Grey's Law, the Republic, and You (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, we painstakingly reached the completely obvious conclusion that the US Secret Service displayed gross institutional incompetence on Saturday, July 13th, 2024.
Autisticly exacting, perhaps, but it sets us on firm ground to ask “how” and then “why” without any spurious objections that “they did the best they could.”
Protection details are not responsible for producing a good-faith effort. Their mission isn’t to try. Their mission is to intercept and defuse any threat to the “asset,” before any attack can be made, 100% of the time, without fail. They are committed, not to efforts, but results.
Thus, there can be no legitimate excuse for this failure, only a failure analysis of the underlying causes.
Nor is it important, legitimate, or sensible to defend the actions of individual members of the USSS on that day. A protection team is a team, responsible to the mission. It functions as a unit or not at all. There are no individual letter grades. If anyone fails, everyone fails. There is no wiggle room in this.
The failure of July 13th was allowing the assassin to successfully set up on the roof and fire shots.
How did this happen?
There were no personnel, either USSS agents, or local law enforcement, on that roof.
Were personnel on that roof necessary?
We have already established that it was a prime shooting position, from which any reasonably skilled rifleman could have executed a shot with a high probability of a kill.
So it was necessary to deny access to that roof to any non-trusted persons.
There are three methods of doing this:
Assign one or more precision shooting teams to cover the roof from a distance.
Form a secure perimeter around the entire building to deny roof access.
Put personnel on the roof.
The first method was the USSS team’s strategy. I will explain how it is inadequate and unreliable. Then I will explain how the second method is simply a worse version of the third. Finally, I will explain how the third method is nearly infallible, if enough personnel are present to monitor the whole roof.
On July 13th, a USSS countersniper team, positioned at “A” was assigned to monitor the roof of AGR International, at “B”, thus:
Trump’s approximate position is marked as “C”.
I do not know, and have not been able to find a source for, whether the team had additional responsibilities, such as monitoring the apparent water tower at “D”, or other nearby buildings.
However, I contend that even if the team at A had no responsibilities other than monitoring the roof of AGR International at B, they were still given a task that was impossible to execute with a low-enough probability of failure.
In other words, the team at A did not fail to interdict the assassin due to bad luck, but due to poor odds.
Here is a photograph of the countersniper team at A, in action.
While we cannot see both members of the two-man team, we can see their equipment, which is the important part, because it tells us not only what their capabilities were, but what mission they were equipped for, and how well that matches the mission they were assigned.
The equipment breakdown:
Both tripods are carbon fiber ReallyRightStuff tripods, with some sort of equipment bag slung from both. These are easily recognizable, and they are absolutely what I’d use. They are great.
On the roof next to the visible officer is a pair of binoculars, possibly with integrated ranging laser. I am unable to identify the exact brand. I myself use a pair of Vortex Fury HD ranging binos, with a relatively modest 10x fixed power magnification, which allows a wide field of view, and quick scanning. These appear to be higher-power.
The two officers appear to have identical rifles, both chassis bolt-action models which take an AICS magazine. I am unable to tell for certain if they are short or long-action.
Both are topped with a long scope, definitely a Nightforce by its characteristic eyepiece and throw lever, probably an ATACR.
The scope rings seem uncharacteristically high, possibly even AR-height. However, the front of the handguard appears to be topped with a full-length pic rail, so this may be necessary to ensure that a 56mm scope bell, with a cap around it, clears the rail.
The front ring is topped with another section of pic rail, mounting an LRF and ballistic computer… can’t see what kind. Perhaps a MARS.
I don’t see a bubble level on either rifle, but many good LRFs have cant detection built in.
Also, not seen in this shot, but other pictures have it… these rifles have attached silencers. I am unable to determine what make/model, because they have heat covers attached.
What are the implications of all this?
Well, this long-range kit. Serious long-range kit. It’s optimized for finding and engaging targets out to about 800 yards or more, depending on what cartridge those rifles are chambered for.
Short, long, and magnum actions refers to the travel distance of the bolt and length of the magazine, which determines the maximum cartridge length the rifle can be chambered for, allowing a range of actual calibers for each chassis. That caliber is determined by the barrel and bolt selected.
If that is a short-action chassis, the most probably candidates are 7.62x51mm NATO, with an effective range of about 800 meters, or 6.5 Creedmoor, a more modern and aerodynamic cartridge which is effective out to perhaps about 1200 depending on load.
If it’s long-action, or even magnum, it could be anything from 300 Win Mag to 338 Lapua Magnum for serious head-exploding fun out to absurd distances.
Squinting at the relative sizes of the officer’s hand and the magazine, I can’t be sure. The two-groove pattern suggests it is a long-action magazine. Short-action AICS mags have additional, shallower grooves, but these may simply not be visible in the photo, which appears to have been shot with a potato.
