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The discourse around conspiracy seems like a gift from the heavens for any 'pro-institution' person. What an embarrassing gaff for the Secret Service.
Seeing a bunch of old men and fat assed women who look like school teachers running around the stage was embarrassing enough. But as the details emerge, it seems like it would have been hard to do their jobs worse. I was under the impression that a rooftop was a complete no-go zone when a VIP like this is around. Let alone that a guy with a range finder is allowed to prance around without anyone asking him what he's doing.
If there is no conspiracy I would like the discourse to move away from that and towards a recognition of how bad the Secret Service has to be to let this sort of thing happen.
More damningly, he was allowed to draw a bead on president trump. Like the secret service saw him point an AR-15 at Trump and let him shoot before they opened fire.
We don't actually know (as of right now) based on what I've read if the Secret Service actually saw him point a gun and yet did not shoot. It's certainly possible of course. But the language I've seen does not currently imply that (not that we have very precise language in the first place, I'm sure we will in the coming weeks)
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I'm surprised there aren't 24/7 surveillance drones hovering-around a presidential security detail. It seems a lot cheaper and more effective than SS operatives manually scouting out these locations.
The USSS does currently have anti-drone tech in its protection detail, I think they have some sort of roughly man-portable radio jammer/wave disrupter kind of deal IIRC, but yeah, using drones for law enforcement could very well be a thing. However, privacy concerns means that local PDs don't usually (and IMO probably shouldn't). It does seem like pretty low-hanging fruit, though. When in doubt, budget might be the issue.
I think part of why is that they already use extensive general-level jamming/GPS stuff at events, and that might mess with their own drones? Plus it's easier to do IFF if literally every drone is a "bad" drone, you can shoot down/react with complete confidence. If you have your own special drones, it makes IFF hard for regular dudes on the ground.
Edit: Reddit turned up this so they at least had one program in progress. They don't use the high-altitude spy drones like we use in Afghanistan over US soil usually at all, partly for privacy and legal reasons.
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Give it a few years. In the short term, they're probably focused more on anti-drone countermeasures, and adding IFF to that raises the complexity beyond "shoot down all drones."
On the other hand, I think laser-based anti-drone systems are probably going to start appearing in all sorts of places like this within a couple years.
Lasers can be countered with foil on the drone. Mark Rober has a good video on the state of drone warfare.
Which video?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU?si=knTFfAMySNZ2Jxlw
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More than that, any laser powerful enough to knock out a drone at a reasonable distance is going to be too dangerous to use in some sort of automated system in a civilian area.
A laser powerful enough to knock out anything at all is too dangerous to use in an automated fashion in a civilian area unless it has hard stop that prevents aiming the laser at low enough targets to do anything useful against similar snipers.
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It’s because the service became looked at the same way special forces is: it’s a trophy that can be used to open doors to other jobs, or bragging rights.
So it becomes something that needs to be equally distributed. That’s why you have a woman running it talking about increasing the number of women she hires, and then the embarrass videos from last Saturday.
USSS members should be 6’5” terrifying meat shields with guns. Yes Brienne of Tarth, no to Caroline Ellison.
Nah, you want someone calm under pressure first, relatively innocuous, so around 6 feet or so. Good with guns and probably combat experience. That will make most of your good candidates men, but you don't want 10 Jack Reacher's. For a start they need to be able to fit inside vehicles with the principal and some to be able to blend into your crowds if needed. 25-35 and if you have a female principal you will also want some female officers, as your principal is likely to try and keep men out of the bathroom with her at least in a lot of cases. The Secret Service is going to have to guard women at some point, so at least a few of them should be women as well. The female close protective officers I met were certainly...butcher than average, but they could still put on a dress for a garden party or ambassadorial function. Not all of your security should stand out.
Okay fair point that there should probably be some people that can blend into the crowd.
But the people literally walking around the President as actual literal meat shields should actually be the hulking beasts I'm talking about.
If 'meat shield' is high on the list of qualifications, hasn't the protection meaningfully failed at that point anyways? Analytically, the ability to 15% more effectively take a literal bullet with your body is less valuable than for example a 10% faster reaction time, so selecting for criteria like that makes more sense. Plus, the amount of people who want to join the USSS... there's a lot of prestige, but I'm pretty sure the job itself sucks ass. Super boring, super stressful, so-so pay, and you can't even party when you go to a foreign country anymore after that last scandal
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Do you have any particular evidence that the SS is too…effeminate? It sounds like you’re reasoning backwards from the conclusion, here.
Well, the story their leader is going with for now is that they couldn't put agents on the roof because it was sloped. That's pretty effeminate.
This story is an obvious lie because they put agents on a different sloped roof. Who knows the real reason(although I'd go with laziness).
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Do you consider the presence of a Melissa McCarthy lookalike in Trump's personal detail to be evidence? I can't imagine an institution with healthy masculinity allowing this slob to occupy any highly visible position.
