Every political action has an impact on people and their money, and thus on investments

 

Thanks to Liz Hoffman at Semafor. 

The Ultimate Solution to Candidate Security: Directional Investment Will Come to Force Fields

 

The July 13 shooting that could have killed Donald Trump has engendered considerable technical discussion of security protocols.  One result will be, hopefully, safer candidates.  Another result will be new investment opportunities.  That is, the direction of investment will ultimately push policy toward new technology--and that's exciting for investors, as well as for the safety-conscious. 

One hot topic, all of a sudden, is the policy on counter-snipers.  Specifically, at a political event, what should a counter-sniper do if he sees a shooting threat?  Should he wait till the shooter shoots?  Or shoot first?

The concept of counter-sniping emerged from the military, where the rules of engagement, in wartime, or near wartime, are understandably much different.  For instance, in a section entitled, “Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain,” the U.S Army Field Manual 3-06.11 takes up the issue of when to shoot—or, to use milspeak jargon, “engage”—first.  “He should be given clearance to fire, and then he and his team leader decide when to engage the target.”  The point being that in combat, or what could be combat, it’s often vital to shoot first.

But again, the U.S. homefront isn’t Iraq, or Afghanistan.

Here’s how Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics reported on the counter-sniper rules that were in place in Butler, PA last Saturday:

A source within the Secret Service community tells RealClearPolitics that the agency rules of engagement in this situation are to wait until the president is fired upon to return fire.

“You want to take a shot then find out the guy was holding a telescope?” the source suggested. “The Secret Service is by nature reactive…and you better be right when you do react or you’re f——d.”

The Secret Service protocol requires that a counter sniper aware of a potential shooter to radio directly to intelligence division team to respond and investigate. In this case, the investigation may have been cut short by the shooter firing his weapon, so the counter sniper then fired as quickly as possible in return.  [Emphasis added]

 

It’s a tough issue: Shoot first and you could kill an innocent person.  Shoot second and it could be too late.   It is a conundrum, perhaps akin to the trolley car problem, in which it's imagined that a trolley car could be steered so as to kill one passenger, or many passengers.  Either way, a horrible dilemma. 

Most likely, the reaction of the July 14 incident is going to be an increase in Secret Service and other security personnel and technology at events.  The Biden administration just granted USSS protection to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which is overdue, and it’s fair to foresee there will be a stronger presence everywhere.  That means more surveillance, more fencing, and so on.  And it’s even possible that the rules of engagement for counter-snipers will be adjusted.  These may, or may not, be sustainable options.  Horrible dilemmas could come. 

But there’s another way to think about these security concerns: Instead of accepting the remorseless logic of the trolley car, perhaps we can think our way to a better solution, just as Captain Kirk of Star Trek renown escaped from the Kobayashi Maru dilemma.  In that fictional universe, Kirk refused to accept the parameters, and so changed them, saving lives.

So how to apply this to our real-world dilemma?  Instead of focusing on scanning the crowd or the environment, focus instead on hardening the target.  And I don’t mean body armor for the candidate, or perhaps a bullet-proof lectern or plastic shield--although those might be needed sometimes.  Yes, of course, it will always be important to monitor the crowd, but hopefully not to the extent that the monitoring becomes oppressive or erosive of the campaign.

Instead, let's think about a revolution in technological affairs, such that the old sci-fi dream of force fields finally comes into existence, used to protect lives.  If the tech could be made to work it could work not only for candidates, but for others in need of protection, including police officers, as well as, of course, soldiers. 

Indeed, right now, the world’s militaries are in a state of confusion, because the offensive capacity of drones and missiles has exceeded the defensive capacity of defense systems, such as the U.S. Patriots, as well as the Israeli Iron Dome and Iron Beam.  Those systems seem to work well enough, but not at the scale and tempo needed to bat back offensive rockets and drones.  That is, some intruders get through.  The Patriot missile, for example, traces back to the 1980s, when the threat was much different. The Patriot is 17 feet long; it’s designed to blast other big missiles; nothing stealthy, and not small-, or even nano, drones.

So in the Gaza war, and elsewhere on Israel’s embattled frontiers, enemy weapons are getting through.  And they can even kill Americans, as happened in Jordan earlier this year. 

In the meantime, in Ukraine, both sides in the fighting are coming to grips with this changing nature of war; they are developing emergency expedients, such as turtle tanks.  These tanks are a kind of hardened target—or if one prefers, the least stealthy stealth—and they’re a workable expedient, even if they’re hardly the optimum solution.  Ideally, tanks, have a low silhouette.  After all, the older kinds of antitank weapons, fired horizontally from point to point to point, haven't gone anywhere.  So lower is better.

Eventually, militaries will get smarter about defensive shields, including directed-energy shields, plasma shields, or that sci-fi standby, the ill-defined but always cool force field.  Such devices are probably possible under the laws of physics, although they are, of course, energy hogs.  So it could be that militaries will be bringing along big batteries, or even small nuclear power plants, as part of their logistical train.  An army runs on its stomach, it also runs on its energy. 

Similar forward thinking is needed at home.  After all, for all the discussion of snipers, and lines of sight, and direct fire, we haven't come to grips with indirect fire, coming from over the horizon, including drones, including whatever else attackers come up with.  Clearing away a sniper on a roof could be the old battle; the new battle could be stopping a drone flying in from five miles away. 

In other words, a significant escalation in tech is desperately needed, lest the American homefront start to resemble Israel, or Ukraine. 

There has, in fact, been considerable discussion about directed-energy machines to stop bullets, and the conversation, on sites such as Gizmodo,  Medium, Quora and Reddit, and ImpactLab (the source of the first picture above) has been mixed.  Not everyone is convinced that it’s a workable idea, even as everyone is convinced that it will be energy intensive.  

But there’s the bottom line: If it’s within the realm of the possible, if you have to make it work, you will.  Necessity mothers the invention. That's been the story of many tech crash projects, from antibiotics to synthetic rubber to the atomic bomb to the internet. All of which begat new investment opportunities, as well as military, social, and economic  victories. 

To be sure, there's never an ultimate, final, solution.  There's only the next iteration of improvements, the next higher plateau on the punctuated equilibrium of tech advance. 

Yet for now, the imperative of candidate safety, as well as other kinds of safety, will drive new next-gen tech in force fields, making it a great Directional Investment.