Terrorism and counterterrorism in the US: the question of responsible policy-making

Abstract

Officials serving the public are tasked at the most fundamental level to spend funds in a manner that most effectively and efficiently keeps people safe. To do otherwise is irresponsible and, because human lives are at stake, immoral. In the case of counterterrorism policy-making, it is important to evaluate the degree to which any gains in security afforded by counterterrorism measures have been great enough to justify their cost. Risk analysis is an aid to responsible decision-making that does exactly that. We deal with four issues central to this approach, applying them to the hazard presented by terrorism: the cost per saved life, acceptable risk, cost–benefit analysis, and risk communication. We also assess the degree to which risk analysis has been coherently applied to counterterrorism efforts in the US in making or evaluating decisions that have cost taxpayers many hundreds of billions of dollars over the past dozen years.

Keywords:

• counterterrorism
• terrorism
• cost–benefit analysis
• risk analysis
• decision-making

Notes on contributors

John Mueller is the Ralph D. Mershon Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and adjunct professor of Political Science, Ohio State University, and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Washington, DC. Before coming to Ohio State in 2000, he was on the faculty at the University of Rochester for many years. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book, Terrorism, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security (with Mark Stewart), applies cost–benefit analysis to issues of homeland security and was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Other recent books include Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (Oxford University Press, 2010) and War and Ideas: Selected Essays (Routledge, 2011).

Mark G. Stewart is Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability, University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the co-author of Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security (Oxford University Press, 2011), and has produced over 350 technical papers and reports. He has more than 25 years of experience in probabilistic risk and vulnerability assessment of infrastructure and security systems that are subject to man-made and natural hazards. In 2011 he received a five-year Australian Professorial Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to develop probabilistic risk-modelling techniques for infrastructure subject to military and terrorist explosive blasts, and cost–benefit assessments of counter-terrorism protective measures for critical infrastructure.

Notes

1. See, for example, ISO 31000–2009, Risk Management: Principles and Guidelines (Geneva, 2009); and Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley, 1996).

2. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, ‘Quantitative Safety Goals for Risk Management of Industrial Facilities’, Structural Safety 13 (1994): 145.

3. Lisa A. Robinson et al., ‘Valuing the Risk of Death from Terrorist Attacks’, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 7, no. 1 (2010) . Characteristically court awards or compensation payouts are considerably lower. The average life insurance payout to 9/11 victims was $350,000, and workers' compensation was $400,000. Lloyd Dixon and Rachel K. Stern, Compensation for Losses from the 9/11 Attacks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Institute for Civil Justice, 2004), 31, 17. Court awards may be higher than this, but not always. A study of aviation fatality payments found that the average compensation for cases that went to trial was roughly $1.2 million, with a maximum of $10 million in 2010 dollars; however, half of all payouts, including those settled before trials began, were less than $350,000. James S. Kakalik et al., Costs and Compensation Paid in Aviation Accident Litigation (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Institute for Civil Justice, 1988), x. Payments to the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq war total $500,000, up from $112,240 before that conflict. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 17.

4. A useful comparison might be made with the Los Angeles Police Department, which operates with a yearly budget of $1.2 billion. Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, Budget for the Fiscal Year 2013–14 (City of Los Angeles, April 2013), 152. Considering only lives saved following the discussion above, that expenditure would be justified if the police every year saved some 170 lives when each saved life is valued at $7 million. At present there are some 300 homicides each year in the city and about the same number of deaths in car accidents. It is certainly plausible to suggest that both these numbers would be substantially higher without police efforts and accordingly that local taxpayers are getting pretty good value for their money. Moreover, the police provide a great many other services to the community for the same expenditure, from directing traffic to arresting burglars and shoplifters. Although efforts to police terrorism also provide such co-benefits, they are likely to be quite a bit lower than those provided by the Los Angeles police.

5. C. C. Travis et al., ‘Cancer Risk Management: A Review of 132 Federal Regulatory Decisions’, Environmental Science and Technology 21, no. 5 (1987): 415–20.

6. See also Kenneth T. Bogen and Edwin D. Jones, ‘Risks of Mortality and Morbidity from Worldwide Terrorism: 1968–2004′, Risk Analysis 26, no. 1 (2006): 56; and Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger (New York: Dutton, 2008), 250–1.

7. See, for example, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Integrated United States Security Database (IUSSD): Data on the Terrorist Attacks in the United States Homeland, 1970 to 2011, http://www.start.umd.edu/start/publications/START_IUSSDDataTerroristAttacksUS_1970-2011.pdf (accessed December 11, 2013).

8. Michael Kenney, ‘“Dumb” yet Deadly: Local Knowledge and Poor Tradecraft among Islamist Militants in Britain and Spain’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33, no. 10 (2010): 911; and John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, ‘The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11’, International Security 37, no. 1 (2012): 81. For a discussion of the real-world relevance of Four Lions, a fictional film about a bumbling band of would-be terrorists in Britain, see John Mueller, ‘Introduction’, Terrorism Since 9/11: The American Cases, ed. John Mueller (Columbus: Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 2013), 27–8, http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/since.html.

