11 ms·

I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on Septemb

by pivo 4y ago

I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on September 12, 1994 [1] in which a pilot landed a small plane in front of the white house. Secret Service members she interviewed were dumfounded that they were asked there to run to the white house roof with rifles to protect the building, and that there were no such thing as anti-aircraft missiles available at the time. More recently, another person landed a small aircraft on the Whitehouse grounds [2] with (apparently) no missiles involved. Maybe the missiles are elsewhere, or maybe they're just a cost-effective rumor. The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Fail-Rise-Secret-Service/dp/0399589015 https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Fail-Rise-Secret-Service/dp/0399... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Eugene_Corder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Eugene_Corder [2] https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/15/politics/aircraft-lands-on-capitol-grounds/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/15/politics/aircraft-lands-on-ca...

thepasswordis 4y ago
>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And aren't they all just citizens of this country? If it's not safe for various politicians to walk around in the streets, then maybe they should do something about that because it means that it is unsafe for everybody.
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  I like your take but politicians do have a target on their back that the average citizen doesn’t.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    But not one so big that every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting. A handful absolutely do, the vast majority don't. They will be perfectly fine. They might catch an egg or cake, or in the rare instance a fist: they'll still be fine.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
      As far as I am aware, the vast majority of politicians in the US do not receive Secret Service protection. "every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting" is a straw man. Of course the vast majority of politicians, which includes a lot of city council members of tiny towns and so forth, do not need a 24hr security detail. And they don't have them either. It happens for the handful, not the majority. Which seems to be what you want, but your tone is frustrated or angry.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration). Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a political commentator/activist here in Germany, I can tell you the political climate drastically devolved over the last seven years, and police is nowhere near the security system it should be. In my case it took over four years until the main perpetrator was identified, arrested and subsequently sentenced to almost six years in prison[1]. And for what it's worth, it's not limited to politicians, journalists and activists - even ordinary doctors can be driven to suicide [2], or YouTube streamers such as the infamous Drachenlord [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr [3] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-drachenlord-die-schuld-gibt-hat-nichts-verstanden_id_182210847.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-d...
      - 4y ago
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I wonder how big Musk or Bezos's security teams are?
    - safety1st 4y ago
      Who cares? The perennial mistake is believing that if any of these guys get capped, it's some irreparable loss to society. It's not. Let them play the odds of life like the rest of us do. A society that depends on strongmen isn't a free society.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        Oh you're singing to the choir on that stuff. Don't get me started on who we can and can't feed into the woodchipper because I'm already rate-limited. I'm just always surprised when people limit their thinking (and I'm not saying the post that spawned my response was guilty of that, though it's possible) of the powerful in society to government officials.
      - petsfed 4y ago
        I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination. Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jodi Foster. A nobody's obsession with an actress is really, REALLY not the thing we should allow to materially affect our civilization. I think there's a good argument to be made that the WWII-era Japanese government became the one capable of its atrocities in China specifically because assassination was so frequently employed to check to its power.
- chucksmash 4y ago
  > Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? So like Shinzo Abe? Edit: I picked Shinzo Abe because it was a recent example I felt people would be familiar with, but honestly it seems like any notoriety at all is dangerous. Someone assassinated MLK Jr's mother[1] while she played a church organ. Relying on the general reasonableness of other people doesn't seem to scale at all. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-44-gunman-who-killed-mother-of-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-4...
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Or Olof Palme.
    - mc32 4y ago
      On the other hand... Indira Gandhi.
      - bakul 4y ago
        She might have escaped her fate if she had replaced her Sikh bodyguards with non Sikhs after Operation Blue Star that removed a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
    - seunosewa 4y ago
      J F Kennedy
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    Shinzo Abe is actually a very good example, because his tragic death occured in a country where violent crime basically doesn’t exist and where it’s virtually impossible to acquire any kind of a firearm (I am aware how far 3D printing has come) This would of course be far worse in a country that’s very familiar with violent crime and where everyone and their dog has at least 1.2 firearms, like the United States.
- vt85 4y ago
  [dead]
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Bruce Schneier once said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the culture of the DHS I believe and how their mission was "Never Again" in the wake of 9/11. But never is basically an impossible standard to meet, and the result was that we get security theater instead. I would imagine you can also soak up a near infinite amount of money and effort trying to achieve never again. Zero Fail sounds like the same thing.
  - mc32 4y ago
    'Never' and 'Zero' programs are all aspirational. We want Zero pedestrian deaths, but we know it's not possible (even in back in the age of horses), but still something we should aim for within reason.
    - mwint 4y ago
      It's that "within reason" that people get hung up on.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- macinjosh 4y ago
  Indeed, these very same people who demand a well-armed and trained _personal_ security detail are the very same people who enact laws to deprive the convenience store worker from having a firearm to defend themselves with while working in the middle of the night.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  "Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details." I lived in the DC area on and after 9/11. There was a huge increase of governmnent officials having drivers and flying private jet "for security reasons"
- munificent 4y ago
  > Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you. You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.
- DerekL 4y ago
  > Isn't that the job of the police? The Secret Service are police (that is, they're a law enforcement agency).
colonwqbang 4y ago
Yes, it seems unlikely. How many civilians would be in danger by the debris raining down on central DC (or the white house itself, if he really was right over it). Not to mention the risk of a missile missing the target and instead exploding somewhere down on the street.
- therealcamino 4y ago
  There's a missile launcher across the street from the White House -- see the Popular Mechanics link in a sibling comment.
phpisthebest 4y ago
>> book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded it is critical that we recognize a few truths before we declare something "underfunded" 1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money" 2. Where is the money going.... Often in government budgets essentials (like fleet repair) are cut in favor of non-essentials in order to make the budget issue into a "crisis". It is much easier to blackmail the public /congress/ who ever that is controlling the budget with "We have to use our personal cars" instead of "We had to give up our Cappuccino's" . Just because essential services are being cut does not mean nonessential services have. This is seen in local government often when they cut the big 4 (schools, fire, police, roads) first because it is easy to pass a tax increase for those 4 items than any other local service / program.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > 1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money" Well, the scope that the general public (or the impact of freshly passed laws) also continuously expands, and payment/contractor/vendor costs rise as well, which explains some of the demand for more funding. A part of the blame also lies in parliament groups not doing effective auditing and oversight on government agencies, which can differentiate between legitimate growth (for reasons outlined above) and cancerous growth (as described by you).
- foota 4y ago
  Looks like they get ~3 billion a year and employ 8000 people. Seems like chump change. They have responsibilities beyond just protecting the president.
- Retric 4y ago
