Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Some day, despite all the confiscated shampoo and all the groped breasts and all the tapped phones and all the butchered Afghans, a terrorist is almost certainly going to destroy an airplane.  It might happen tomorrow, it might happen 30 years from now, but it will almost certainly happen.  When that happens, a few heads will almost certainly roll at the TSA. Maybe they’ll fire the screener who failed to grab hard enough on the terrorist’s testicles.  Maybe they’ll fire his site supervisor.  Maybe they’ll fire somebody higher up in the organization.  Maybe they’ll even fire the chief of the entire organization.  (Gropenkommander?)  But they will fire somebody.

Let’s think about what else will happen at the leadership level:

1)  Managers who pushed hard for security theater, who pushed for things that weren’t implemented because they were deemed too extreme even for the TSA, will almost certainly be safe in their jobs.

2)  Managers who survive the storm and fury will probably find themselves with an even bigger budget and more power over travelers.

Oh, and the American people will be treated even worse when they fly.  And all this will be dished out on travelers by people who are merely doing as they were told in exchange for money.

Anyway, when you look at the incentives faced by TSA leadership, visible but ineffective measures seem to be a ticket to a secure career path.  You might ask whether their jobs would be even safer if the measures were actually effective.  Sure.  If there’s no successful attack there’s no purge.  But 100% success is usually impossible in the real world.  Given that eventually, one way or another, a terrorist will almost certainly take down a plane, the only question that management has to ask itself is what position they want to be in when that happens.  And that answer is simple:  Safe in their jobs, and poised to inherit a bigger budget.