Supply Chain

Please Continue to Remove Your Shoes

May 2, 2011

The death of Osama Bin Laden should certainly be celebrated. He was more responsible than anyone else for the expansion of international terrorism in the last 20 years.

Still, we shouldn't expect things at our nation's airports to change much, if at all.

Those of us flying today, this month, or later this year will be subjected to the same byzantine aviation security system of the past ten years, i.e. pat-downs of 6 year olds, naked x-ray scanners, etc.

The creation of the TSA was a direct result of the 9/11 attacks and has been a major disappointment. Dishearteningly, John Mica, the Republican Congressman from Florida, who was the person on Capitol Hill most responsible for creating TSA in the first place, now describes the Agency as "my bastard child and a monster that we've created, a bureaucratic monster."

Having Bin Laden out of the picture is surely a good thing.

What we need to do now is force our leaders to re-evaluate how we deal with the threat of terrorism here at home.

About the Author

Andrew R. Thomas Blog | Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business

Andrew R. Thomas, Ph.D., is associate professor of marketing and international business at the University of Akron; and, a member of the core faculty at the International School of Management in Paris, France.

He is a bestselling business author/editor, whose 23 books include, most recently, American Shale Energy and the Global Economy: Business and Geopolitical Implications of the Fracking Revolution, The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business, Global Supply Chain Security, The Final Journey of the Saturn V, and Soft Landing: Airline Industry Strategy, Service and Safety.

His book The Distribution Trap was awarded the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the Best Marketing Book of 2010. Another work, Direct Marketing in Action, was a finalist for the same award in 2008.

Andrew is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transportation Security and a regularly featured analyst for media outlets around the world.

He has traveled to and conducted business in 120 countries on all seven continents.