• Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
• Value of time (opportunity costs), and
• Employment, at both regional and national levels

Increases in economic indicators from reduced wait times stemming from the addition of CBP staff represent the benefits in a benefit-cost analysis.

CREATE brought Gartenstein-Ross to USC to address its stakeholders on the topic of Bin Laden's legacy. Alhough Osama bin Laden's death was a significant blow for al Qaeda, it did not end the fight against jihadi terrorism. Indeed, his strategic ideas for beating the United States have permeated his organization, and for years to come America will be grappling with the strategy he forged. There have been two critical prongs to this strategy: undermining the U.S. economy, and making the battlefield on which the United States has to fight al Qaeda as broad as possible. Gartenstein-Ross's presentation examines the evolution of both of these strategic strands. It demonstrates that the United States never had a strong understanding of al Qaeda's strategy and, as a result, has developed systems of both offense and defense that have been ill suited to defeating this adversary. Indeed, at critical junctures, the United States' own actions have helped significantly advance al Qaeda's objectives. The "International Herald Tribune" has described Daveed Gartenstein-Ross as "a rising star in the counterterrorism community." He frequently leads training programs for the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement, and has designed educational curricula on terrorism for the U.S. Department of State. His writing has appeared in "The New York Times," "Foreign Policy," "The Atlantic," "Reader's Digest," and "The Review of Faith and International Affairs," among other publications.

The lecture will touch on three topics: • A survey of all the global neo-jihadi plots in the West since 9/11/01 in order to detect the emerging trends • A summary of new insights in the process of turning to political violence coming from recent empirical research • A summary of how the Internet is affected the evolution of the global neo-Jihadi threat in the West The talk will conclude with the implication of the new developments in the Middle East on the global neo-Jihadi threat in the West.

The database was used to carry out two sets of analyses. The first is a set of analyses over time using three-, six-, or twelve-month averages for number of incidents, average outage duration, customers lost and megawatts lost.

Negative binomial regression models, which account for overdispersion in the data, were used. For the number of incidents over time a seasonal analysis suggests there is a 9.7% annual increase in incident rate given season (that is, “holding season constant”) over this period. Given the year, summer is estimated to have 65-85% more incidents than the other seasons. The duration data suggest a more complicated trend; an analysis of duration per incident over time using a loess nonparametric regression “scatterplot smoother” suggests that between 1990-93 durations were getting shorter on average but this trend changed in the mid-1990s when average duration started to increase, and this increase became more pronounced after 2002. When looking at average customer losses by season there is weak evidence of an upward trend in the average customer loss per incident, with an estimated increase of a bit more than 10,000 customers per incident per year. Similar analyses of MW lost per incident over time showed no evidence of any time or seasonal patterns for this variable. The second part of the report includes a number of event-level analyses. The data in these analyses are modeled in two parts. First, the different characteristics related to whether an incident has zero or nonzero customers lost are determined. Then, given that the number lost is nonzero, the characteristics that help to predict the customers lost are analyzed. Unlike the first set of models described, in this section a number of predictors such as primary cause of the outage (including variables such as weather, equipment failure, system protection, human error and others), total number of customers served by the affected utilities, and the population density of the states where the outages occurred were used in the analyses to gain a better understanding of the three key outcome variables: customers lost, megawatts lost and duration of electric outages. Logistic regression was used in these analyses. For logged customers lost, the only predictor showing much of a relationship was logged MW lost. The total number of customers served by the utility was found to be a marginally significant predictor of customers lost per incident. Customer losses were higher for events caused by natural disaster, crime, unknown causes, and third party, and lower for incidents resulting from capacity shortage, demand reduction, and equipment failure, holding all else in the model fixed. The analyses for duration at the event level find that the two most common causes of outages, equipment failure and weather, are very different, with the former associated with shorter events and the latter associated with longer ones. When the primary cause of the events is included in the regression models, the time trend for the average duration per incident found in earlier analyses disappears. According to the data, weather related incidents are becoming more common in later years and equipment failures less common, and this change in the relative frequency of primary cause of the events accounts for much of the overall pattern of increasing average durations by season. Holding all else in the model constant, these analyses also suggest that winter events have an expected duration that is 2.25 times the duration of summer events, with autumn and spring in between. The event-level models can be used to construct predictions for outage outcomes based on different scenarios. We look at scenarios for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. Using the characteristics of the utilities in these four cities, the estimated expected duration and estimated expected customer loss (given nonzero loss) of an incident, separated by season and cause, can be determined for each city. We also construct 50% prediction intervals for duration and for customer loss (given that the loss is nonzero) for any cause and season for the four cities.

