Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke on Channel 4 news

In late September 2007 Professor Michael Clarke was appointed as Director of the Royal United Services Institute in succession to Rear Admiral Richard Cobbold who retired in summer 2007.

According to RUSI:

Professor Clarke is currently Director of Research Development and Deputy Vice Principal at King's College London. His distinguished career in the defence academic field began with a degree in international politics from Aberystwyth University, where he subsequently took an MSc(Econ) in British Defence Policy and served as a researcher in the Department of International Politics. He moved to Manchester University from 1975 to 1979 and then to the Department of Politics at Newcastle where he remained until 1990 when he became the founding Director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College London. He was appointed Professor of Defence Studies at King's in 1995 and took up his present position there in 2005.

Professor Clarke has been a senior Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defence Committee since 1997, having served previously with the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. In 2004 he was appointed the UK member of the United Nations Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. He has published extensively on defence and security issues and has lectured at many universities in the United Kingdom, as well as at the Joint Staff College, the Royal College of Defence Studies, the NATO School at Oberammergau and the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands. He has been a Guest Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a Fellow in British Foreign Policy at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, of whose Council he has been a member since 2004.

Islamic Terrorism Comments

In June 2009, Michael Clarke warned that the threat of Islamic terrorism "would not wither away in the near future: it is likely to be generational." He stated that the success of police and intelligence operations that had been executed were "the golden age of counter-terrorism", but had led to British prisons becoming "universities of terror". He argued that "the security services had done a good job so far in containing a new, home grown threat to public safety and to the UK's chosen way of life ... [but] ... the 90-odd convictions [which have been secured relating to terrorism] ... will have their own longer-term consequences for which the government must be prepared."

Radicalised Prisoners

In August 2010, Michael Clarke and Valentina Soria issued a report that warned of a new-phase of home-grown terrorist attacks because of the escalating in-prison radicalisation that was taking place. RUSI stated that upto 800 "potentially" violent radicals who have not been convicted of terrorist offences could be released in the the next 5-10 years and could be targeted/groomed by extremists and radicals upon their release.<ref name="RUSI Threat">Alan TravisTerror warning over radicalised prisoners, The Guardian, 27 August 2010, accessed 29.08.10

The report warns that the nature of the threat posed by the individuals that would be released would see a shift in tactics - it would be a "new-wave" of terrorism. RUSI argues that this "new-wave" will move-away from "large-scale, co-ordinated bombings, which have needed considerable training and operational support, to the greater use of lone individuals carrying out smaller-scale random attacks against different targets".

The report also states that "attacks on 'crowded places' are near the top of the government's risk rankings over the next five years."

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the institution responsible for prisoners and prisons in the UK questioned the figure of 800. It stated: "The prison and probation service does not recognise the figure of 800 'violent radicals' referred to in the report, nor do we agree that jihadist radicalisation is taking place at a rapid rate.There are only 6,000 prisoners in the high security estate, most of whom are not Muslim. The figure of 'one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslims' in the high security estate is therefore unrecognisable."