> Airlines could have locked cockpit doors and prohibited passengers from bringing box cutters on their airplanes 30 years ago, but they didn't, even though hijackings regularly happened.
Yes, because in most cases the hijackers would demand you land, negotiate, and either get some sort of asylum deal or get shot. Big inconvenience, but usually not much bloodshed.
9/11 changed the math for the people on the plane a lot, from "sit down, be quiet, and you'll probably be fine" to "you are about to be flown into a building". Reinforced cockpit doors are one of the little bits of legitimate security improvement made since then.
Yeah, exactly, the security posture was simply to accept the risk because it was presumed to be small. A hijacking is an archetypal security failure, but airlines chose not to add friction to their operations to prevent them.
It's the Ford Pinto cost-benefit analysis scandal of the sky.
"In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials."
They're not mutually exclusive things. Red-teamers often have quite a bit of expertise and are smarter than your average threat. And the point of these exercises is precisely to continually improve in response to the findings. But alas, most of the people who bring guns on to planes aren't threats anyway (at least not in the typical sense), they're idiots who forgot their CCW in their bag.
Well funded and planned security threats are overwhelmingly outliers. Most security threats in airports are drunk and pissed off idiots, and most terrorists are lone wolf crazies with zero experience or expertise in security.
Those aren't the ones who are actually going to do serious damage. Drunk pissed off idiots haven't planned to be carrying anything anyway. Lone wolf crazies might get organized enough to be in the line in the first place... and if they do, well, crazy is not actually mutually exclusive with smart or even knowledgeable. And you still have the assumption that it matters how smart you are. There are only so many places to hide a weapon, and being smarter doesn't give you more choices.
A red teamer is going to be better suited at picking the right thing to hide and right way to conceal it, not because they have more options, but because they understand which combination of options are more likely to exploit the weaknesses of their target.
The T-14 Armata and Sukhoi Su-57 not really showing up in Ukraine, for example. As well as the S-500, which seems to be vulnerable to even 1990s tech like the ATACMS.
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