I think that Saudi Arabia's 35,000 man security force is an interesting point. There are several ways to view it. One is that it represents probably in excess of one billion dollars a year in expenditure on security in the absence of any actual investment in an attack. I'm not convinced that it will have much preventative effect, as it is quite possible that it is really a PR move and works program for unemployed Saudis, but who knows. Having spent some time in critical infrastructure protection, there is a fundamental problem at work. There are functionally infinite valid CI targets. If you pick the top 10, 100, or even 1000 to protect, then, assuming that you make these invulnerable to attack through your protection (which doesn't happen), the net effect is to push adversary targeting down the list to the 11th, 101st, or 1001st target, respectively. In most CI scenarios, it is economically impracticable to protect all valid targets. It is the fundamental flaw in a reactive notion of CI security versus a proactive notion of CI security (which is much more difficult, especially for governments, to implement). That said, there has been an unexpected (in my view) calm in Saudi Arabia lately, so who knows?

Regarding your proposed vernacular, I think it is a great idea in the sense that it may help bring the reality of geological versus "above ground factors" more into the awareness of the public. I'm not sure about the specific labels. Several of the comments down thread suggest (and RR's post yesterday) that quite a few TOD readers and contributors (myself included) have recently finished reading Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan." We should be careful to avoid applying inappropriate categorization to these matters--I think it is reasonable to categorize in this way for the purpose of raising public awareness or separating two commonly conflated issues, but we should avoid it in the quest for actual understanding. For our purposes I think it is important to view these phenomena as inseparable and part of the "system" of Peak Oil.