Grey's Law, The Republic, and You (Part 3)

We have gone over, in specific detail (Part 1) (Part 2), one instance of how the US Secret Service failed egregiously on July 13th, 2024.

There are other failures as well, and we could dig down that rabbit hole for many days, discussing how initial reports of a suspicious person were ignored, how Trump was not removed from the stage when there were indications of a threat, how the security perimeter was not large enough.

But one example is sufficient to prove the point… the USSS failed, through gross incompetence. It does not matter if the point of failure was the local police, the loaner agents from DHS, or the USSS itself. Remember, a security team succeeds or fails as a team, and that success or failure belongs the agency in charge.

The buck stops here.

The important question is not how the USSS failed, but why.

It has now been thoroughly established that Trump’s security team on 7/13 was not a well-oiled unit of high-speed operators who were accustomed to working with each other and providing security for Trump.

Quite the opposite. We now know that the personnel present were thrown together from the scrapings of whoever could be found from the local field office, rounded out with DHS agents. The presence of local police was normal… coordinating with and directing local law enforcement agencies for crowd duty is a standard USSS practice.

In any sort of military, security, or paramilitary work, this is a big deal. Operators are not fungible units, and a team is not simply a certain number of fungible units. They are a team, and they function as a whole or not at all. They train together, work together, develop their own methods of coordination and communication, and know each other’s roles and responsibilities.

A unit thrown together from operators who do not know each other is little better than a unit of conscripts until they’ve had a chance to practice together, even if they are individually high-speed tier one types. And if they’re not, well…

You get this: