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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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