Is Provoking a Backlash the Only Thing That the TSA is Good For?
16th March 2012
Jehu is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
It was that the public changed its expectation regarding the impact of a hijacking from ‘we’ll take an unscheduled vacation to Cuba and pick up some cigars’ to ‘some SOB wants to turn us into charcoal by using our plane as a guided missile’. Changing the expectation is all that it took to make such behavior impractical. All of the rest is theatre—expensive, humiliating, and time-consuming theatre. All of the terrorist incidents that have been thwarted recently have been done so by…you guessed it…passengers, or, if you prefer, by the unorganized militia of the US. Not for nothing did Sun Tzu say, if you put your men on deadly ground (i.e., ground where it is clear that you must fight and/or die, retreat is obviously impossible) they will live (because most of the slaughter in ancients battles came after one side’s morale had broken, and those ‘on deadly ground’ tend to have very strong morale). Because the public now recognizes a hijacking as ‘deadly ground’, it is extremely unlikely that we’ll see a successful repeat of the tactic.
But that’s the government way — as armies prepare for the last war, governments strip-search everybody coming out of the barn after the horse has long since taken off.