  The less politically interesting government agencies tend to work surprisingly well with minimal budget and no need for games. The National Transportation Safety Board for example has a 2023 budget request of 129 million. They are simply for too tiny and useful for anyone to really mess with. The National Weather Service might have 10x the budget still generally gets ignored by politicians as so many companies, people, and government agencies depend on what they provide.
euler_angles 4y ago
In the present time, there is an air defense network around Washington DC. It uses the NASAMs system. Anything that is determined to be a threat can be engaged with surface launched AIM-120C missiles. https://www.kongsberg.com/kda/what-we-do/defence-and-security/integrated-air-and-missile-defence/nasams-air-defence-system/ https://www.kongsberg.com/kda/what-we-do/defence-and-securit...
- neutered_knot 4y ago
  A launcher is visible on Google Maps, and is still there. I drove by it today. https://goo.gl/maps/LByxzGzqQ28ETtJb9 https://goo.gl/maps/LByxzGzqQ28ETtJb9
  - aimor 4y ago
    That Pentagon shaped pool really caught my eye, then the long covered building, had to look it up. Now I know all about the David Taylor Model Basin and the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Explosive Test Pond. https://www.navalgazing.net/David-Taylor-Model-Basin https://www.navalgazing.net/David-Taylor-Model-Basin https://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/bblp/mine/carderock01.htm https://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/bblp/mine/carderock01.htm
cafard 4y ago
"Landed" is not quite correct for 1994: the guy crashed it. (He had been smoking crack beforehand, as I recall.) This led the government to close Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 15th and 17th Streets. The reasoning was not apparent, for the pilot had certainly not taken off there--he flew from a field in Maryland.
- therealcamino 4y ago
  Pennsylvania Ave was closed to vehicle traffic on May 20, 1995, following the April 19 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died.
ok_dad 4y ago
The answer is that the people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile into the middle of a huge city full of important officials since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna. Instead, they waited for the plane to come down somewhere (on the lawn, it seems) and arrested the person inside.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > knew the aircraft was no threat A Cessna intentionally crashing into the White House is no threat? Especially if packed with explosives?
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    > since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna. I think it's safe to assume that the bunkers under the White House are sufficient protection against as much explosives as a Cessna could possibly carry. The plane itself will do almost no damage, it's a flimsy thing built light out of aluminum and it's not even fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash#/media/File:Tampa_plane_crash.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash#/m...
  - ihattendorf 4y ago
    Not if you have ample time to move everyone to safety before it arrives. Seems a good trade off to make if you aren't confident what the pilot's intentions are instead of just blowing them out of the sky.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile I don't think we have evidence of this. The simple truth is the U.S. government doesn't fortify against domestic enemies in a systematic way.
yencabulator 4y ago
1994 was a long time ago. Here's a picture of one known setup for you: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30027303/washington-dc-air-alert/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30027303/...
ufmace 4y ago
I have no idea how the Secret Service in particular is doing, but I would kind of expect that any actual anti-aircraft missiles would be owned and operated by some unit of the Army or National Guard or something. They own all of the actual missiles, and repair and maintenance people and gear, and probably training for how to operate it and how to try not to fuck up when you have 15 seconds to determine if an incoming aircraft is hostile and needs to have missiles fired at it. Also the way they were caught with their pants down on 9/11 kind of suggests that there was no actual military level ordinance readily available around DC at the time. Maybe there is now, but I heard at the time they scrambled some fighter jets with no weapons because there wasn't time to get the weapons out of wherever they were stored and load them up.
- eftychis 4y ago
  Yeah you either keep some fighters weapon armed or use them for reconessaince style interception. You can't arm a plane in seconds or under 5 minutes. I think the rule of thumb is 5' at most scrambling time if plane is on alert-- fueled, armed, and pilot ready.

