THE QUIXOTIC QUEST FOR INVULNERABILITY: a CBA of homeland security

John Mueller, Department of Political Science, Ohio State University wrote a terrific paper outlining a cost benefit analysis of US homeland security earlier this year.

"ABSTRACT This paper attempts to set out some general parameters for coming to grips with a central homeland security concern: the effort to make potential targets invulnerable, or at least notably less vulnerable, to terrorist attack. It argues that protection makes sense only when protection is feasible for an entire class of potential targets and when the destruction of something in that target set would have quite large physical, economic, psychological, and/or political consequences. There are a very large number of potential targets where protection is essentially a waste of resources and a much more limited one where it may be effective...

Policy considerations: premises

There seem to be at least five premises which must be taken into consideration when formulating policy for protecting the homeland, for seeking to make it "invulnerable."

1. The number of potential terrorist targets is essentially infinite...
2. The probability that any individual target will be attacked is essentially zero...
3. If one potential target happens to enjoy a degree of protection, the agile terrorist usually can readily move on to another one...
4. Most targets are "vulnerable" in that it is not very difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be rebuilt in fairly short order and at tolerable expense...
5. It is essentially impossible to make a very wide variety of potential terrorist targets invulnerable except by completely closing them down..

Policy considerations: implications

Four policy conclusions or implications can be derived at least in part from these premises.

1. Any protective policy should be compared to a "null case": do nothing, and use the money saved to rebuild and to compensate any victims...
2. Abandon any effort to imagine a terrorist target list...
3. Consider negative effects of protection measures: not only direct cost, but inconvenience, enhancement of fear, negative economic impacts, reduction of liberties...
4. Consider the opportunity costs, the tradeoffs, of protection measures...

Situations where protection may potentially be effective

Protection makes sense only

• when protection is feasible for an entire class of potential targets
and
• when the destruction of something in that target set would have quite large physical, economic, psychological, and/or political consequences.

Conclusion

"In general," concludes security expert Bruce Schneier, "the costs of counterterrorism are simply too great for the security we're getting in return, and the risks don't warrant the extreme trade-offs we've been asked to make" (2003, 249). This certainly seems to be the case for the quixotic quest to make the country less vulnerable. Although there may be some areas in which the effort makes sense, most of it, on reasonably close examination, seems to have been a spectacular waste. At the very least, it is surely time to subject these expenditures to systematic analysis."

Why don't the Browns and Bushs of this world get exposed to that kind of sensible thinking on security?