The Catastrophic Failure of the Secret Service
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There has been no shortage of political and cultural commentary related to the attempted assassination that occurred in Western Pennsylvania on Saturday night, so I will avoid that sort of commentary here. What I would like to focus on instead is related to security, and what I see as a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States Secret Service.
To begin, former President Donald J. Trump is only alive because the shooter missed, and not because of any competencies or heroism on the part of the Secret Service or law enforcement.
One attendee is not so lucky, and two others are fighting for their lives. The notion that anyone would prop this up as a success story on the part of the people whose job it was to keep the former president and all those people at the rally safe is frankly incomprehensible.
From a tactical perspective, there were numerous security failures, including:
Significant uncontrolled spaces around the perimeter of the event, especially an obvious tactical observation point (TOP)—namely, the rooftop from where the shooter took his shot. These spaces could have and should have been secured in a fashion designed to deny opportunity. Most typically, this happens by having security forces physically occupy the rooftop. This specific effort is so basic and fundamental, the lapse leaves me questioning whether leaving that TOP unoccupied was in fact an error, or a deliberate omission in favor of the (again, catastrophic) strategy we saw in play on Saturday.
Given that a Secret Service sniper ultimately put down the shooter, it appears that a decision was made to employ a strategy known as a counter sniper overwatch. This was and is a reactive security strategy rather than a proactive strategy designed to deny opportunity via occupying the nearby rooftop. This effort is typically used in support of, rather than in lieu of, basic security protocols. Clearly, this was also an undeniable tactical error.
The counter sniper took the shooter down almost immediately upon shots fired. This is a key detail because it means that (in all likelihood), the sniper was trained on the shooter prior to the moment shots were fired. It will be some time before all of the details are confirmed or refuted, but at the time of this writing, there is some information floating around that one of the counter snipers saw and reported the potential shooter minutes prior to the first shots being fired, but was not permitted to engage until the shooter began firing first. A retired Secret Service agent interviewed on one of the major news networks stated that this is due to the Secret Service being bound to the same laws as any other law enforcement officer or private citizen when it comes to justifying the use of deadly force. This is true, of course, but it also does not mean a Secret Service agent cannot use deadly force to prevent someone from taking a shot once the threat is clear. If what appears to be true is true—that the counter snipers were aware of the shooter setting up and did nothing as they waited for him to fire first—nothing about the strategy or the response makes sense.
On a related note, reports and videos taken by rally attendees continue to surface, at least one of which presents video of the shooter positioning himself on the rooftop minutes before the first shots were fired. Despite reports that they were made aware of this by rally attendees, local law enforcement officers failed to engage the shooter in any way. Not to mention, the Secret Service failed to follow the most fundamental of close protection procedures when a potential threat is identified: getting, or keeping, Trump off stage until the issue is sorted out.
Post-shooting, the security failures continued, including:
The cover and evacuation protocols by the Secret Service after the former President was shot were altogether clumsy and slow, leaving Trump exposed to the crowd (and the threat of a potential second shooter) for a significant period of time.
From current available video, it appeared that the escape vehicle was not positioned correctly. It wasn’t close enough to the stage, and when they finally got Trump into the vehicle, Secret Service put him in the wrong side, with the former President still exposed to the crowd.
Overall, the close protection team surrounding Trump looked unprepared and unprofessional (i.e. fumbling to re-holster sidearms, putting on sunglasses, etc.). In general they appeared unpracticed in the most fundamental maneuvers of cover and evacuation. Remember, there were no guarantees that Trump hadn’t been more severely injured than it first appeared. When former President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, no one, not even Reagan himself, thought he had been hit. It wasn’t clear that he had been shot until he was in the limo and being inspected by his own close protection agents. Even then, the gravity of his wound wasn’t known until he collapsed after walking into the hospital a short time later. In close protection, getting the principal off the X and on the way to medical help is always the most urgent priority. On Saturday night, a better prepared team would have managed to get the former President into the car and on the way to the hospital much more efficiently.
While the majority of the news media is applauding and glorifying the Secret Service for surrounding the former President with their bodies as shields, I see things a little differently.
Of course they surrounded him; that’s their job.
It’s the way the job is done. Is it brave? Absolutely. But when taken as a whole, the dynamic of the agents’ collective actions leaves me truly mystified. How is it possible the vaunted Secret Service showed such incompetence as to leave such an obvious and fundamental vulnerability in their security perimeter? I seriously doubt it was owed to a lack of manpower, as there would have been plenty of local and state police to support perimeter security.
I do not want to believe that these failures—the failure to secure an obvious TOP position, the failure to engage the shooter before he could take a shot, the failure to evacuate the former President expeditiously and without exposing him to further lines of sight—were deliberate.
This means that the only other rational answer is gross incompetence.
And if it was gross incompetence, then clearly the wrong people are leading these teams. Whatever the case, it seems doubtful that anyone will be held accountable, and if they are, the public likely will never hear about the accountability measures.
Donald J. Trump is lucky to be alive. We can’t say the same for one of the rally attendees, and two others are severely injured as well. As we ponder how this was allowed to happen, the critical question is how injured is the country as a whole? Will we see this harrowing event as a wakeup call to stop vilifying people we don’t agree with and making them into enemies or dehumanizing them? Will we correct the destructive direction we are headed in pursuing equity over competence, no matter the cost?
Will we choose to pull together or further apart?