"Most of their rehearsals to familiarize themselves with Mumbai were done on high-resolution satellite maps, so they would have a good feel for the city’s streets and buildings where they were going," terrorism expert Praveen Swami told the Post.

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The precision of the movement rendered clandestine infiltration unnecessary. This wasn’t like Munich where the attackers had to dress like athletes, then had to bluff their way into the complex, and then had to figure where things were after arriving on site. The Mumbai teams knew exactly where they were and where they were headed. This is iG v 2.0. Mumbai was a terrorist attack that exploited modern information technology. Like the Hizballah fighters in 2006, the Mumbai attackers of 2008 used all the modern technology within their reach to conduct their operation.

This type of attack isn’t new or even novel. Terrorists have carried out these types of attacks before and have hit these kinds of targets before. They’ve even been able to "make it last" like Mumbai did. Below are two very similar examples:

November 17, 1997; Tourist Attack in Luxor, Egypt: Al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya gunmen killed 58 tourists and 4 Egyptians and wounded 26 others at the Hatshepsut Temple in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor. Thirty-four Swiss, eight Japanese, five Germans, four Britons, one French, one Colombian, a dual Bulgarian/British citizen, and four unidentified persons were among the dead. Twelve Swiss, two Japanese, two Germans, one French, and nine Egyptians were among the wounded.

And more recently . . .

September 1 – 3, 2004; Beslan, Russia: Islamist gunmen take over 1,000 hostages, mostly children, at a school in North Ossetia. After a three-day siege, many of the hostages are killed in an explosion in the school gym, after which Russian troops storm the building. The final death toll is over 330, many of them children. Eight hundred more are injured.

Nope, this attack profile isn’t new. The targets aren’t new and neither are the victims. Only the extent of the infusion and exploitation of technology is new. Just like Hizballah’s defense south of the Litani River wasn’t really new, the unexpected appearance of a full array of sophisticated technology and weapons augmented by an aggressive information operations campaign were new. The unanticipated combination forced the Israeli Defense Force to leave the field appearing, at least nominally, to have been beaten, thus bursting their all-important invincibility persona. The Israeli military expected to meet intifada-like refugee mobs throwing rocks and firing potshots, but they got paramilitary commandos fighting from a coherent and well-prepared defense system.

The Mumbai attacks will have a similar chilling effect once the whole story is known. I expect the lessons learned might point to the introduction of a new type of special ops terrorism whose capabilities will extend their reach while enabling them to execute surgical strikes that will surely be transformed into grand theater for the "if it bleeds it leads" media. The virgin-seeking suicide bomber may give way to sectarian suicide “A-Teams” whose final moments resemble a Blackhawk Down movie clip versus a series of grainy surveillance stills of a car driving up, parking, and detonating. With terrorists armed with Information Age technology, I fear there will be more Taj Hotels, more Luxors, and more Beslans on the horizon. It’s not all that difficult to train someone how to use a GPS and to pull up the Internet on a Blackberry.

We must now brace ourselves for iG v2 terrorist-guerrillas who will launch pseudo-guerrilla operations in the west with the ultimate goal of pulling one off within the continental United States. They won’t require a long incubation period and an extensive sleeper network and, with our porous borders, they probably don’t have to sweat getting in all that much. Their attacks won’t be hit-and-run; they will be stick-and-kill. Cyber recon and distributed cyber command and control and cyber navigation will enable terror guerrillas to execute precise, Special Forces–like operations. Low-cost, readily available, easy-to-use modern information technology has accelerated all aspects of modern society. I guess it would be folly not to think that the bad will accelerate alongside the good. The newest killer virus is among us. The iG v 2 is the West’s newest and potentially most lethal non-state threat.

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