A state funeral for a victim of a no-tech checkpoint may possibly improve the situation.
The "victim" may have contributed to his own demise, but in our hi-tech age our aim should be to make things not just fool-proof, but idiot-proof (as the pioneers of military command and control computer systems used to say, back in the happy days of the golden fifties).
Our troops are not to be faulted. They are doing the best they can with what they have available at great risk to themselves. And they have kept unnecessary fatalities quite low.
Our military managers undoubtedly had other problems to distract them, but it should be noted that the development of hi-tech checkpoints is in the long term interests of the enemies of terrorism.
However, a plethora of lo-tech checkpoint equipment is readily available, off-the-shelf, I expect, in the United States.
Such things as police car flashers, various emergency noisemakers, speed bumps, "Jersey wall" barriers, remote video cameras, portable flashing signs, etc.
Flashing white lights are rather ambiguous, but police car flashers send a message. In this case: "Red, white, and blue. / This message is for you." Or whatever it translates to in Arabic.
And other improvements come readily to mind, once one realizes that there is a technical problem here.
And technical problems are generally more fixable than people problems.
The basic difficulty is that in our supposedly hi-tech age, the world seems to be run at every level by mostly no-tech people.
Lo-tech people appear to be valuable as workers who will hide the ignorance of their superiors while getting necessary work done.
And some hi-tech people appear to advance by keeping their lights under a bushel.
And the young avoid the often relatively poorly rewarded labor of a technical education.
