I heard several people now tell me how amazing it is that the snipers landed 3 kills with 3 shots from a boat. Having known a sniper and seen him hit skeet one-handed with a 9mm, I can tell you that this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m actually more surprised at the public’s reaction. Here’s a great excerpt from a DefenseTech article I read on the incident:
A shot of 80-90 feet — even at night and in rolling seas — is a cakewalk for DevGru SEALs.
“These guys can put three rounds onto the head of a quarter at that range,” Allen told me.
…A multi-thousand ton destroyer is a pretty stable platform in any but the most tumultuous sea states and makes dialing in a shot on an admittedly tossing life raft more doable — a smart platform for the Team to operate from. …
I think the American public doesn’t fully appreciate the talent of these teams. Props to SEAL Team VI!
As the alarmism and hype about terrorism continues to be blown out of proportion, it’s nice to see scholars of political science laying out the facts. One such person is Ohio State University professor John Mueller; an expert in national security issues. I find this except from a review of his latest book “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (2006)” to be very enlightening:
Mueller’s book is filled with statistics meant to put terrorism in context. For example, international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Mueller’s conclusions: An American’s risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist is microscopic. The likelihood of another Sept. 11-style attack is nearly nil because it would lack the element of surprise. America can easily absorb the damage from most conceivable attacks. And the suggestion that al Qaeda poses an existential threat to the United States is ridiculous. Mueller’s statistics and conclusions are jarring only because they so starkly contradict the widely disseminated and broadly accepted image of terrorism as an urgent and all-encompassing threat.
And here’s an appropriate comic to follow:
This is a reprint from Bruce Schneier’s blog on security.
This is an interesting paper on the efficacy of terrorism:
This study analyzes the political plights of twenty-eight terrorist groups — the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) as designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The data yield two unexpected findings. First, the groups accomplished their forty-two policy objectives only 7 percent of the time. Second, although the groups achieved certain types of policy objectives more than others, the key variable for terrorist success was a tactical one: target selection. Groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumbered attacks on military targets systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature.
The author believes that correspondent inference theory explains this. Basically, the theory says that people infer the motives of an actor based on the consequences of the action. So people assume that the motives of a terrorist are wanton death and destruction, and not the stated aims of the terrorist group:
The theory posited here is that terrorist groups that target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has an extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer from the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent citizens, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — the objectives of the terrorist group. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed. Target countries are understandably skeptical that making concessions will placate terrorist groups believed to be motivated by these maximalist objectives.
This certainly explains a great deal about the U.S.’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Many people — along with our politicians and press — believe that al Qaeda terrorism is different, and they’re just out to kill us all. (In fact, I’m sure I’ll get blog comments along those lines.) The paper examines this belief: where it came from, how it manifested itself, and why it is wrong.
