Model Forum / General / Rockets / January 2005

The money would be better spent getting the bad guys and not letting it
happen in the first place rather than trying to play defense.  Of couse
you also have to take actions that actually improve the situation
rather than just hit a hornet nest with a stick.

Brad Hitch

No, it's much more likely that their cost-benefit analysis showed that
there's no reason to think anybody's going to successfully knock down
an airliner with a missile any time soon.

Umm, no. The study explicitly acknowledges that a successful attack would
result in direct economic damage of more than $11 billion, with even
greater intangible effects.

They determined that relative to a limited transportation-security budget
($4.4 billion annually), spending nearly half that (based on 20-year
amortization of acquisition and maintenance costs) for this
partially-effective defense system would not be a cost-effective allocation
of resources. Put another way, there are more cost-effective ways to spend
our finite security dollars. I'd much rather see the incremental security
dollar going toward the threat of weapons of mass destruction than this
one. Filling holes ensuring effective use in funding of the Nunn-Lugar
initiative for conversion of ex-Soviet nuke technology would be much higher
and better use of funds.

Given the terrorist's almost unlimited ability to choose methods of attack,
you could probably spend the entire US GDP several times over on security
measures that would individually have economic cost lower than the damage
they are designed to prevent. In government, it's a matter of
prioritization, not blue-sky justification assuming infinite funding
resources.

Shhh