Each security countermeasure provokes a still-superior adaptive terrorist response

Evidence

Adding to the problem of countercontrol, efforts to reduce societal vulnerabilities with better counterterrorist technologies can beget better terrorist tactics and devices. Recall the security officer who characterized such escalating adaptations metaphorically, “For every 10 foot wall you erect, terrorists will build an 11-foot ladder.” Technological advances are producing highly sophisticated devices that, when terrorists adopt them, increase social vulnerability to attack. Some nations promptly answer attacks with massive, deadly retaliation, whatever the costs might be, on the grounds that this is the price they must pay to check terrorism. Opponents of such policies argue that excessive countermeasures only make matters worse by creating more terrorists and increasing public sympathy for the causes that drive them to violence. Vigorous debates rage over whether massive retaliation curbs terrorism or exacerbates it. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2277

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘every 10 foot wall, terrorists build an 11-foot ladder’ quip is a tidy, tweetable encapsulation of the escalation arms race.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2277
• XREF: connects to: Treating enemies as vermin to be exterminated actually amplifies the terror it targets — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1454