Home thoughts from abroad...
After being shot at on our way to Murtala Muhammed Airport, Ikeja, Nigeria I went through a period of analysis, SASless-style, even though I have never knowingly eaten any snakes.
At the end of it all I came to the same basic conclusion: living in an insecure suburb of Lagos one is just too damned exposed to the risk of an ambush. Tactics favour the bad guys in that they can always bring more deadly force to bear at a certain point than you could ever afford to have with you, even if it were available. (I mean guys with clean, serviceable weapons who can shoot straight; I wouldn't expect Legionnaires ready to die to the last man.)
'Umm' has a point, I suppose, but it's pretty clear to anyone in the area that the compound has a fixed location, fixed travel times, fixed routes (given that one could only drive out the gate and go right, right, left, right to the motorway or else go left, left, left, right to the motorway). For inside intelligence just one of the amateur prostitutes allowed to roam freely would suffice and just one bad guy with a mobile telephone watching the gate would do very nicely to tell the ambush team when to expect a certain vehicle at a certain point.
If you didn't want to go to the trouble of a roadblock you could just hang out in the milling crowds at one of the many points where a vehicle is slowed to a crawl in the usual Nigerian traffic chaos.
Even the most stupid of crims must be able to figure out the basics of how to pull this one off. Our lot were f*ck-ups in that they blocked our vehicle and then opened fire when they were supposed to block our vehicle, next rob us and THEN open fire. (I wanted to point this out to them but there was just no time for that, 'Hey, you! You are getting this all wrong!')
Management dismissed what happened as a one-off, basically. Well, what else could they do; spend a lot of money to upgrade our security when the threat level would inevitably rise like a tide to overwhelm whatever was accomplished? Better perhaps to just wait and see what happened next.
Either they were right or they have just been lucky but that gun attack was on 10 September 2001 and there has not been another one quite like it on that particular operation. Why not, no one really knows. Meanwhile guys are dying elsewhere, to say nothing of the way people are being grabbed right off the streets where it was once enough to avoid 'bush bars.'
I think the logical thing would be to do it Viet Nam-style and live right there next to the aircraft. That would mean the Nigerian Government admitting they have lost control of security, though. When have they done anything but paper over the cracks?
Algeria makes an interesting contrast, what little I have seen so far. If there are no vehicles at the destination airstrip you do not land, period. Of course one of these days it will be bad guys instead of good guys in the vehicles but things haven't got quite that far yet.