Reader Comment 03-02-10 Deter Attacks

I hate it when readers catch me in an obviously poor word choice (not their fault, mine). In this case Anonymous called me on a poor choice of words in my response to another reader’s comment. Anonymous wrote:

“. . . regarding Risk Management and the statement: "The security professional does this in the full knowledge that most security money is wasted, . . ." The security professional could also recognize that if a target was not attacked, then certain deterring safeguards were successful and the security money, in fact, was not wasted.”

What I was trying to say is that most facilities will never be attacked or probably even be targeted for a terrorist attack; too many potential targets to choose from and too few terrorists. The whole point of course being that one would never really know in advance if the all the work in designing, establishing and maintaining an adequate security program would really be necessary. Anonymous makes a good point by going one step further. Just because a facility with a good security program was never attacked does not mean that the effort was wasted. Since a good security program deters potential attacks as well as it deals with actual attacks, one never really knows whether or not the security was ever really tested. It could be that the deterrent effect made the response effort unnecessary. Of course, every real professional security manager would much rather deter an attack than have to exercise the plans to actually defend against a terrorist attack. You loose fewer people that way.