Any military person will tell you that the biggest mistake militaries make is planning to fight the last war.
Tactics evolve, weapons evolve, players change. If you plan your defenses against how you were attacked last time, you may prevent a repeat — but you’ll leave yourself vulnerable to something new, repurposed, innovative. If you’re inspired by trench warfare to build massive forts, you may be safe against wave attacks, but you’ll have invested in making yourself vulnerable to armored columns that bypass your forts. Plan on fighting a war of armor and strategic bombing, and you’ll get blindsided
by guerilla fighters in the jungle. Orient yourself around body counts and patrols territory, and someone will introduce assymmetric warfare and IEDs.
Security works that way, too. You want to learn lessons from the past, but you don’t want to assume that the past dictates the future. But our post-9/11 world has done just that — reacting to each new threat as if it were the one thing that needs defending against.
Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won’t make us safer, either. It’s not just that there are ways around the rules, it’s that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.
It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets — stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security — and too
many ways to kill people.Security measures that require us to guess correctly don’t work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It’s not security, it’s security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.
(Of course, we assume that the folks who are trying to protect our security are doing so with good intentions — really trying to keep us safe — rather than simply trying to make us think they’re doing something for political and personal reasons.)
Aside from the difficulty of guessing correctly, the problem with security based on the last intrusion is that it lets the intruders set the agenda. Terrorists, by definition, are more interested in terror than killing per se; killing is only useful insofar as it instills terror (and thus coerces to a desired action). The terrorists “win” if we’re afraid, not just if we’re dead. And it’s a lot easier to scare everyone than kill everyone.
So, if I were a terrorist, I’d be thinking of how to better terrorize, of how I could make air travel (if I were going to focus just on one thing) even less convenient. Hmm. No liquids on board — maybe a plot to create poison gas from “food” brought on. Hey presto! No more food brought on a plane (maybe not even stuff from the catering truck). More disuption. Surely we can think of something that would require even more intrusive personal searches.
Or that would force us all to give up on all carry-ons, even beyond the exceptions Her Majesty’s Government is presently allowing (who knows what’s hidden inside that tampon?!).
Ultimately, air travel will be so scary, or onerous, that we’ll simply give it up. Huzzah for security.
Then we can start on trains and automobiles …