With my music turned up and the open road in front of me, I was lost in blissful reverie. Then I felt the vibrations. I glanced down at my buzzing cellphone and immediately sensed trouble. Three missed calls from producers at CNN. This only happens when trouble is afoot and I’m needed to provide analysis as a law enforcement contributor.
It was Thursday afternoon. What possibly could have happened?
The first producer I spoke to shared the grim update: News of an active shooter within the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Md. There were early reports of casualties. The final death toll soon reached five. The shooter, yet another troubled young man, made his way into the local newspaper’s open office area using a shotgun. And then like the coward so many of these mass murderers are, he hid under a desk until police officers who were part of a lightning-quick law enforcement response took him into custody.
The tragic shooting, as usual, created more questions than answers. No, we can’t blame a semi-automatic weapon or high-capacity magazines for this one. And there have yet to be revealed any actionable leads that law enforcement missed, or glitches that failed to update a system.
[Also read: Trump after newsroom shooting: Journalists ‘should be free from the fear’ of violence]
We cherish our freedoms in America. But an open society comes with a price. This is one.
It’s probably too early to draw any firm conclusions about the stalker who appears to have had grievances and a years-long vendetta against the newspaper for a column that highlighted his cyber-stalking.
Responding law enforcement have drawn deserved praise for their immediate commitment to “going to the sounds of the guns” in this one. They got it right. They clearly saved lives. And somewhere, a former deputy sheriff and school resource officer in southeast Florida thinks to himself, “So THAT’s what we’re supposed to do?”
Look, while military generals are often faulted for spending peacetime studying how to “fight the last war,” there are always lessons to be learned from prior engagements. Making certain that successes are repeatable and mistakes don’t get repeated is part of what is referred to as a debrief, or an after action review in military circles.
And there is a modern warfare aphorism that every young Army infantry lieutenant has drilled into their psyche during the earliest stages of their training. It’s commonly known as the “3:1 rule of combat” or the “attacker/defender ratio.”
So the humorless sergeant serving as an instructor in the Fort Benning phase of U.S. Army Ranger School in the winter of 1988 let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I was a “no go” on my first graded patrol leader assignment because I hadn’t properly calculated the necessary troops to assault a dug-in opposing force defensive position.
“Come here, Ranger,” he growled. “I absolutely hate to repeat myself. Were you not paying any attention to the force allocation briefing I gave you prior to your platoon planning?”
I gulped hard and looked down. I needed to pass this patrol. Ranger School is the Army’s tough, no-nonsense leadership crucible that tests maneuver commanders in the fine arts of leadership while hungry, tired, and physically spent.
The Ranger School lesson stuck with me. It made me recall tactile military history lessons learned as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. Defenders usually had an advantage. Just hearken back to Thermopylae, the Alamo, or the Battle of Fredericksburg during the Civil War.
Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz urged that “defense is the stronger form of combat.” And the 3:1 ratio essentially maintains that an attacking force should contain at least three times the numbers of defenders to be assaulted.
As with many military strategies, this rule of thumb applies to tactical resolution operations in the law enforcement realm as well. As a former FBI SWAT team leader and member of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, I applied similar ratio considerations when planning to assault a barricaded subject or when in pursuit of a violent felon.
But the AAR process, learning from previous incidents and past operations, is paramount to improving efficiency — namely, saving more lives during a crisis event.
It’s why a SWAT team always brings superior numbers to a takedown. The “fight” can be removed from the barricaded subject by arriving in overwhelming numbers, removing the fight-or-flight psychological response. SWAT employs the principles of speed, surprise, violence of action, and a fail-safe breach to gain an edge on the “defender.” This is a tried and true stratagem and the result of the continual review of “best practices” gleaned in the ever-evolving interdiction business.
Lessons learned after Charles Whitman, the infamous “Texas Tower Sniper,” who murdered 13 and wounded another 30 at the University of Texas in August of 1966 — considered to be the perpetrator of the first mass casualty school shooting — led to the creation of SWAT teams around the nation.
And when two disaffected students at Columbine High School in April of 1999 slaughtered 13 of their classmates, while wounding some 24 others, the incident was a seminal moment for the tactical resolution business. When disparate law enforcement personnel arrived on scene, they conferred outside the school for a staggering 47 minutes prior to making entry.
This was consistent with the then-strategy made famous in the 1975 crime drama “Dog Day Afternoon,” which is known as “contain and negotiate.” But that strategy is predicated on the notion that criminals are looking to cut a deal. What we’ve learned, however, from the rise of Islamist terrorism (inspired by a desire for martyrdom) and young, disenfranchised (typically Caucasian male) mass casualty perpetrators is that negotiation as a practice has almost become obsolete, an anachronism.
We in law enforcement must immediately “go to the sound of the guns” and bring as many of us who are available in the moment to overwhelm and interdict the typical lone gunman.
Yes, this practice means more cops will potentially be slain in the process. Hasty assaults are never as clinical, surgical, and as successful as a deliberate, well-planned assault on a position. But law enforcement officers, by nature of the profession, are signatories to the prospect of assuming a higher level of risk. It always reverts back to saving lives — others’ lives.
But a better job must be done of applying those critical “lessons learned” that this young lieutenant was scolded for ignoring at Ranger School on a frigid January morning in 1988.
The Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting two summers ago was an incident where users of outdated “contain and negotiate” tactics stubbornly resisted the obvious sea change in tactical response X’s and O’s. Lawsuits filed by survivors and victims’ families, well-versed in the change in tactics, are now aimed at the responding police.
And lest we forget the aforementioned cowardly Broward County school resource officer, and a select few other responding units, who “bravely” held down the perimeter while kids were being massacred in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last February. Seconds are minutes in the business of saving lives. To err is human. To err is to wait.
Go to the sound of the guns. Apply lessons learned and adapt to an obviously evolving threat.
Anything less for modern law enforcement is a dereliction of duty and in defiance of your oath: Protect and serve.
As Clausewitz once gamely warned us, the defender has the advantage. But you are better trained, more skilled, and even more committed. Recall the lessons of history and do what the brave officers in Annapolis did just last week — go get the damn bad guys.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University.
