Contemporary Security Management

Among other things, I'm also teaching a "contemporary issues" course in security management. I came across this interesting series of articles in Yahoo! Finance on the burgeoning security industry. This particular piece noted the startling growth in federal contracting:

One of the nation's fastest-growing industry groups is homeland security -- a sector that has grown to more than 30,000 companies today doing business with the federal government from only nine just seven years ago.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its agencies have paid private contractors at least $130 billion, an analysis of federal databases shows. The top ten contractors won at least $65 billion, or roughly half, of that.

Unfortunately, after 9/11, we're in a growth industry.

Another article in the series describes the use of operations research techniques to model the aftermath of a terrorist attach:

By looking at security threats as large operations problems, Lawrence Wein, a professor of management at the Stanford School of Business, thinks we could save thousands of lives.

"Just like McDonald's has to get hamburgers out in a rapid and defect-free manner, so too does the U.S. government have to get vaccines and antibiotics out or screen the borders for nuclear weapons and terrorists," says Wein, a soft-spoken 49-year-old academic who until recently specialized in health care and manufacturing.

Hearing Wein, an unlikely security wonk, spin out scenarios can be frightening. Whether it's a few grams of botulinum toxin dropped into an unlocked milk tank or a couple of pounds of anthrax scattered above a crowded metropolis, Wein has spent the past five years developing models that pinpoint with precision the expected number of casualties.

The article is an interesting read. It just goes to show that this stuff may seem dry in a classroom setting, but it has applications that can literally save millions.