Fighting the last war...

Throwing money at a problem; the siren-song of technology elbowing out people-skill.

Why does thought and intution borne of field experience leave the Management Class cold? It's the American way: if you can't measure it with a ruler, inventory it, and therefore, lay personal claim to its success, you don't want to know. You don't want to know, I don't want to know. A cold-steel, bricks-and-mortar, or transistor-based "solution" with only marginal proven utility wins over softer skills every time.

(Human Intel, versus Signal Intel--satellites and other shiny tech--is consistently where we miss opportunities, pre- and post-9/11.)

In the meantime, trillions go down assorted ratholes every year, while more and more average (non-managerial class) lives are compromised, deprived of opportunity or, literally, ended unnecessarily. And the professional band plays on, badly. Unprofessionally. But with the manic fervor of headless chickens.

ICG blog, as always, has a very nice post on the "Maginot Line," or "Fortress Urbanism" mentality holding sway with security decisionmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. A snip...

ICG: ...Showing the fallacy of an excessive focus on the fortress urbanism approach, the initial UK attacks of 7 July, the botched attacks of 21 July, and the discovery of twelve bombs and four improvised detonators in the car trunk of one of the bombers occurred in the Western city said to be best equipped to prevent such bombings. In keeping with the non-alertive approach of the asymmetrical attacker, these bombs and detonators were produced from materials available at either supermarket or hardware store.

Politicians on this side of the Atlantic appear to be no better at responding to the UK's lessons of the low proactive and predictive value of large 'feel good' visible security measure such as CCTV security systems, GPS tracking devices for buses and electronic intrusion monitors:

Some government officials in Washington and New York want to spend billions of dollars on security systems [where the] call to redirect a chunk of the nation's homeland security dollars to "harden" mass transit systems is hardly a surprise. In fact, for politicians from urban centers, it is an almost irresistible refrain.

We have already commenced on this slippery slope in New York City where, in the post-UK bombing atmosphere, the city is spending $1.9 million USD per week in overtime for added police presence and random inspections in the subway and mass transit system. How long is that sustainable, who will pay it, and what will we not be able to financially or conceptually address because of that spending? The problem only gets worse as we build our own fortress urbanism, our own rigid Maginot Line.

Just as the Maginot Line, crafted from the 'success' of static, defensive combat in World War I, failed under a newer mobile mechanized infantry, so will our own fail under the small-scale high-impact operations of an asymmetrical attacker employing unexpected, non-traditional and broadly applicable methods. One should keep three simple equations in mind to characterize risk, threat, and impact but learn to view them through the eyes of the asymmetric attacker:

• Threat = Vulnerabilities X Intentions X Capabilities
• Risk = Threat X Vulnerability X Asset Value
• Impact = Resources + Unexpected Methods + (Understanding + Exploitation) Vulnerabilities + Effect Multipliers (M1+M2+M3+…MX)

The successful approach to defend, defer, or deflect an attacker is almost all proactive process with a modest amount of strategically placed hardware that has a specific value to the process - one variant of which is to prevent, deter, prepare, detect, respond, recover, and mitigate.

Sane voices mirroring our own thinking appear to be trampled in the stampede of politicians that cherish well-intentioned but misguided effort that allow themselves to be seen as 'doing something' on behalf of their constituents. Randall Larsen cautions that, "We should not be focusing our efforts on preventing an attack 10 meters or 10 minutes before the attack," when the shooter is already in motion and you have little chance of interdiction. (One can always hope that they run out of ammunition first.) James Carafano stresses the need to remedy deficiencies in our foreign and domestic intel collection and analysis (notably HUMINT), reduce the consequences of a successful attack, and only then look to "building barriers" and inspecting bags.

Fat chance. The US is "already replete with examples of well-intentioned but marginally effective efforts to create anti-terrorism barriers." Expect it to get far worse without improving our proactive efforts. Expect that we could fall victim to a domestic version of the UK bombers, "all British citizens, had no criminal records, weren't on any watch lists and had no extremist pasts."...

Chickens without heads, doing without thinking; with spending, not insight or result, as proof of their "commitment to our security." Sad, yet so simply wrong. And fixable.