Soft Targets:Contexts and Costs

Section 5: Contexts and Costs

In previous sections, we have described the nature of the target and the extent of the threat. Focusing in this fashion permits us to ground our analysis in concrete examples. In this section, we step back and consider the problem in its broader context. In doing so, we examine two questions.

First, to what extent do the proposed protective measures make society safer in aggregate? Most of the proposed protective measures make the soft target in consideration safer in some way. However, it is important to determine whether a protective measure actually reduces the total destructiveness of attacks, or merely relocates the destructive attacks. By analogy, consider a boat that's taking on water; it does not improve matters merely to slosh water around from the front of the boat to the back of the boat, or vice versa. One must bail water out of the boat, or plug the hole.

Second, what costs do the proposed protective measures impose on society? Up to this point, the security analysis has been evaluated from the perspective of school administrators or law enforcement charged with defending against violence. However, these are not the only stakeholders. Society as a whole has a stake in ensuring that the proposed protective measures do not interfere with other social goods, such as the school's objectives of educating and socializing students. Returning to our boat analogy, one can easily make the boat secure against leaks by dragging it onto dry land, but that interferes with the boat's purpose.

In the remainder of this section, we discuss these two questions in turn in more depth.

Aggregate Safety

In Section 3, we considered foreign, domestic student, and domestic non-student adversaries. The question, when considering whether a proposed measure increases aggregate security is: for each class of attacker, will this measure reduce the probability that this adversary will perform an attack, or will this measure merely transfer the probable attack to another target? This question, in turn requires the answer to the following associated questions:

• Why would the attacker attack the school?
• Can this motivation be satisfied by attacking a non-school target?
• Is at least one alternative target feasible for a motivated adversary to attack?

[XXX-TODO: fill in the rest of this, going through each major class of countermeasures in Sect. 3.]

"Boiling the Ocean": Why aggregate safety matters

Consider the following objection to the preceding analysis: "So what if the attack gets diverted to another target? We'll just secure that target too." ...

[XXX-TODO: fill out this section, making the point that you can't "boil the ocean", i.e. you can't lock down every civilian target and also maintain an open society. Israel has tried, and they have become an ethnically divided police state, effectively denying freedom of travel (and hence freedom of association) to the Palestinian minority. The point of making this comparison is not to suggest that Israel was wrong to do this, but exactly the reverse: that it is most likely taking the correct measures to prevent terrorism, and that America cannot follow Israel's lead without abandoning some of its founding principles.]

Costs

A public secondary school has two primary missions, which we call the educational and socialization missions:

• Educational: The school should teach students about the subject matter which society deems it necessary to teach.
• Socialization: The school environment must prepare students with the mental and emotional skills and habits required to participate in society; or, at a minimum, it muts not actively interfere with this development.

The socialization mission is often only implicitly understood, and therefore less obvious, but equally important. The socialization mission is one of the reasons, for example, that American schools choose not to copy the model of East Asian countries, which expect secondary students to devote nearly all their waking hours to some form of academic labor.

[XXX-TODO: examine two missions. Briefly, it does not seem acceptable to deny students access to educational resources, and it does not seem acceptable (or legal --- will have some case law cites for this) to place students inside a police state. However, many of the proposed countermeasures do neither, and that's a good thing; list them.]