Also, at some DARPA event (unclassified, and in front of journalists, so this story is ok to repeat here) some three star general, talking about infosec, makes analogy to “strategic deployment of stay dogs”:
Suppose:
you do not have enough explosives-detecting sniffer dogs
You do, however, have as many untrained stray dogs as you want
The enemy does not know which kind of dog is which
The principle applies to more than just sniffer dogs at check points.
Can work well as long as the enemy don’t have good intel regarding that actual number of trained dogs, even if they cannot identify the specific dogs. But I suspect there are probably ways to get the trained dog to reveal itself without actually giving up the bombs.
I would be surprised if this even works against the average 911-era terrorist. Stochastic enforcement with 10% success is good enough to stop well to-do people from shoplifting (small benefit, large expected cost) and to catch repeat offenders, but the success criterion for a suicide bomber is to explode and die! Why wouldn’t they just YOLO it?
I suppose it might be different if, say, you have a dozen checkpoints and only one dog, and the bombers could probably avoid a single checkpoint without getting caught sneaking over a fence or something, but if the bombers jump a dozen fences they’re likely to be caught, and if they go through all the checkpoints the one with the real dog will get them.
Also, at some DARPA event (unclassified, and in front of journalists, so this story is ok to repeat here) some three star general, talking about infosec, makes analogy to “strategic deployment of stay dogs”:
Suppose:
you do not have enough explosives-detecting sniffer dogs
You do, however, have as many untrained stray dogs as you want
The enemy does not know which kind of dog is which
The principle applies to more than just sniffer dogs at check points.
Can work well as long as the enemy don’t have good intel regarding that actual number of trained dogs, even if they cannot identify the specific dogs. But I suspect there are probably ways to get the trained dog to reveal itself without actually giving up the bombs.
I would be surprised if this even works against the average 911-era terrorist. Stochastic enforcement with 10% success is good enough to stop well to-do people from shoplifting (small benefit, large expected cost) and to catch repeat offenders, but the success criterion for a suicide bomber is to explode and die! Why wouldn’t they just YOLO it?
I suppose it might be different if, say, you have a dozen checkpoints and only one dog, and the bombers could probably avoid a single checkpoint without getting caught sneaking over a fence or something, but if the bombers jump a dozen fences they’re likely to be caught, and if they go through all the checkpoints the one with the real dog will get them.