Are We Safe Enough?: Measuring and Assessing Aviation Security

Govindaraju.

Chapter 1

Asking the Right Questions About Terrorism

Abstract

The chapter poses the question: How safe are we? In the process, it assesses the nature of the terrorist threat, especially that from al-Qaeda and ISIS, and concludes that, although the threat from terrorism to the United States and to much of the West generates much fear, it is quite limited. While security measures put in place after 2001 should be given some credit for this desirable outcome, it is not at all clear they have made a great deal of difference: while some targets have been made secure, there are legions of others for terrorists to choose from. Nor is it clear that airliners and airports have been peculiarly targeted by terrorists. At any rate, averaged over the past 44 years, the chance worldwide that an individual airline passenger will be killed by terrorists on an individual flight is 1 in 25 million; for the post-9/11 period, the odds are 1 in 110 million.

Keywords

Aviation security; Terrorism; Cost-benefit analysis; Layers of security; Acceptable risk; Value of human life

Contents

How Safe Are We?

Conflating Terrorism and Insurgency

Al-Qaeda Since 2001

ISIS

Are We as Safe as We Are Because of Security Measures?

Disclosed Plots

Undisclosed Plots

Disclosed Minor Plots

Deterrence

How Safe Is Aviation?

Are We Safe Enough?

References

This book applies standard risk analytic and cost-benefit techniques to evaluate efforts to make the aviation industry safe from terrorism. To do so, it is important to ask the right questions. This chapter explores these.

How Safe Are We?

The most common question asked about counterterrorism spending is are we safer? However, it is the wrong one. Posting a guard at an outdoor Coke machine in Xenia, Ohio, does, in some sense, make Xenia, as well as Ohio, the United States, and the world, a bit safer. But it scarcely seems to be worth the effort. And it carries with it the danger that, if one were later to remove the security guard, one might be accused of making us less safe.

The place to begin is with this question: How safe are we?

In evaluating the threat presented by terrorism, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that, although such violence presents a concern for the United States and other developed nations, the scope of the hazard is limited.

For a time, of course, this perspective was severely challenged by the events of September 11, 2001, which inflicted damage that was decidedly not limited. If terrorist attacks like that had become common, even routine, everything would have changed. But it didn’t. Although we can’t have another 9/11 remains a conversation stopper, the event itself has proved to be an extreme outlier: scarcely any terrorist deed before or since has visited even one-tenth as much total destruction, even in war zones where terrorist groups have plenty of space and time to plot and assemble. The 2001 tragedy thus seems to stand out as an aberration, not as a harbinger (Mueller, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Seitz, 2004). Much of the fear about terrorism has centered on the possibility that radical groups might acquire nuclear weapons—the imminent danger of which we have been urgently warned about for a decade and a half. However, no terrorist group has gotten anywhere near going atomic, and, even more telling, none seems to have really even tried (Mueller, 2010; Jenkins, 2008).

In the years since 9/11, Islamist terrorists have managed to kill, on average, about six people a year within the United States or United Kingdom, while for Canada and Australia, it is two to four in the last decade. All those deaths are tragic of course, but some comparisons are warranted: as shown in Table 2–3 in Chapter 2, lightning kills about 30 Americans a year, accident-causing deer another 200, and drownings in bathtubs around 400. And eight people die from drug overdoses each day in Ohio alone (Johnson, 2016).

Another way to put it is to compare the annual fatality risk posed by terrorism with that presented by other hazards to human life. An array of such annual fatality risks is supplied in Table 2–3 in Chapter 2 where the issue will be discussed more fully. As can be seen, even including the 9/11 tragedy in the count, an American’s chance of being killed within the United States by a terrorist of any motivation is very low: during the 47-year period from 1970 and 2016 the annual fatality risk was 1 in 4 million for the United States. For industrial accidents, in contrast, the annual fatality risk is 1 in 66,000, for homicides, 1 in 20,000, for auto accidents, 1 in 9500, and for drug overdoses, 1 in 6100. For the period since 9/11, an American’s chance of being killed by a terrorist is about 1 in 39 million per year.

This holds as well for the rest of the developed world. The annual fatality rates for terrorism of all kinds during the 1970–2016 period are also low: 1 in 1,300,000 for the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), 1 in 4,400,000 for Canada, 1 in 8,000,000 for Australia (including the Bali attack of 2002). To reach an annual fatality rate of 1 in 100,000—agreed by many to be an unacceptably high rate as will be discussed more fully in Chapter 2—the number of fatalities from all forms of terrorism during that period would have to increase 44-fold in Canada, more than 62-fold in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland), more than 80-fold in Australia, and more than 90-fold in Western Europe.

Western Europe has experienced a higher frequency of large-scale attacks since 9/11 than the United States, yet the annual fatality risk through 2016, which includes the 2016 Brussels and Nice attacks, comes to 1 in 9 million. Recent terrorist attacks in France and Belgium show that a threat does exist in these countries, but it remains to be seen whether these attacks are harbingers of more to come rather than aberrations. The shocking bombings in Madrid in 2004 that killed 191, and London in 2005 that killed 52 were not followed by other attacks in those countries; indeed, during the following decade, no bomb was successfully detonated in either country. Even if all the terrible outrages committed in Western Europe after that decade are included in the count, far more people perished yearly there at the hands of terrorists in most years in the 1970s and 1980s (York, 2015).

