What saved the entire hearing from becoming a complete debacle was an interesting interjection by freshman Congressman Maxwell Frost of Florida. He asked if Secret Service advance planning for the Trump campaign event had verified whether the agency had established interoperable communications between its agents and the local police forces charged with larger site security. That answer is important because much of the controversy centers on what did the Secret Service knew and when. Was it a "suspicious person" perched on an adjacent roof or an actual "threat", i.e., a potential shooter armed with range finder, rifle or both? Most essentially: who communicated with whom, about what and when?

 

Until Congressman Frost raised that issue, no one had examined whether the Secret Service and the local police were communicating over compatible radio links. Until those questions are answered, you can only wonder if the Secret Service and their police allies were sharing information about the onset of a deadly threat. One thing is clear: None of those vital issues interfered with the timing of the President Trump's speech or his close brush with sudden death. But even if she knew the answer, Director Kimberly remained mute.

 

 Because she seems curiously ill-informed about many things, it is possible the Director was unaware that interoperability is the classic American problem. To cite the most notorious example: On 911, the NYPD foresaw the imminent collapse of Tower 2 and ordered their crews to evacuate immediately. Sadly, over 300 NYFD firefighters on their way to the higher floors never received that vital message and perished when Tower II collapsed. Although each service provided vital services to New York City, leaders of the NYFD and NYPD had never made it a priority to ensure their respective formations could communicate with each other over a common network. Tax dollars are always scarce and fancy, interoperable radios always seemed to finish beneath the cut-line.

By sheer coincidence, when the Army sent me to Harvard en route to the West Point faculty, they casually mentioned that finishing my doctorate might be a good idea. I had long been aware of the Army's historic difficulties in providing their diverse combat formations with interoperable communications. During our 1985 invasion of Grenada, for example, there were widespread complaints about the lack of connectivity between the Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force contingents, allegedly joint participants under unified command. In one apocryphal story, an Army soldier allegedly used the island's commercial phone system (and his AT&T credit calling card) to call Fort Bragg to request naval gunfire and close air support. 

Like many other war stories, this lurid tale underlined the existence of a long-ignored historical problem: Despite fighting on the same side, US armed forces often couldn't talk to one another! I examined that problem for what became my Harvard dissertation and in, 1991, my first book, Command, Control and the Common Defense. Many of its insights were addressed during and after the landmark reforms of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Even greater progress came under General Norman Schwarzkopf’s leadership during the First Gulf War; in that conflict, he became the first combat commander in American military history to plan and execute a fully integrated air campaign organized as he saw fit. Even more recently, after 911, Special Forces "A " teams in Afghanistan were able to speak directly with USAF bomber pilots 30,00 feet above them, calling in 2,000-pound JDAMS on Taliban strongholds. 

If they actually are shown to exist, can't we solve Secret Service interoperability problems with some similar stroking of the legislative pen? Actually no, because interoperability is a lot like Original Sin: You seldom "solve " it in a single day or by addressing a single issue, no matter how urgent. Instead, you have to be committed for the long -term, celebrating small wins the same way a missionary does: One soul at a time!