Terror Dollars

Is the terrorist war on the West being run by MBAs?

Looking at terror in terms of business models and dollars - even if by reasonable estimates and guesswork - discloses that there are some pretty savvy bad boys out there. It's not just the people who finance terror, it's the folks who handle corporate strategy and day-to-day operations.

Neutralize the rhetoric and ideology, go up to 10,000 feet, and look at terror as an enterprise. What emerges from the smoke of the car bombs is a low-overhead, high return-on-investment operation that, by its very existence, forces competitors to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to stave off entry into their markets.

Talk about a New Economy.

Take the 2004 al-Qaida train bombing in Madrid. A few hundred thousand bucks to put the team in place, some stolen explosives, and all of a sudden there's a new government that quickly pulls its troops out of Iraq. Add to that the intangibles of global PR for the cause. The anti-war but studious New Priorities Project estimates the U.S. regime change action in Iraq will have cost taxpayers about $208 billion by the end of the year (www.costofwar.com).

Any business will tell you that it's expensive to find new employees. The Department of Defense spends more than $ 4 billion a year keeping its uniformed ranks filled. The Army, though, fell 42 percent short of its recruiting goals in April, even with the offer of $20,000 signing bonuses. Given that the majority of the current crop of terrorists come from the ranks of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, and that the majority of them live in poverty, and that half of them are under age 25, al-Qaida and other groups need to offer little if anything to keep their units fully staffed.

Then there's customer service. The proposed budget for the Department of Homeland Security is $47.4 billion. That doesn't include all the other money spent on anti-terror stuff by the military, the CIA, the FBI, and virtually every other federal government department, all of which have security components in their spending plans. Be conservative, double the Homeland Security budget and total spending pushes $100 billion.

Do federal authorities stop potential attacks in the homeland all the time? Yes, they do. But, we're at 10,000 feet and looking at return on investment. At the cost of one car bomb and one dispensible fanatic, the U.S. government would spend tens of millions of dollars. on the investigation, congressional hearings, and new budgets to make sure "this won't happen again." Add in lost productivity as people turn their focus to the tragedy and figure who's making a profit.

If this war was played out in the world of high tech, Microsoft (the government) would find a way to purchase its small but innovative competitor (organized terror) and take it out of the marketplace. But in the world of global politics, terrorists don't want to sell - they want to become Microsoft.