At first I suspected long-action, 300 win mag, but then I noted the officer is not wearing hearing protection. Fire a 300 win mag without hearing pro, even with a decent 30 cal suppressor, and all you will hear for the rest of the engagement is, and I quote:
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”
Ask me how I know.
Not recommended. Even if it’s 7.62x51, he’s playing fast and loose with his hearing, but it’s doable.
Now we turn to his scope. The Nightforce ATACR does come in a 1-8x, but it doesn’t look like that. At that length, what he has there is a 7-35x56mm. That means, for the folks at home, that he can’t “zoom out” to lesser magnification than 7x.
On Nightforce scopes, lever starts down and left for low power, then goes clockwise to zoom in. Squint as I might, I cannot estimate where his magnification is…. somewhere in the middle? 10x? 15x? Don’t know.
His binos look to be serious high-power, too.
This kit may seem like overkill for 150 yards. Because it is. And that’s a problem. Here’s why.
This is the whole roof of AGR International. I’ve left in some cars for scale.
See the problem?
This whole business is 150 yards away, and the lowest power this dude has available to him is 7x. And he’s got two pairs of eyeballs to scan that whole roof, over and over.
Which explains why, in this picture, he is off glass. He doesn’t have a wide enough field of view on glass to be effective at covering a wide area at close range.
This is a long-range, reach-out-and-touch-someone team, who have been assigned to sweep and cover a broad area, and not given the time and opportunity, if they had the wit, to get proper gear from the armory instead.
I’d have gone with a CSASS-like semiauto platform in 6.5 Creedmoor, topped with a March 1-10. The ability to use low magnification is important for close range, and semi-auto is important for fast followup shots.
Anyway, wrong tools for the job, wrong team for the job, and it gets worse.
There are some rumors, which I cannot confirm, that this team actually had eyes on the guy, and were on the radio, trying to figure out if he was one of theirs, and get permission to take the shot.
If so, this illustrates the other problem with using countersniper teams to cover close areas. The limit on one’s ability to engage isn’t usually the effective range of your weapon, or your ability to see or even hit a target, but your ability to positively identify that target as a hostile.
That’s why these guys have glass that goes to 35. It’s not for hitting stuff at 1000 yards. I can hit stuff at 1000 yards using 8x magnification, and so can you with a little practice. 35x is for figuring out if it’s Abu Suleman bin Goatfucker, responsible for a string of bus bombings in Belgium, or an Australian scout team that wasn’t even supposed to be in Yemen at all.
But these guys aren’t in Yemen, they’re in the States, where there’s a lot of Americans running around, who have the right to do pretty much whatever they want with a reasonable expectation that some trigger-happy cop isn’t going to turn their head into a canoe from a distance of several football fields off. People tend to get shirty about that.
So the Rules of Engagement are different. These guys need permission to take a shot. And how does the guy on the radio know whether that permission should be given? He has no more information than the dude looking through the scope. All he can do is shuffle through different agencies radio frequencies trying to find out if anyone sent a dude up on that roof.
From a hundred and fifty yards away, looking through a scope, you can’t speak to your target. You ask him who he is and what he’s doing there. You can’t tell him to get the fuck off the roof.
All you can do is shoot, not shoot, and ask some guy on the radio who knows less than you for permission to shoot.
Clusterfuck.
Sure, you have some of the same problem if he’s 600 yards out, but 600 yards buys you time to deal with those problems, or at least get your precious cargo moving towards that armored limo.
And that’s why we don’t cover huge nearby areas with long range sharpshooter teams.
Which is what they did. Which was stupid. And anyone who is tempted to answer “that’s all they had” is invited to read the top of this post again.
So you have to cover the roof some other way.
And sure, you could put a ring of officers around it, but why would you? It just uses more officers to create a fallible cordon around on area those officers could just as easily stand in… the roof.
Which brings us to the real solution. If you’re an assassin, and you climb up on that roof, and there’s several rookie police officers up there with M4’s and hard-ons, what are going to do? Win a gunfight with all of them? Not likely. Because you’re outnumbered and standing on stepladder with your dick swinging in the breeze. And even if you do, now everyone just heard gunshots and Donald Trump is on the freeway by now, surrounded by several inches of armor.
No.
Again, we have slowly and painfully worked out the surprisingly obvious: a rookie cop in the right place is better than a SWAT marksman in the wrong one. An officer on the scene can maybe even take your would-be assassin alive and you can find out all sorts of pertinent stuff like where he got the explosives and who his special friend at the CIA is.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
We’ve established that the USSS was incompetent, and now we know how. Next time, we’ll look at why, and why that, and why again, until we get back to the year 1909.
Then we should have a few clues about how to fix this shit.
Grey’s Law, the Republic, and You (Part 1)
Grey’s Law, the Republic, and You (Part 3)
Devon Eriksen is author of the novel Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1. Learn more, read sample chapters, and find retailers on his website DevonEriksen.com, or get it on Amazon today.