by pivo 4y ago

thepasswordis 4y ago

>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And aren't they all just citizens of this country? If it's not safe for various politicians to walk around in the streets, then maybe they should do something about that because it means that it is unsafe for everybody.

throwaway1777 4y ago
I like your take but politicians do have a target on their back that the average citizen doesn’t.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  But not one so big that every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting. A handful absolutely do, the vast majority don't. They will be perfectly fine. They might catch an egg or cake, or in the rare instance a fist: they'll still be fine.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    As far as I am aware, the vast majority of politicians in the US do not receive Secret Service protection. "every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting" is a straw man. Of course the vast majority of politicians, which includes a lot of city council members of tiny towns and so forth, do not need a 24hr security detail. And they don't have them either. It happens for the handful, not the majority. Which seems to be what you want, but your tone is frustrated or angry.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration). Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a political commentator/activist here in Germany, I can tell you the political climate drastically devolved over the last seven years, and police is nowhere near the security system it should be. In my case it took over four years until the main perpetrator was identified, arrested and subsequently sentenced to almost six years in prison[1]. And for what it's worth, it's not limited to politicians, journalists and activists - even ordinary doctors can be driven to suicide [2], or YouTube streamers such as the infamous Drachenlord [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr [3] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-drachenlord-die-schuld-gibt-hat-nichts-verstanden_id_182210847.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-d...
    - 4y ago
phpisthebest 4y ago
General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I wonder how big Musk or Bezos's security teams are?
  - safety1st 4y ago
    Who cares? The perennial mistake is believing that if any of these guys get capped, it's some irreparable loss to society. It's not. Let them play the odds of life like the rest of us do. A society that depends on strongmen isn't a free society.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Oh you're singing to the choir on that stuff. Don't get me started on who we can and can't feed into the woodchipper because I'm already rate-limited. I'm just always surprised when people limit their thinking (and I'm not saying the post that spawned my response was guilty of that, though it's possible) of the powerful in society to government officials.
    - petsfed 4y ago
      I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination. Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jodi Foster. A nobody's obsession with an actress is really, REALLY not the thing we should allow to materially affect our civilization. I think there's a good argument to be made that the WWII-era Japanese government became the one capable of its atrocities in China specifically because assassination was so frequently employed to check to its power.
chucksmash 4y ago
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? So like Shinzo Abe? Edit: I picked Shinzo Abe because it was a recent example I felt people would be familiar with, but honestly it seems like any notoriety at all is dangerous. Someone assassinated MLK Jr's mother[1] while she played a church organ. Relying on the general reasonableness of other people doesn't seem to scale at all. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-44-gunman-who-killed-mother-of-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-4...
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Or Olof Palme.
  - mc32 4y ago
    On the other hand... Indira Gandhi.
    - bakul 4y ago
      She might have escaped her fate if she had replaced her Sikh bodyguards with non Sikhs after Operation Blue Star that removed a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
  - seunosewa 4y ago
    J F Kennedy
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Shinzo Abe is actually a very good example, because his tragic death occured in a country where violent crime basically doesn’t exist and where it’s virtually impossible to acquire any kind of a firearm (I am aware how far 3D printing has come) This would of course be far worse in a country that’s very familiar with violent crime and where everyone and their dog has at least 1.2 firearms, like the United States.
vt85 4y ago
[dead]
hotpotamus 4y ago
Bruce Schneier once said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the culture of the DHS I believe and how their mission was "Never Again" in the wake of 9/11. But never is basically an impossible standard to meet, and the result was that we get security theater instead. I would imagine you can also soak up a near infinite amount of money and effort trying to achieve never again. Zero Fail sounds like the same thing.
- mc32 4y ago
  'Never' and 'Zero' programs are all aspirational. We want Zero pedestrian deaths, but we know it's not possible (even in back in the age of horses), but still something we should aim for within reason.
  - mwint 4y ago
    It's that "within reason" that people get hung up on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 4y ago
Indeed, these very same people who demand a well-armed and trained _personal_ security detail are the very same people who enact laws to deprive the convenience store worker from having a firearm to defend themselves with while working in the middle of the night.
rqtwteye 4y ago
"Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details." I lived in the DC area on and after 9/11. There was a huge increase of governmnent officials having drivers and flying private jet "for security reasons"
munificent 4y ago
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you. You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.
DerekL 4y ago
> Isn't that the job of the police? The Secret Service are police (that is, they're a law enforcement agency).

colonwqbang 4y ago

Yes, it seems unlikely. How many civilians would be in danger by the debris raining down on central DC (or the white house itself, if he really was right over it). Not to mention the risk of a missile missing the target and instead exploding somewhere down on the street.

therealcamino 4y ago
There's a missile launcher across the street from the White House -- see the Popular Mechanics link in a sibling comment.

phpisthebest 4y ago

>> book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded it is critical that we recognize a few truths before we declare something "underfunded" 1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money" 2. Where is the money going.... Often in government budgets essentials (like fleet repair) are cut in favor of non-essentials in order to make the budget issue into a "crisis". It is much easier to blackmail the public /congress/ who ever that is controlling the budget with "We have to use our personal cars" instead of "We had to give up our Cappuccino's" . Just because essential services are being cut does not mean nonessential services have. This is seen in local government often when they cut the big 4 (schools, fire, police, roads) first because it is easy to pass a tax increase for those 4 items than any other local service / program.

