Some thinking on terrorism that may be of interest:

The recent al Qaeda sponsored attempt to blow up an Northwest Airways flight is an example of an interesting, but likely inadvertent strategy: failure. Given the earlier example of 9/11, even failed attacks provide the following benefits:

New and sweeping rules on airline passengers (most inane) and beefed up security.

New military/intelligence efforts launched against Yemen.

A potential substantive review and expansion of the broken no-fly lists and other substantial/expensive "systemic" overhauls.

In sum, the attack generated more expense (a nice return in red ink for a relatively small effort) even though it failed.

NOTE: This is hilarious given the only thing that did work to stop the attack was (again) quick thinking/heroism on the part of the passengers on the flight. This implies that the real reason for all this 'action' is more about bolstering nation-state legitimacy (why do we spend all this money in taxes on these massive bureaucracies) than preventing attacks.



Failure is interesting, as a strategy, because it doesn't require the necessary planning, funding, and training required for a potentially successful attack. As a result, attacks can be made quickly across a broad spectrum of targets. If al Qaeda did embrace failure as a strategy, we could expect them to: