3rd Annual SARMA Conference: John Mueller, Professor, Author, Ohio State

John Mueller, an Ohio State Political Science professor, gave a talk about Establishing Principles for Evaluation Measures designed to protect the homeland from terrorists at the end of day 1.

Professor Mueller is the author of the popular, and controversial, book “Overblown.”  He pitched the book on The Daily Show with John Stewart.  His next book, Atomic Obsession, is scheduled to be released this October.  As you can guess by the titles, these books are about threat inflation currently taking place in the United States, and his presentation followed along those lines.  His view is that the Cost of overreaction > cost of terrorism.  He offered eight policy considerations to start us off.  He believes that: potential terrorist targets is essentially infinite, small amount of terrorists with limited efforts and competence (Not how DHS defines terrorists: relentless, patient, opportunistic, and flexible), terrorist target-selection is often effectively random, probability that any specific target will be attacked is extremely small in almost all cases, if you protect one target, the agile terrorist generally can readily move on to another one, make one target safer, make another target more vulnerable, most targets are vulnerable in that it is not difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be readily rebuilt and at tolerable expense, impossible to adequately protect a very wide variety of potential terrorists targets except by completely closing them down.

There are some pretty heavy thoughts there.  I agree with some of them, but others make me scratch my head and ask for evidence.  However, I plan on reading his book so I will not make a distinct argument until afterwards because information had to be cut short to fit the time frame of his talk.

Next, he presented implications of those policy considerations.   Again, he has a knack for some pretty bold statements.  His position is that: protective policy should be compared to a null case: do nothing, and use the money saved to rebuild and to compensate any victims.  Abandon, or at least greatly scale back, efforts to imagine a terrorist target list.  Consider the negative effects of protection measures: not only direct cost, but inconvenience, enhancement of fear, negative economic impacts, reduction of liberties (Short haul flights are used less and people drive more, which is more dangerous and kills 400 extra people a year. This means that the TSA is to blame for more deaths in the US since 9/11 than all other terrorist groups combined).  Consider the opportunity costs, the tradeoffs, of protection measures.

The one statement I was really glad he made was the negative effect of countermeasures.  For a while now, I have been hearing about how people should not be so afraid to fly because driving was actually more dangerous.  While, personally, I would not fly Pittsburgh (or State College) to Cleveland or Columbus, it actually would be a less risky than driving there, especially with that crazy stretch of I-80 between Pennsylvania and Ohio I’m sure some of you are all too familiar with.

He next showed an application of his beliefs in the real world: commercial passenger airlines.  He queried: Can they be protected?  Is the response to 9/11, like the event itself, an outlier? Can costs be reduced?  His answers are that the US should:  Abandon efforts to prevent a replication of 9/11. Reconsider the protection of airports. Relax weapons ban. Reduce harassment of automobiles picking up and dropping off passengers. Reduce crew screening.  What I gained was that he wanted to scale back security at airports to that of the early 1990s.  I do not agree with that position.  While I see his point that it would save the US money in the long run, I would rather feel more safe than have more money.  Remember: actual risk does not equal risk perception. How risk is perceived is often more important than what the risk actually is.

He ended with the following thoughts: Reduce orange alert? Professor Mueller said that Orange alert costs $100,000 more per day than Yellow alert.  How much security theater is necessary? He was a big supporter of security theater.  Finally, what are the negative consequences of the security measures?  We must always fully understand what the counter-measure will do to us, not just how it will hurt the enemy.

All in all, it was a very interesting presentation, I anticipate reading his two most recent books and posting on them at a later date.  I am currently at Day 2 of the conference and you can expect more posts in the following days.  Until then, check out my quasi-live tweet coverage of the proceedings @russwbeck.

To see the video of John Mueller on The Daily Show, go here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=119294&title=john-mueller