COUNTERTERRORISMThe Counterterrorism Response to 9/11 Killed More People Than It Saved
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a crime of shocking proportions that deserved a proportionate response, but the costs of those attacks were multiplied by the government’s grossly disproportionate response. When studying public policy, we must ask: Was the counterterrorism response to 9/11 worth it? Did it save enough lives to pay for itself or at least break even? No, not even close.
Nineteen Islamist terrorists murdered 2,979 people on September 11, 2001. The government’s counterterrorism (CT) response to 9/11, which was the deadliest terrorist attack in world history, included domestic security measures like the TSA, the PATRIOT Act, surveillance, and numerous wars overseas that we lost. The costs of 9/11 were horrific, and the response was gargantuan. When studying public policy, we must ask: Was the counterterrorism response to 9/11 worth it? Did it save enough lives to pay for itself or at least break even?
No, not even close. For CT spending to equal the value of lives saved, it would have to have saved between 390,000 and 442,000 lives, or between 15,600 and 17,680 per year since 9/11. From September 12, 2001, through September 10, 2026, I estimate that 347 total people were murdered on US soil by all terrorists of all ideological motivations and locations of birth. That includes some victims in attacks since that analysis was published. Thus, all CT spending would have to have saved 1,124 to 1,274 times as many lives as were taken by terrorists in attacks on US soil for the benefits of CT spending to equal the costs in terms of lives saved.
To put that in perspective, the number of lives that would have had to be saved for CT just to break even, never mind producing a positive return, would have had to be roughly equal to every murder committed on US soil since 9/11. That large number of lives was not saved by post‑9/11 CT spending and foreign wars to stop terrorists.
This matters because scarce resources that funded CT could be used to save lives elsewhere, such as better road safety, improved policing, or the innumerable other ways that people make their lives safer when they’re richer. Much of the actual CT spending is worse than just the opportunity cost of diverted safety resources implies, because the actions that caused the spending directly or indirectly killed Americans. Around 7,000 Americans died in Iraq and Afghanistan, not including the hundreds of thousands of locals.
