How much Bang is stopped for your Bucks?

Back to Slate again, but not to excoriate this time. It's pretty 'Progressive" but balanced enough or I wouldn't read it, and today's link ties into whatever it is that I've been on about here lately. The trend seems to be "efficiently fighting bad people" and here is the authors' explanation of "cost effectiveness":

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

Hearken back to my problems with the methods of the TSA in the last post, and we're all on the same page here. The enemy of cost effectiveness is bureaucratic empire building, and we come to where that begins in the context of American Homeland Security:

To evaluate the reduction in risk provided by security measures, we need to consider their effectiveness in foiling, deterring, disrupting, or protecting against a terrorist attack. In assessing risk reduction, it is important first to look at the effectiveness of homeland security measures that were in place before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission's report points to a number of failures, but it acknowledges as well that terrorism was already a high priority of the government before 9/11. More pointed is an observation of Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism: "The most important work in protecting our country since 9/11 has been accomplished with the capacity that was in place when the event happened, not with any of the new capability bought since 9/11. I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post-9/11 security."

There is another consideration. The tragic events of 9/11 massively heightened the awareness of the public to the threat of terrorism, resulting in extra vigilance that has often resulted in the arrest of terrorists or the foiling of terrorist attempts.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we come back to the fact (visited a couple of posts back) that history and terrorism didn't pop out of nowhere ten years ago. I will make the argument that 9/11 was Team bin Laden's peak (safe bet at this point) and only worked because they had element of strategic surprise about the suicide bombing thing. No one will ever again allow terrorists to take over an airplane, and you'll notice they have stopped trying and merely try to destroy them in air. A cost effective solution to hijacking: lock the cockpit door and give flight attendants tasers.

With that in mind, into the meat of Mueller and Stewart's excerpt:

Putting this all together, we find that, in order for the $75 billion in enhanced expenditures on homeland security to be deemed cost-effective under our approach—which substantially biases the consideration toward finding them effective—they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks of something like the one attempted in Times Square in 2010. In other words, we'd have to foil more than four major attacks every day to justify the spending.

I don't crunch numbers too much here, so I'll use theirs and take this at face value. Assuming there was this much terrorist activity in the USA (it's a big place, but seriously?) how much of it is there that wouldn't be picked off by routine law enforcement? Standard police work with some elementary triggers (chemical purchases, reports from concerned citizens, etc.) will sort most of this out, and indeed there were warnings about the 9/11 hijackers which could have been acted on.

Now the age-old question: how much is your life worth?

It is possible, of course, that any relaxation in these measures will increase the terrorism hazard, that the counterterrorism effort is the reason for the low-hazard terrorism currently present. However, in order for the terrorism risk to border on becoming "unacceptable" by established risk conventions, the number of fatalities from all forms of terrorism in the United States would have to increase 35-fold, equivalent to experiencing attacks as devastating as those on 9/11 at least once a year or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year. Even if all the (mostly embryonic and in many cases moronic) terrorist plots exposed since 9/11 in the United States had been successfully carried out, their likely consequences would have been much lower. Indeed, as noted earlier, the number of people killed by terrorists throughout the world outside (and sometimes within) war zones both before and after 2001 generally registers at far below that number.

At the end of the day it again comes down to leadership or the lack thereof. If rational decisions are made and explained by calm, rational people to the rest of us, we will (mostly) follow that example. secure in the knowledge that our concerns are taken seriously and are being acted on. However, the Zero-Defect mentality is enforced by the media, and it takes a very strong personality to stand their ground in face of the shit-storm should something slip through, as it inevitably will.

Even with the extra multi-billions spent on all of this, things still slip through to be stopped only by alert and motivated members of the public. All that money and a Dutch tourist sitting next to the would-be bomber had to do the job; your organization was not very cost effective, was it, Ms Napolitano? Good leadership is also shown by subordinates who know when to act, but huge expensive bureaucracies don't generate many of those, and promote even fewer. Good thing the Americans can afford all of this...