Secret of getting serious on security

As Americans we reflexively take deep dives into details. It is part penchant and part pride that make us act as if examining every minute detail, exposing it to some level of public scrutiny, tracing its antecedents and speculating on why's and wherefores constitutes Part One of solving the problem. Then Part Two becomes an engineering challenge of making minute corrections for every perceived flaw, in the confident hope that this pain-giving form of painstaking will surely order events in such a way as to foreclose future failures. Sadly, results of this approach are as elusive in homeland security as in disaster relief.

Cases in Point:
• Mirandizing instead of interrogating the Christmas underwear bomber, effectively seconding the objective of defense through collection of perishable intelligence to a legalistic and armchair warrior's concern over public relations proprieties
• Trying 9/11 attackers by planning to give them a Manhattan platform from which to conduct a propaganda attack that Guantanamo does not offer.

That this penchant pervades our culture is evident beyond the security realm. Witness the story of a botched relief effort in Haiti chronicled in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (See Haiti Aid Efforts Go Awry in the 'Convoy to Nowhere' by Christopher Rhoads at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031673153590414.html). Planned to the nth degree, with competent altruists volunteering to drive relief supplies where needed, the effort failed. Why? Could it be that our natural biases rob us of a view of the larger picture? All the relief was about concentrating supplies in one place, transporting them to another, and then breaking them into smaller concentrations to be distributed from yet another central point. What did this create? Multiple, cascading points of failure. What if we started dispersing supplies through air drops instead of concentrating and planning complicated truck deliveries that end up blocked or diverted?

The allure of concentrating too intently is almost as irresistible as that of its cousin, focusing over much on detail. After all, isn't it easier to secure anything -- including food and medicine -- if you keep it all in one place, transport it altogether, and then distribute it from a single, fortified location. The answer is a thoughtful "yes, but." Yes, but putting all the eggs in one basked invariably makes an unmistakable target of that basket. Dispersing the assets, instead, exemplifies the Security 101 rule of distributing one's risk. In the long run, such dispersal makes it harder for misfortune or bureaucratic error to undermine your relief effort and for rogues to target your supplies. Direct, wide dispersal would also remove middle men (the province that thugs and crooks like to reserve for themselves) from standing in the way between needed supplies and needy beneficiaries. The right priority should help reveal the right tactic.

Similarly, for security, a little more alacrity in putting defensive objectives ahead of political navel-gazing might be the shorter path to excellence.

-- Nick Catrantzos

The Passenger Responder - Fly together or die together

It is a mark of being young in age or young in experience to point fingers and demand answers -- to zero in exclusively on deficiencies and cry havoc -- when wisdom would, instead, acknowledge realities for what they are and play to strengths in such a way as to make weaknesses irrelevant. Yet the Homeland Security enterprise, being young, insists on learning such lessons the hard way, hence the post-Christmas frenzy to subject our institutions and airline passengers to yet another overhaul laced with traveler torments and fiscal folly under the banner of defending air travel from yet another failed attack.

What does the Christmas Unexploded Underwear Bomber have in common with the Shoe Bomber and the Anal Cavity Assassin who tried to kill a Saudi official earlier in 2009? All of them failed. The latter failed particularly badly, as he managed to blow himself into several parts without inflicting much of any injury to his target. The Shoe Bomber did the least damage. The Underwear Bomber did burn himself, however. So, of the three, the most destructive proved to be the one who did not attack commercial aviation and, instead, had to contend with such screening as his meeting hosts imposed. What are some lessons we refuse to learn about the other two cases?

The first is that passenger screening is having some net security effect even when it is applied imperfectly, which the real world will cause to happen despite the best of intentions. Security screening is forcing would-be attackers to inconvenience themselves and to devise plots which, at the end of the day, are remarkable mainly for their high failure rates. After all, even some 9/11 attackers were thwarted by an alert, improvised counterattack on United Flight 93. So the second, unheralded but significant lesson is that an unsubsidized, unchampioned, and politically neglected component of security is proving to be highly adaptive and devastatingly effective in countering new attacks as they arise. This component is the passenger responder, the person next to you who is no longer content to ignore ambient threats and wait for the experts, real or perceived, to do all -- or even any -- of the dirty work or heavy lifting.

The passenger responder realizes that we all fly together or die together. This class of individual deserves recognition, encouragement, lionizing, and whatever information or training our protective bureaucracies can impart. Indeed, this ignored component of homeland and fellow traveler security deserves to be touted as our most robust, resilient, and adaptable answer to anything that Al Qaeda and other adversaries have to throw at us. Properly or even adequately promoted, the phenomenon of the passenger responder would become a significant deterrent and a symbol of our strength and resolve.

Instead, we starve this resource of attention in favor of anemic witch hunts, pointing the accusing finger of blame, and opening the door to the next spending spree on end-all and be-all security devices or ceremonial sacrifice of defenders who "let us down." What do such measures say to a watchful world of adversaries and neutrals? They only reinforce the message that we are weak, vulnerable, uncertain, overreactive and ... just asking to be struck again.

- Nick Catrantzos