vonny:

August 14th, 2006 at 4:27 pm

It seems to me that resiliency hits certain limits in terms of infrastructure. While we can put in back-up systems for something like telecommunications, which is a must, other infrastructure entities such as hospitals and power plants become more difficult and more expensive to have robust back-ups. And still others, such as industrial centers, make up the next level where it becomes very difficult to have a resilient system if attacked. We absolutely should pursue redundancies where possible, but we need to balance that with a keen awareness of where our limitations are and devote resources for the security of those elements.

Dave Schuler:

August 14th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

I think you must mean something different by “practical” than I do, Mark. The practical but heinous and completely unacceptable solution to the problem of Islamist terrorism is kill all the Muslims (or at least enough that environmental degradation would do the rest). It’s well within our capabilities. Have you looked at the inventory on our nuclear arsenal lately?

Redundancy as a strategic component of a defensive posture has an impractically large overhead. And there’s no redundancy possible for individuals. How many people killed at the same time would it take to cause our legal system to collapse? If too many more than the 3,000 who died on 9/11 had been victims, that could have done it. And we’ve done nothing whatever to refurbish our systems to address the problem.

mark:

August 14th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

Hey Von,

Good point -there is a definite and fast approaching point of economic diminishing returns with this sort of countermeasure.

Hi Dave,

I think my response here was heavily skewed toward Chirol’s specific question regarding resiliency and not the overall problem.

And we have done very little to refurbish anything.