Originally Posted by
SATTSO
There is more to it than that: the guy who was recently caught with a small amount of explosives in his luggage. And at SAT, we had 2 people bring a fake IED into a checkpoint, thinking it would be funny. And many more incidents of current and former military than that doing things at airports they shouldn't...
But as I have said, current military in uniform with proper ID are screened less intrusively.
While the things above don't actually change the real underlying risk (unless the person with the explosives actually was planning to use them), there's certainly no support for the idea that active duty military are _less_ of a risk of committing acts of terrorism than the average member of the US population. The numbers, of course, are vanishingly small in all cases (which speaks to how vastly we as a country overspend on attempting to reduce tiny risks), but, over the past decade:
Number of active duty military who committed acts of terrorism on US soil: 1
Active duty military: 2.3MM (including the reserves, to be comprehensive of anyone who might be traveling in uniform)
Number of non-active duty military who committed acts of terrorism on US soil: 19
US population ex-active duty military: 305MM.
The incidence of commission of terrorist acts among members of the military is about 7x the non-military incidence.
I'm certainly not saying "we gotta screen those military folks more closely, they're dangerous!" But there's zero reason to assume that they're LESS dangerous than the typical flyer, and hence should be screened LESS thoroughly.