When you’re facing people who are willing to joyfully blow their own genitalia off just to have a hope of downing an aircraft — the actual goal isn’t that, it’s to inflict economic damage to the economy that keeps the planes moving, which doesn’t even require an attempt, just the whispers of a credible attempt — you can’t consider the odds they’ll fail to do their worst, you have to consider the odds they’ll make a return on investment.
Terrorism doesn’t work, as a political program, by seeking repeat success, it works by capitalizing on your very occasional successes by making the targeted people spend way more resources on defense than you do on offense.
That’s my whole point… they don’t need to actually succeed at taking down the aircraft to make a return on investment. If they sacrifice a few pawns on failed attempts they get the worldwide airline industry and governments around the planet to spend more on persistent security theater then several thousand times the operating budget of all the world’s terrorists combined, they’ve achieved their goal.
Terrorism doesn’t work, as a political program, by seeking repeat success, it works by capitalizing on your very occasional successes by making the targeted people spend way more resources on defense than you do on offense.
That’s my whole point… they don’t need to actually succeed at taking down the aircraft to make a return on investment. If they sacrifice a few pawns on failed attempts they get the worldwide airline industry and governments around the planet to spend more on persistent security theater then several thousand times the operating budget of all the world’s terrorists combined, they’ve achieved their goal.