By Dave Anderson:
The TV was on in the background for most of the day on one of the cable news stations. It alternated between stories about stock market updates, celebrity gossip and then the shiny item of the week; airport security.
- A dog sniffed something funny at Minneapolis
- Odd items found in Bakersfield, California
- Newark's security procedure review.
The dog in Minneapolis was a false positive, the odd items that may have been explosives turned out to be high end honey, and someone screwed the pooch in Newark. And yet those three instances created significant delays, and confusion throughout the entire political-news system as well as the national air transit system. There may be something to John Robb's idea of failure as a strategy:
even failed attacks provide the following benefits:
- New and sweeping rules on airline passengers (most inane) and beefed up security.
- New military/intelligence efforts launched against Yemen.
- A potential substantive review and expansion of the broken no-fly lists and other substantial/expensive "systemic" overhauls....
Failure is interesting, as a strategy, because it doesn't require the
necessary planning, funding, and training required for a potentially
successful attack. As a result, attacks can be made quickly across a
broad spectrum of targets.
Our decision loops suck right now. We are creating friction without capturing the heat for anything useful.
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