a common objectives, as well as a common language, in managing important security information, assets and people.

An international protective security standard will also provide a unified approach to organisations collaborating on intelligence and security in the region. It will help smooth over any cultural differences that create a barrier to successful security collaboration.

States and organisations that have high levels of security may be reluctant to share information with states that are known to have weaker processes. A protective security standard will encourage collaboration between states and business by providing a higher level of transparency, which enhances the reliability of information management.

An enhanced protective security standard can provide a level of assurance for businesses, which leads to more confident decision-making. Stronger security standards will provide customers with a higher level of confidence in the quality of the company and its ability to protect them and their information.

Standards Australia’s conference this week underscores the trend for national security to be a team sport when private companies influence national security outcomes, primarily by providing services. Key sectors include infrastructure, telecommunications, finance and banking and transport.

Security now needs to be looked at from a 360-degree approach, bringing together experts from government and businesses in counterterrorism, protective security, cybersecurity, data management and emergency services.

Standards Australia, for example, is now reaching out to countries across the region to tackle the increasing threat of cyberattacks on specific businesses. It’s using a regional program that analyses each nation’s cybersecurity needs, identifies gaps and encourages the adoption of national cybersecurity standards.

This week’s Sydney meeting is a great opportunity to create and extend more cooperative frameworks for preventing and responding to security incidents.

The importance of sharing information to protect assets, systems and people will only increase. That makes this week’s efforts on establishing better international standards for protective security important.

But in some ways, what’s being discussed isn’t as relevant as the fact that more meetings like this are taking place to tackle security and resilience across an inter-connected web of issues.

It’s all part of the bigger story of a more joined-up national security strategy that’s now emerging in Australia.