Bang for the Buck?…

It’s happened—again. And we can’t be really surprised, or minimally, we ought not be surprised. When you have vermin, you need to attack the nest—not just the pathways where you see them travel or enter and go for food.

This is the third time Al Qaeda has attacked a major urban and financial capital. You would hope we’d get the message—densely populated urban centers that represent the policies of nations they hate make compelling targets where damage can be maximized and change the way people act and extract a higher price.

The purpose of such terrorist attacks is to maximize your leverage—to paralyze the place and population as much as possible to cause as much damage as possible and most important of all, to create an environment where business as usual becomes impossible—I mean that both in the way people conduct their lives and feel and in the economic consequences that befall the targeted location. London was literally shut down yesterday and casualties and affects to the markets are inestimable at this point, but almost certainly will hover around 75 once the bus is figured in and economic costs in the millions of pounds.

In short, Al Qaeda is getting a high return on their expenditures of resources and personnel, from their perspective, such as they are. I can’t help but wonder—are we?

We don’t really seem to be prepared for this. As has been noted, London with its experience with the IRA and the blitz has surveillance almost everywhere, but observation does little to prevent attacks on infrastructure underground. Even with cameras underground, determined suicide bombers, as any Israeli citizen can tell you, can get to just about any civilian target.

I mourn for my friends in London—I worked there for some time, and two of the stations hit were regular commuting points for me. These events are, of course, repugnant in the extreme but they should really make us pause and think about what we’re doing and if we’re prepared for this sort of attack ourselves—it’s happened in Spain, France, Tokyo and the UK. Looking around the IRT this morning, I can tell you that everyone in NYC is keenly aware we’re still the big target.

So, how are we using our resources? What kind of ‘bang for the buck’ are we getting for our deployed resources in the ‘war on terror’ thus far? Here’s what I’m getting at:

Why do we have a homeland security funding formula that buys ambulances and hazmat suits for Wyoming before it puts explosive detectors in the subways? Every entrance into the major urban transportation systems requires walking through a turnstile gate—why aren’t radiation and explosive detectors part of those gates and why aren’t we funding those sorts of initiatives instead of the wrong-headed formula we have?

Why aren’t we doing the same with major ports and cargo centers that are equally vulnerable? Why don’t we have teams of bomb sniffing dogs and K-9 units EVERYWHERE near these areas?

I watched the 14th street station last night. Two explosive devices—one at the northwest and one at the southeast ends of that platform could wipe out several trains simultaneously and produce 1,000 casualties in one blast at one station.

Senators Schumer and Clinton are right to call for quadrupling the monies deployed for securing the transportation system—clearly, it’s an attractive target and it’s not like it hasn’t been tried before—in December of 1994 Edward Leary detonated a crude bomb injuring 47 people in the NYC subway system.

So, we know it’s a target, we know it’s vulnerable and we do… well… precious little about that. Mirroring our inaction on other key elements on the war on terror, we turn to policies that really don’t do much for our safety.

We’d get more out of focusing on high priority targets than uniform deployment of resources, and this holds true in the ‘war on terror’ at large and homeland security. We get more out of getting tough with Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan and weaning ourselves off of the teat of middle eastern oil than we do out of focusing on Iraq and creating a destabilized recruiting ground. We get more out of uniform increased fuel efficiency standards than we do out of attempting to negotiate with OPEC against their interests. We get more out of pursuing Bin Laden through cooperative intelligence with other nations than we do out of alienating allies and potential allies. We get more out of treating this as a real war, that requires a real war-time footing with more troops, and real fiscal sacrifices and measures (other than shopping!) than we gain by continuing to treat this as some sort of a minor action that can be fought with TSA agents taking away lighters and 135,000 troops in Iraq.

Clearly, whatever else we’re doing, and whatever your position on what we’ve done thus far the resources we have are limited and they could be better used and our responses be more coherent. We’re not getting the bang for the buck we need, because we’ve allowed the mingling of politics and pork to distort a number of our actions and that coupled with valuing preconceptions over intelligence makes us vulnerable.

I can’t help but wonder when we will, as Londoners apparently understood, adopt the notion that it’s a question of when—not if—and start planning and acting accordingly. Because the truth is what we’re doing now, regardless of the reason or ideology behind it, is deploying our limited resources poorly—it’s not the best bang for the buck.

And that’s cold comfort on the #5 Express from Bowling Green at night.

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway
—Simeon Strunsky