Rational cost-benefit analysis of the War on Terrorism

[Marat]

Decisions to go to war are usually based on qualitative reasoning, but what if we apply rational cost-benefit analysis to the War on Terrorism? Has anyone ever calculated whether resources are more rationally spent on protecting the homeland from attack through expenditures on police and intelligence capacities than through invading terrorist bases abroad, or how much would be gained by increasing police resources at the expense of military investments? Prima facie it seems that foreign invasions are highly cost-inefficient, since huge expenditures for logistics, for the military's supporting bureaucracy, for propping up local puppet governments, for building local infrastructure, and for fighting the local population who would never have been terrorists, but who are just resisting a foreign invader, all absorb resources not directly related to preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. In contrast, money spent on policing and intelligence-gathering would waste comparatively little through the unavoidable diversion of funding to projects irrelevant to the central mission.

 

Another issue in the War on Terrorism which has to be quantitatively assessed is how much territory does an enemy need to occupy to organize, support, and fund a significant terrorist attack on the U.S.? Since countless nations around the world could provide alternative bases for terrorist groups to flee to if squeezed out of any one place, the U.S. would have to block terrorist access to the entire potentially terrorist-supporting world in order to prevent future attacks. So it is important to know how much territory has to be controlled in potentially terrorist-friendly areas to prevent terrorists from moving there and setting up a base of sufficient size to mount another 9/11 attack. If the area required is sufficiently small, say 100 square miles, then the terrorists could easily hide out in the mountains of West Pakistan forever, where geopolitical factors would make them unattackable by anything but relatively ineffective U.S. drones. If small patches of land like this are sufficient to support a significant terrorist attack on the U.S., and the U.S., for reasons of logistics, geopolitics, and cost could never manage to occupy them all, then it makes no sense to devote so many resources to foreign invasions rather than domestic policing to control terrorism.

[Pangloss]

I'm sure there are a number of good operationalizations for the War on Terror, but getting all parties to agree on its applicability is the sticking point.

 

But that never stopped us from discussing it! (grin) If anyone runs across a good one, please feel free to pass it along.