9. See US v. Faisal Shahzad (2010, USDC, SDNY), http://s3.amazonaws.com/nytdocs/docs/333/333.pdf.

10. For a fuller discussion and for the derivation of this number, see John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 4.

11. Ibid., chaps. 6–7; Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller, ‘Aviation Security, Risk Assessment, and Risk Aversion for Public Decisionmaking ’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 32, no. 3 (2013): 615–633; and Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller, ‘Terrorism Risks and Cost–Benefit Analysis of Aviation Security’, Risk Analysis 33, no. 5 (2013): 893–908.

12. Office of Management and Budget, ‘Guidelines and Discount Rates for Benefit–Cost Analysis of Federal Programs (Revised)’, Circular No. A-94, Washington, DC, 1992.

13. Mark G. Stewart and Robert E. Melchers, Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Engineering Systems (London: Chapman & Hall, 1997), 208–216; Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein, ‘Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk’, in Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough?, eds. Richard C. Schwing and Walter A. Albers (New York: Plenum, 1980), 181–216.

14. James Fallows, ‘If the TSA were Running New York’, theatlantic.com, May 2010.

15. On this issue, see Mueller and Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money, 179–82. One might also compare the reaction to 9/11 with that to the worst terrorist event in the developed world before then, the downing of an Air India airliner departing Canada in 1985, in which 329 people, 280 of them Canadian citizens, perished. Journalist Gwynne Dyer points out that, proportionate to population, the losses were almost exactly the same in the two cases. But, continues Dyer, ‘here's what Canada didn't do: it didn't send troops into India to “stamp out the roots of the terrorism” and it didn't declare a “global war on terror.” Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been stupid.’ Gwynne Dyer, ‘The International Terrorist Conspiracy’, 2 June 2006, http://gwynnedyer.com.

16. Mueller and Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money, 87–92.

17. For a discussion, see John Mueller, Mark G. Stewart, and Benjamin H. Friedman, ‘Finally Talking Terror Sensibly’, 24 May 2013, http://nationalinterest.org.

18. Howard Kunreuther, ‘Risk Analysis and Risk Management in an Uncertain World’, Risk Analysis 22, no. 4 (2002): 662–3. See also John Mueller, ‘Some Reflections on What, if Anything, “Are We Safer?” might Mean’, 11 September 2006, http:// cato-unbound. org.

19. National Research Council of the National Academies, Review of the Department of Homeland Security's Approach to Risk Analysis (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010). An evaluation of a risk analysis tool developed for the DHS is similarly critical. The tool has ‘thousands of input variables’, many of which cannot be estimated with much precision, and it could generate results that are ‘completely wrong’. Moreover, it takes so long to run that it was not possible ‘to conduct even a superficial sensitivity analysis’ of its ‘many thousands of assumptions and parameter estimates’. In addition, it only deals with relative risk, not absolute risk (a key criticism as well in the 2010 National Research Council study), and its estimates of these ‘are subject to strong, probably untenable, assumptions’. The tool is also insensitive to changes in the magnitude of risk and ‘assumes no attack can be deterred’. Andrew R. Morral et al., Modeling Terrorism Risk to the Air Transportation System (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012).

20. Mark G. Stewart, Bruce R. Ellingwood, and John Mueller, ‘Homeland Security: A Case Study in Risk Aversion for Public Decision-Making’, International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management 15, nos. 5– 6 (2011): 367–86; and Stewart and Mueller, ‘Aviation Security’.

21. PBS NewsHour, 16 November 2010, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/transportation/july-dec10/airsecurity_11-16.html.

22. Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), Health Effects of Security Scanners for Passenger Screening (Brussels: European Commission, 26 April 2012). Passenger exposure to backscatter scanners is 0.4 mSv per scan. A 1 mSv dose, according to standard models, increases the risk of fatal cancers by 0.004%. The increase in fatal cancer risk per scan is thus 0.4 × 0.001 × 0.004% = one in 60 million.

23. Three hundred and sixty-three airline passengers were killed by terrorists in the 14 years between 1999 and 2012. The total number of global airline passengers in same period was roughly 29 billion.

24. Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus, 2003).

25. Tammy O. Tengs and John D. Graham, ‘The Opportunity Costs of Haphazard Social Investments’, in Life-saving, Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved: Getting Better Results from Regulation, ed. Robert William Hahn (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1996), 167–82.

26. Mueller and Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money, 182–3.

27. Björn Lomborg, Global Crises, Global Solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1.

28. Todd Sandler, Daniel G. Arce, and Walter Enders, ‘Transnational Terrorism’, in Lomborg, Global Crises, 552. They place the value of life at $2 million in their calculations.

29. J. Brian Hardaker, Euan Fleming, and Gudbrand Lien, ‘How should Governments make Risky Policy Decisions?’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 68, no. 3 (2009): 256–71.

30. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, ‘Risk and Uncertainty Analysis in Government Safety Decisions’, Risk Analysis 22, no. 3 (2002): 633–46.

31. David L. Banks, ‘Statistics for Homeland Defense’, Chance 15, no. 1 (2002): 10.

32. Sewell Chan, ‘Buzz over Mayor's “Get a Life” Remark’, nytimes.com, June 6, 2007. See also John Mueller, Overblown (New York: Free Press, 2006), 151–2.