mschuster91 4y ago
> 1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money" Well, the scope that the general public (or the impact of freshly passed laws) also continuously expands, and payment/contractor/vendor costs rise as well, which explains some of the demand for more funding. A part of the blame also lies in parliament groups not doing effective auditing and oversight on government agencies, which can differentiate between legitimate growth (for reasons outlined above) and cancerous growth (as described by you).
foota 4y ago
Looks like they get ~3 billion a year and employ 8000 people. Seems like chump change. They have responsibilities beyond just protecting the president.
Retric 4y ago
The less politically interesting government agencies tend to work surprisingly well with minimal budget and no need for games. The National Transportation Safety Board for example has a 2023 budget request of 129 million. They are simply for too tiny and useful for anyone to really mess with. The National Weather Service might have 10x the budget still generally gets ignored by politicians as so many companies, people, and government agencies depend on what they provide.

euler_angles 4y ago

In the present time, there is an air defense network around Washington DC. It uses the NASAMs system. Anything that is determined to be a threat can be engaged with surface launched AIM-120C missiles. https://www.kongsberg.com/kda/what-we-do/defence-and-security/integrated-air-and-missile-defence/nasams-air-defence-system/ https://www.kongsberg.com/kda/what-we-do/defence-and-securit...

neutered_knot 4y ago
A launcher is visible on Google Maps, and is still there. I drove by it today. https://goo.gl/maps/LByxzGzqQ28ETtJb9 https://goo.gl/maps/LByxzGzqQ28ETtJb9
- aimor 4y ago
  That Pentagon shaped pool really caught my eye, then the long covered building, had to look it up. Now I know all about the David Taylor Model Basin and the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Explosive Test Pond. https://www.navalgazing.net/David-Taylor-Model-Basin https://www.navalgazing.net/David-Taylor-Model-Basin https://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/bblp/mine/carderock01.htm https://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/bblp/mine/carderock01.htm

cafard 4y ago

"Landed" is not quite correct for 1994: the guy crashed it. (He had been smoking crack beforehand, as I recall.) This led the government to close Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 15th and 17th Streets. The reasoning was not apparent, for the pilot had certainly not taken off there--he flew from a field in Maryland.

therealcamino 4y ago
Pennsylvania Ave was closed to vehicle traffic on May 20, 1995, following the April 19 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died.

ok_dad 4y ago

The answer is that the people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile into the middle of a huge city full of important officials since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna. Instead, they waited for the plane to come down somewhere (on the lawn, it seems) and arrested the person inside.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> knew the aircraft was no threat A Cessna intentionally crashing into the White House is no threat? Especially if packed with explosives?
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna. I think it's safe to assume that the bunkers under the White House are sufficient protection against as much explosives as a Cessna could possibly carry. The plane itself will do almost no damage, it's a flimsy thing built light out of aluminum and it's not even fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash#/media/File:Tampa_plane_crash.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Tampa_Cessna_172_crash#/m...
- ihattendorf 4y ago
  Not if you have ample time to move everyone to safety before it arrives. Seems a good trade off to make if you aren't confident what the pilot's intentions are instead of just blowing them out of the sky.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile I don't think we have evidence of this. The simple truth is the U.S. government doesn't fortify against domestic enemies in a systematic way.

yencabulator 4y ago

1994 was a long time ago. Here's a picture of one known setup for you: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30027303/washington-dc-air-alert/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a30027303/...

ufmace 4y ago

I have no idea how the Secret Service in particular is doing, but I would kind of expect that any actual anti-aircraft missiles would be owned and operated by some unit of the Army or National Guard or something. They own all of the actual missiles, and repair and maintenance people and gear, and probably training for how to operate it and how to try not to fuck up when you have 15 seconds to determine if an incoming aircraft is hostile and needs to have missiles fired at it. Also the way they were caught with their pants down on 9/11 kind of suggests that there was no actual military level ordinance readily available around DC at the time. Maybe there is now, but I heard at the time they scrambled some fighter jets with no weapons because there wasn't time to get the weapons out of wherever they were stored and load them up.

eftychis 4y ago
Yeah you either keep some fighters weapon armed or use them for reconessaince style interception. You can't arm a plane in seconds or under 5 minutes. I think the rule of thumb is 5' at most scrambling time if plane is on alert-- fueled, armed, and pilot ready.