More than five years after 9/11, the federal government has yet to come to grips with basic questions about priorities, roles, and funding.

In August 2006, British authorities announced that they had uncovered a plot in which liquid explosives would be used to destroy airliners en route from England to the United States. When the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) responded by banning all liquids and gels from passenger aircraft cabins, it was widely reported that such action was necessary because existing screening equipment could not detect the kind of explosives involved in the plot. This is perhaps understandable, given the daunting technological challenge of developing detectors that are not only sensitive enough to identify explosives from among the wide array of liquids routinely carried on aircraft, but also compact and affordable enough to be widely deployed and quick enough to not unduly impede passenger flow.
But this response comes 11 years after the similar Bojinka plot (a plan to bomb 12 U.S.-registered aircraft flying across the Pacific) was foiled in 1995, five years after the 9/11 hijackings that produced unprecedented attention and funding for aviation security, and two years after the 2004 law that sought to implement the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States' (9/11 Commission's) recommendation to prioritize the development and deployment of effective checkpoint explosives detectors. By itself, this is sobering, but when taken together with widespread evidence that such limited progress is the rule rather than the exception across all transportation security programs, a fundamental reassessment is in order about how the United States is approaching this issue.