Security Breach From Pearl Harbor to Butler PA

AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR, ‘THIS IS NO DRILL’

Perhaps no single words in American history capture the horrific transition, in a single moment, from “just another day” to “our world just fell apart.” The naval officer who ordered this famous message had only just complained of the numerous security and safety violations committed by the aircraft screaming overhead. He only recognized the planes as Japanese after he saw a bomb drop and felt the resulting explosion.

Similar phrases abounded as sailors, marines, soldiers, and airmen tried to comprehend the incomprehensible. A shipboard PA announcement to “Man your battle stations” was necessarily accompanied with “This is no shit!” An officer witnessed a bomb explode but thought it an accidental explosion. Standing at the rail of the Arizona and watching the action, one sailor remarked to several others: “This is the best g–damn drill the Army Air Force has ever put on!” Only moments later 1,177 sailors and marines would perish on board Arizona as a result of this “drill.”

Like the vast majority of Americans, my wife and I have wondered at the utter and complete failure of the Secret Service to protect Donald Trump. There is no way to minimize this failure — only luck or the hand of God prevented the former — and likely future president — from being murdered, not by a highly-skilled professional assassin, but by a 20 year-old with no obvious tactical background. Along with the rest of the nation, our minds boggled at the evident incompetence and the lame excuses. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: On America, Hochman Strikes the Nail on the Head)

But unlike most of the nation we once served as protective services professionals, my wife as an Army CID Special Agent, me working in the private sector. We both were extensively trained, and we both once performed protection duties serving high level dignitaries in high hazard environments. It’s been a long time ago for both of us, but the principles are unchanging. And the security provided by the Secret Service to Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania quite literally violated every fundamental principle taught in “Protective Services 101.”

I don’t mean to pick on some of the things highlighted by other commentators. That local law enforcement had been entrusted with outer perimeter security is unsurprising. This is routine, and done properly, entirely appropriate. Well-trained and thoroughly briefed local officers, properly integrated into the Secret Service’s on-scene communications network, usually perform well the tasks associated with outer perimeter security. They know their communities well, and can zero in on unusual behavior, things not obvious to the agents who’ve just blown into town with the protectee. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: On America, Hochman Strikes the Nail on the Head)

Nor is it at all unusual that the Secret Service relies on law enforcement personnel from other federal agencies to round out their operations during times of peak demand, as apparently was the case with the employment of Homeland Security Investigators as part of the Butler team. The first person I worked for in protective services had received the full Secret Service dignitary protection training and had worked numerous presidential campaigns, but he drew his paychecks — and did most of his everyday work — as an ATF agent.

Finally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with employing qualified female officers in protective services work, a practice that goes back decades. A colleague of mine back in the 1980s found himself leading a protection detail for a famous supermodel, and almost immediately recognized the need for at least one qualified woman who could work closely within this celebrity’s comfort zone. In protective services, there’s nothing that a qualified female agent cannot perform successfully. Again, it comes back to native ability sharpened by rigorous training.

Who, then, deserves the blame, since there’s obviously plenty of blame to go around. Start with the Pearl Harbor example, and apply it to protective services. The keys to understanding are cognitive dissonance , confirmation bias, and normalcy bias. “Cognitive dissonance” simply means “the sudden confrontation with the unbelievable,” a conflict between new information and established expectations.

With “confirmation bias,” an individual tries to come to terms with cognitive dissonance by defaulting to the most comfortable interpretation of what he is seeing. At Pearl Harbor this meant assuming that the low flying planes were part of a drill, at Butler it likely meant initially disbelieving the evidence of one’s own eyes.

‘Normalcy Bias’ Threatens Our Security

“Normalcy bias” represents a special case of “confirmation bias.” This refers to a latency period, the period of incomprehension and inaction following the recognition of acute danger, the moment when someone “freezes.” At best, this involves delayed reaction, at worst it represents a virtually paralytic refusal to believe “this” is happening, whatever the awful “this” might be.

Again, Pearl Harbor provides numerous examples. Some people unfreeze more quickly than others, but when bombs are dropping or an assassin reveals himself, every second counts.

We know that the shooter had been observed by various officers, but observation and comprehension are two different things. But refusal to believe what one is seeing is baked into such situations. It took a disturbingly lengthy period to act it appears, or even to request guidance from the Secret Service agent-in-charge. Similarly, the Secret Service team apparently approached the entire event in a lackadaisical manner.

I don’t mean to pick on the Secret Service sniper, who, after all, neutralized the threat relatively quickly once shots were fired. But one sees in the video that the sniper seems to have already locked onto Crooks. Why didn’t he shoot?

Were the rules of engagement such that he had to wait either for a command from the agent-in-charge or for shots to be fired before acting. We’ve learned over and over again that restrictive rules of engagement actually reinforce normalcy bias — was this an example? In recent years reluctance to act, even in deadly force situations, has been pounded into law enforcement everywhere. No one wants to get it wrong, and then face prosecution and prison for killing an innocent man.

It always comes down to having the right kind of people — protective services isn’t for everyone — and making sure that they have both the right kind of initial training and also behavioral reinforcement through rigorous and frequent refresher training.

Were the Homeland Security augmentees properly trained? Simply bearing a federal law enforcement credential isn’t good enough. For that matter, had the Secret Service agents on the Butler team received adequate continuation and refresher training. When the tempo of operations accelerates, as it always does during an election season, training time often is sacrificed. You can’t rotate personnel through training if you don’t have enough bodies to support the workload.

Moreover, did the Secret Service team agents at Butler do an adequate job of integrating the Homeland Security augmentees and the local officers into the operational plan? Did they assure effective communications? Anyone who has worked with the Secret Service knows that, when they take charge of an activity, they insist on unquestioned obedience from everyone involved. This may be understandable, at least in terms of ensuring close coordination, but also stifles initiative. (READ MORE: We Must End the Democrats’ Failed Foreign Policy)

Training, then, should be the focus of any after action review. Proper training helps to make the correct response automatic when there is literally no time for deliberation, and thus is a necessary ingredient in overcoming normalcy bias. Necessary, but not sufficient, because it is also absolutely critical that senior management infuses the right attitude throughout the ranks.

Secret Service Leadership

The Secret Service Director has, absurdly, defended the decision not to post an officer on the roof as a necessary concession to “safety.” This, as anyone could see, was patently ridiculous; this one decision, more than anything else, brought a bullet to within millimeters of President Trump’s brain.

But worse, this kind of thinking, whether by the Secret Service Director or the on scene agent-in-charge, conveyed a message of “business as usual” rather than “prepare for an acute threat.” This was utterly unconscionable given the threat environment, including reports that professional Iranian assassins might be operating inside the U.S.

But this is of a piece with an agency culture that now seems more focused on achieving DEI goals — and wasting precious training time on DEI seminars — than on building a culture of operational excellence. One suspects that the Secret Service’s recruitment and retention crisis reflects a culture that has lost its way, that no longer offers the prospect of becoming part of an elite.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was once, we are told, a good Secret Service agent, which, if true, means that she should understand how lame her excuses for the Butler failure now seem. She’s said that the buck stops with her, but, the patronage of Jill Biden to the contrary notwithstanding, if this means anything at all, it should mean her prompt resignation.

It should also mean the appointment of someone prepared to “kick ass and take names” to insure the right kind of attitude throughout the ranks, and attitude attuned to today’s threat environment. Pearl Harbor meant the end of peacetime “normalcy bias” in the U.S. Navy. Let’s hope that Butler means the same for the Secret Service.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.

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