In Part One, The Long Road To Beslan, Giduck does an excellent job of sketching the history of terrorism in Russia leading up to the Beslan siege, the two recent Chechen Wars, and the fractured history of the Special Forces Counter-Terror units in Russia.
Part Two, Attack on the School, is the play-by-play account of the actual assault, the three-day siege, and the resultant conflagration. This information is critical to our law enforcement today, and there is no other accurate accounting of it available other than this book. The publishers of this book, Archangel Group, have prepared conferences for military and law enforcement to benefit from the lessons learned in the wake of so much tragedy. They also present training for school administration and municipalities to help them evaluate and asses their vulnerabilities and risks. Much of the insights presented in the training have been learned directly from Giduck’s involvement at Beslan on the last day of the siege and the resultant aftermath.
In Part Three, Dissecting a Terrorist Siege, Giduck draws upon his years in Special Operations and counter-terrorism to analyze the siege, starting with the terrorists’ original plan, their execution of it, and the government’s response. Of most value to Americans is the hindsight and lessons learned from the assault. If we, as a nation, do not take to heart the insights gleaned from the debacle of Beslan, then we remain powerless to prevent anything, and the innocents will have died in vain.
Finally, in Part Four, Preparing America for Battle, Giduck lays out a very comprehensive plan to prepare us for the inevitable. There is much to do to prepare, and not much is being done about it. When John asked Russian experts what the most important things were for America to learn from Beslan, it was to prepare – physically, tactically, and mentally.
Russians are not typically a people who take great pains to keep their opinions to themselves. However, when urges to articulate what America must do to prepare for an assault on her own schools, even the most vocal become strangely humble. They know what is at stake. “Security in schools should be a large system,” Special Forces commander Sergei Lisyuk says. “The first and most important part of the system must be the information and intelligence system.” …He is not unrealistic about the changes this would entail. “This would be a large deviation from how schools have historically viewed themselves and their mission,” he admits. “But if they do not adapt to the times, and recognize the threats they are now under, they may not have children to teach”…To keep their children safe in order to educate them, [schools] must take on – at least to some degree a tactical mindset.
We Americans are woefully under-informed and ill-prepared for a ruthless attack against our children, likely because we cannot fathom it. Giduck understands the threat like no other and conveys the seriousness and urgency with which we must face the facts:
The problem up until now is that to most Americans – despite all of the terror attacks on our fellow citizens, on our property, and despite 9/11 – the very notion of Islamist extremists coming here to kill us remains a distant and unrealistic thought. The average person does not get up every day and seriously contemplate that the bridge he is about to drive across on his way to work, or the office building he is about to walk into, the mall or restaurant she will have lunch in, the school or day-care her children will merrily clamor into that morning, may well be the target of a terrorist attack. Moreover, Americans have not been given the information needed – in the context required – to recognize this is not only a realistic and serious concern, but an inevitable one.
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