It’s nice to see the government actually making security trade-offs. From the Associated Press:
Outfitting every U.S. commercial passenger plane with anti-missile systems would be a costly and impractical defense against terrorists armed with shoulder-fired rockets, according to a study released Tuesday.
Researchers said it could cost nearly $40 billion over 20 years to deploy defense technology on the country’s 6,800 passengers jets. By comparison, the federal government currently spends roughly $4.4 billion a year on all transportation security.
The Rand study also cited the unreliability of the system, and the problems of false alarms.
Identifying terrorism security countermeasures that aren’t worth it…maybe it’s the start of a trend.