This assessment occurs in the context of a policy debate about responses to perceived growth in such threats, particularly since the U.S. Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have invested time and resources in exploring the protection of airliners from shoulder-fired “man-portable air defense systems” (MANPADS) missiles, tactically flexible, widely-proliferated weapons known to have been possessed (and used) by anti-Western terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

This report and any other terrorism risk and response analyses must address the policy cost-benefit aspects of three main countermeasure areas, including those related to:

1) proliferation, intelligence, and prevention; 2) vulnerability; and 3) survivability. While there is some overlap between the latter two categories, vulnerability-reducing countermeasures should minimize successful attack in the event that weapons fall into terrorist hands. Survivability countermeasures are intended to minimize the loss to life and property in the event of successful deployment and a subsequent “hit” from a weapon. More than the first two, survivability presumes a certain measure of assumed risk of attack losses. This report preliminarily addresses the potential importance of assumed risk in maximizing countermeasure utility in the context of scarce dollars and adaptive terrorism threat systems.

Yet other external weapons systems, traditionally less widely discussed, are potentially significant, alternative threats to airports and airliners. Combat weapons, ranging from automatic assault weapons, high-caliber rifles and machine guns, to rocket-propelled anti-armor and anti-personnel weapons and mortars – and in the future, a variety of other emerging weapons technologies – might also damage or destroy aircraft either in the air or (along with infrastructure) on the ground (see figure 1, p.4). Any of these weapons might be used to damage public confidence in flying. In some instances, as with assault weapons such as the .50 caliber sniper rifle, these weapons may be cheaper and more easily available than traditional infrared-guided (IR) MANPADS, yet could still pose a significant risk to civil aviation even if the IR MANPADS threat were significantly reduced (or even eliminated) by related countermeasures efforts.

These alternative threats, which for now include non-IR MANPADS, might be used in tactically sophisticated ways, and possess high, increasing lethality potential, owing to advances in explosives and ordnance technology and to the unique vulnerabilities of civilian/commercial aircraft and airports.

In addition, there are significant economic risks for the nation and the airline industry due to the elasticity of travel options and the flying public’s own comparative risk analysis. Thus, while these weapons are capable of causing significant casualties (in the hundreds or thousands in a coordinated attack), their greater threat is the public terror, anxiety, and subsequent damage to a key industry and related sectors (e.g., tourism) that their deployment would engender. Accordingly, risk analyses of terrorism threats to the civilian airline industry must not only account for carefully weighed data and expert opinions, but also the public’s analysis of risk and willingness to fly – whether or not such calculations are “rational.”

Lastly, policy response must consider not only significant potential threats to airborne planes, but on the ground to taxiing aircraft, airport terminals and other infrastructure. Both ground-based and close-proximity ground-to-air attack presents one or more alternative avenues to terrorism if other methods – such as the use of shoulder-fired infrared-guided missiles – are closed off or impeded.

This report is divided into three main parts. It first looks at the history of MANPADS and other external threats to civilian airliners. Part II then addresses the proliferation of and terrorist attack threat risk from portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), surface-to-surface weapons (RPGs, assault weapons, mortars, and large caliber sniper or automatic weapons) and other advancing ballistic (high-yield thermobaric and other high-explosives) and non-ballistic (portable electromagnetic pulse- and high-intensity laser weapons) technologies. Part III analyzes broader civilian airline industry threats, susceptibility and vulnerability, and benefit-cost issues underlying preemption and response measures that might prevent or mitigate them. A sample of such countermeasures and strategies are discussed in brief.

Any significant policy response must be guided by comparative, integrated assessment of broader risks to both the airline transportation sector and society as a whole, across sectors, threat types and geography. Policy response should account for both likely and alternative targets, methods and consequences, collective incremental threats and vulnerabilities, and the possibility of dual- or multiple-benefit countermeasures that might span more than one specific possible threat. Therefore, it is critical to evaluate individual aviation threats – such as MANPADS – within the broader context of improving overall aviation safety and security.