One can also focus on the kind of terrorism that really concerns people in the developed world by restricting the consideration to violence committed by Muslim extremists anywhere in the world outside of war zones, whether that violence is perpetrated by domestic Islamist terrorists or by ones with international connections. Although these tallies make for grim reading, for most of the period after 9/11 the total number of people killed by Muslim extremists outside of war zones comes to some 200–400 per year.¹ For the last few years, that number might double due to the terrorism committed outside war zones by ISIS, but the number would, in total, still be far from monumental considering that it embraces most of the world. For comparison, during the same period, 430 per year drowned in bathtubs in the United States alone. Or there is another rather unpleasant comparison: increased delays and added costs at US airports due to new security procedures provide incentive for many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination rather than flying, and, since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated has been estimated to result in 500 or more extra road fatalities per year (Blalock et al., 2007).

We have been using historical data on terrorism here, and there is, of course, no guarantee the frequencies and destructiveness of the past will necessarily persist into the future. However, as will be discussed in the next sections and in Chapter 7, there is little evidence that terrorists are becoming substantially more destructive, particularly in the West. Indeed, overall, terrorists do not seem to be all that capable a bunch. Those who wish to discount such arguments and projections need to demonstrate why they think terrorists will suddenly get their act together and inflict massively increased violence, visiting savage discontinuities on the historical data.

We recognize that comparing fatalities from malevolent and dramatic acts like terrorism with routine events like traffic or work accidents that cause far more death is not always the best—or the most convincing—way to look at things. But it is instructive and is a useful reality check to counter excessive hyperbole about the degree to which terrorism presents a hazard. Risk acceptability is also a matter of affordability, and we need to consider how much we are prepared to pay to reduce risk and whether the benefits of security measures exceed their cost. This helps us decide which security measures are worth instituting and which are not. Such an assessment requires considering the risk reduction that a security measure may furnish, its cost, the likelihood of a terrorist attack, and the direct and indirect losses that terrorism can inflict, including the psychological ones. These risk and cost-benefit concepts are described, and then applied, to airline security in Chapters 2 to 5, and to airports in Chapter 6.

Conflating Terrorism and Insurgency

Tallies of terrorist fatalities around the world often come up with much higher numbers than the ones we have been applying. For example, the widely used Global Terrorism Database finds that there were a total of 81,000 deaths from terrorism worldwide from 2011 to 2015 (GTD, 2015).

However, the vast majority of what is now commonly being tallied as terrorism has occurred in war zones: in 2014, for example, 78% of all deaths from terrorism occurred in only five war zones: those in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria (Institute for Economics and Peace, 2015; see also LaFree et al., 2015; Mueller and Stewart, 2016a).

The problem is that, since 9/11, there has been a more expansive application of standard definitions of terrorism to the point where virtually any violence perpetrated by rebels in civil wars is now being called terrorism (Mueller and Stewart, 2016b, 2017b). This has resulted in a marked exaggeration in the perceived frequency and importance of terrorism.

In a book dealing with the Global Terrorism Database they have developed at the University of Maryland, Gary LaFree, Laura Dugan, and Erin Miller note that, although there are a great many definitions of terrorism,

most commentators and experts agree on several key elements, captured in the definition we use here: the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by non-state actors to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation (LaFree et al., 2015; see also Mueller and Stewart, 2017b).

And, indeed, definitions generally agree on four components: terrorism involves the (1) pursuit of a policy goal by (2) a sub-state group that (3) applies violence (4) in order to create fear and to create compliant behavior on the part of the enemy.

The problem is that these elements do not differentiate terrorism from insurgency. As the major theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz repeatedly stresses the whole effort in war—at least in non-criminal ones—is to obtain political goals. In his most famous formulation, war is merely the continuation of policy with other means—that is, war is a true political instrument. And the means to attaining the goal, stresses Clausewitz, involve using violence to coerce and to inflict fear and intimidation in order to break the enemy’s will (Clausewitz, 1976).

Terrorism, then, differs from war not in its essential method or goal, not in its efforts to intimidate and create fear, and certainly not in the fact that it applies violence. Rather, terrorism differs from war in the frequency and probably the intensity with which violence is inflicted (Mueller, 2004).

That definitional condition could change if terrorists were to become capable of visiting very substantial destruction with episodic attacks. In that case, the activity would still be considered terrorism because it would remain sporadic, but the damage inflicted could hardly be said to be limited. In the early months and years after 9/11, many feared that was going to come about (Mayer, 2008; Mueller and Stewart, 2016a). But, as noted above, it didn’t: a decade and a half after the event, 9/11 remains an extreme outlier.

Before 9/11, then, terrorism was generally seen to be a limited phenomenon, and terrorism was often called the weapon of the weak. If terrorists began to engage in disciplined violence that was no longer fitful or sporadic, the enterprise was relabeled war or insurgency. The Irish Republican Army, for example, was generally taken to be a terrorist enterprise, while fighters in Sri Lanka in the 1990s were considered to be combatants or insurgents in a civil war situation.

In addition, after 9/11, terrorism, already a pejorative word, became far more so, and the word has increasingly been slung around in an effort to discredit enemies. The rather confusing process can be seen when Islamic State (ISIS) commonly has been labeled a band of terrorists, even though it has occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, run social services, and regularly confronted armed soldiers in direct combat. In any armed conflict before the current century, that would be called an insurgency (Cronin, 2015; Byman, 2016, 2017). In the civil war in Syria, the United States brands those fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad to its own convenience. ISIS fighters are terrorists while those insurgents approved by the United States are labeled the moderate opposition. Assad himself is more consistent, if equally self-serving: any violent opposition to a sitting government, he says, is terrorism (Rose,