Many people have read and/or played the game of Rainbow Six, and some people think that a form of this covert operations squad exsits.
It is known that there are many covert groups that are similar to Rainbow. These diffrent groups have the same basic mission. Stop terrorism. The U.S. has Delta Force Delta, Seal Team 6 , United Kingdom has the British Special Air Service (SAS), Germany has the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), Italy has Carabinieri (CAB) and Russia has Spetsnaz.
All of these were made for counter terrorism purposes. While they are the top of their leage (that we know of) what use are they now a days. While the military groups can be used for special operations, their terrorist expertise is slowly being diminished. Many city police officers are now training for terrorist attacks. They will be able to attend a situation much faster than Delta or the GSG-9.
Terrorists are far from stupid, they know that when they hit a target, they have a limited amount of time. If they dont get what they want, they will do what they said they would right when their time is out. That gives the counter terrorist forces only hours to move. Let us say that a band of terrorist decide to take a bank in Los Angelas. That would mean that Delta would only have hours to get ready. Plus they would need a long flight to the Pacific side of the US. But let us not forget what many people loathe. Politics. There are so many levels of authorization needed to go through, that by the time they have the go ahead everybody in the bank is dead.
Of course this is a very unlikely situation, but it helps prove the point that CT forces must now be more localized, and have a small command structure. Mabey to the mayor, or perhaps the governer for state or federal attacks.
Another thing is that all this training might be useless, if we have more September 11th attacks.