Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Episode 5: Assumptions Bearing on the Problem

Before getting into assumptions, a subject I know you are just salivating to read about, allow me to digress to something I said earlier was beyond the scope of this discussion. This is the Strategic and Operational levels of the war on Terrorism. By Strategic I am referring to efforts that are worldwide in scope and by Operational, efforts that are National in scope. Information is being gathered at these levels that should trickle down eventually to the tactical level. This failure to communicate essential information between levels has resulted in past failures and breaks in the chain of prevention. However, it is not realistic to attribute an operational failure to a single broken link when there are many that are taking place. What leads to failure are the cumulative effects of many broken links. Normally the closer the broken link is to the terrorist act the more often is it pointed to as the root cause. So, like a football game which the fans consider lost by the field goal kicker at the end of the game, the reality is a lot of mistakes are made throughout the process that are every bit as causative as the last to occur.

No doubt, unless my readers live under a mushroom, they have heard the truism about assumptions, “Assume: To make an ass of you and me.” If this is your view then predicting a future event will prove to be a disconcerting experience. Whenever anyone attempts to forecast they must assume facts that have yet to happen and futurity is one of the forms that assumptions take. The great abuse of assumptions is treating something you aren’t sure about as one, one that is already established, because you are too lazy to get to the bottom of. So an assumption is a fact that has yet to happen that you anticipate will take place in the future.

For example, will the sun will come up on the day of the marathon. Will a moratorium on Terrorism be embraced next week? So in dealing with an element of futurity, assumptions are necessary and one is assuming that a terrorist act is going to take place. One of the great challenges to security is that the events happen infrequently. This leads to a gradual erosion of vigilance.

Finally is the assumption that a terror act will take a form we are generally familiar with. For example while aircraft hijackings were well known before 9/11, using an aircraft as suicide bomb was a new twist. Still, while the exact form of the attack cannot be predicted a proxy can be used as a stand in and by using the proxy, variations can be drawn into the net.