I've seen her, and I've seen her failing to get her pistol back in her holster, apparently because of her muffin top. I've seen it in slo-mo while people mocked her.
I'm not confident she actually did a bad job, or that any of the criticism of her is deserved. I think the reports of a quota for female agents are extremely worrying, but I've seen no evidence, other than her shortness, that she's actually bad at her job. I don't see why her less than perfect beauty is relevant; either she can do the job or she can't, and most of the things I'm seeing her criticized for don't appear to be actual failures at doing the job.
What did she actually do wrong? She's pretty clearly not the one making the call on the snipers, nor is she the one making the call on getting Trump off the stage. Near as I can tell, she fucked up her holstering during an insane adrenaline dump, exacerbated by what is either some pudge or her concealed vest, or both. What's the actual complaint?
Isn't this the same broad who was literally cowering behind Trump and the other agents piled onto him instead of forming part of the scrum?
I honestly hadn't noticed that, and it's damning as hell.
Even then, it depends on whether she was even supposed to be jumping in. Close protection officers will have designated roles in the event of an attack. Some will be tasked with covering/moving the principal. Others will be tasked with looking for exits/shooters. It's hard to tell from that angle but she may be looking past the scrum, and be in charge of telling them which way to move. It's hard to do that from inside the scrum itself. And your sniper teams are probably going to be occupied with putting down the target.
Source: I've never been important enough to warrant close protection, but I have travelled extensively with people who have, so I have talked to them a fair bit. Not the Secret Service, but the idea remains similar. Not everyone is supposed to dive on the principal.
Without knowing what her specific task was, we have no way of judging if she was doing it well or not.
She appears to be in a defensive crouch, away from her VIP, with no weapon presented. She appears to be in the exact opposite of an aggressive posture. And again, I'm open to further evidence, but that picture looks real, real bad.
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Obesity isn't just "less than perfect beauty", it's a reflection of actual physical vitality and fitness. Having fat women do this job is just an obviously stupid idea whether she personally screwed anything up this time or not. That we're at the point where people justify enlisting fat women in roles that should be done by fit men is an incredible indictment of the discourse. Even if the complaint was strictly aesthetic and somehow her appearance wasn't reflected in physical performance, I would still object to an elite security force being staffed by people that can't be bothered to look the part. This sort of degradation reflects a culture of tolerating sloppiness and not demanding high levels of performance.
Given the "meatshield" aspect of the job, I suppose a case could be made that this lady is not fat enough...
(j/k, i think)
I dunno, it doesn't take much flesh to start a rifle bullet tumbling or fragmenting. Don't they try to dump most of their kinetic energy in the first 12-18" these days?
I actually wonder how much spaced protection you'd need before the exiting fragments would be stopped by whatever lv2 jacket they surely have politicians wearing. Maybe the "box of truth" guys have already tested that
Not applicable if they get hit by a bullet designed to go straight through an elk's shoulder, obviously, but even the world's fattest person wouldn't stop that.
She's not nearly fat enough to shield the President other than from a narrow attack vector though -- I'm thinking a crew of 4-5 Lizzo lookalikes surrounding him as he speaks would make it very hard to snipe from any angle. (especially if twerking)
The headshot is still open, but as we see this is harder than it looks.
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Show me evidence that the fitness standards have been lowered. Show me evidence that she would have failed the old standards. I'm ready to believe it, and condemn it, but I'm not going to presume it. And to be clear, I think it's entirely possible that they have been. It's just not obvious to me based on the video. Maybe that means I'm bad at estimating bodyguard performance, but in my defense, any lack of capability on the part of the bulletcatchers is completely overwhelmed by the part where a sniper was allowed to get seven shots off at the principle.
All US military, police, and firefighter physical fitness standards are lower for women than for men. That, if nothing else, is the lowering of the standards. They're supposed to be doing the same job so the standards should be the same, but women can't do the physical parts of the job as well because of biology. So, like so many other things in our society, the standards are lowered for women so that the outcomes are "equitable".
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You can see the standards here and they are a joke.
If you don't think her physical appearance demonstrates a lack of serious physical standards, I really don't think I can convince you of this though. Contra the saying, you can pretty well judge a book by its cover when it comes to fitness.
Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that that agent can't do 26 situps in a minute or 1.5 miles in 16:34
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False.
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Brienne of Tarth is like 99.995th percentile in size when it comes to women. Absolutely not a demographic you can rely on for security agents unless you start cloning them or shoot up preteen girls with hormones so they grow up taller.
Sounds like there won’t be very many female USSS agents.
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I mean, Muammar Al-Gaddafi’s Amazon guards worked pretty well until he lost the war, and it seems like ‘Arab dictator’ is a job that probably runs into more assassination attempts than presidents of the USA.
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