The knee jerk “boss must go” cry whenever someone in the organization that boss leads screws up is…silly. See for instance, the hue and cry that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle must resign or be fired over the security failure that allowed an assassin wannabe to take his shots at former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, narrowly missing killing him.

It’s not even known how the lapse occurred, but let’s go ahead and get rid of the lady in charge.

Sometimes, such failures are the boss’ fault. Sometimes the failure can be laid off to the organizational culture the boss fostered, or the lackadaisical attitude toward training or equipage, or to an emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of effective performance.

Often, though—more often, I claim—it’s a matter of one or more of the following:

• bad luck (luck gets a vote right alongside the opposition)
• sound procedure poorly, or mistakenly, executed
• sound training, but an individual(s) executed his training poorly
• sound Standardization/Evaluation procedures, but an individual(s) fell through the cracks
• poor training procedures and/or poor Stan/Eval procedures, in which case the supervisors of those sections and those supervisors’ immediate supervisors need to be looked at
• poor operational oversight of individuals in the course of their performance—look at those supervisors and their immediate superiors
• poor communication with external agencies involved in the action—what caused that (who caused that should come second in that part of the post mortem)

It’s an even more extensive list than that.

So: do the investigation, here of the Trump assassination attempt, of the protection procedures, and of the execution associated, thoroughly. Then decide what corrective action to take, and take it.

Blame, fire, investigate is a suboptimal order of events.