Let's say you're at a store, and a loud alarm starts going off. You look around and see several flashing strobe lights. You read the sign next to the strobe light, and it says fire. You then look around and try to figure out where the fire is, obviously you want to make sure it's a real alarm. Change this from a store, to an office where you work. It's human nature. First, we have to identify the alarm, then identify the source. Precious seconds are lost while you, the individual starts to figure out what is going on.
I said systemic failure, and I mean just that. We came up with systems that monitor for every imaginable thing under the sun, and obviously we need to protect the President, so the White House gets all those systems. Fire alarms, Smoke Detectors, Carbon Monoxide detectors, radiation detectors, motion detectors, open door detectors, detectors that look for explosives, and a half dozen that look for biological and chemical warfare agents. All of the detectors have a different alarm. All of them have a different warbling or shrill tone. Worse, we as humans doubt these things. We roll our eyes and groan when they go off. Oh the first time we get scared and rabbit, and perhaps even the second time. After that, we get complacent. Nobody wants to panic and send everyone running into the street the first time a smoke detector goes off.
Imagine all the time lost, and imagine all the wasted seconds, and minutes, every time one of those alarms starts it's shrill warning. The people in charge of security hear the alarm, they groan and then spend a couple seconds. OK, high pitched warbling alarm. That is the motion detector on the east lawn. The last fifty times it was nothing. Hey Joe, do you remember last summer when some kid lost a frisbee over the fence? A gust of wind caught it from the park. Door alarm to the East wing? What happened this time? Did one of the Ushers forget to log in? That's happened about a thousand times.
We hear so many alarms we learn to ignore them. That's the systemic failure. Think about your car. You're driving, and the check engine light comes on. You glance at the dials, nothing out of sorts. Perhaps the oil is low, or the coolant. You stop, you check, nothing appears wrong. All the fluids seem ok. You talk to a friend who is a mechanic. He says it's probably an oxygen sensor. This little doohickey doesn't do anything but monitor the quality of the air entering the engine so the computer can put the right amount of fuel in to the chamber before it fires. You find out it will cost a lot of money, and then the light goes out on it's own. Oh well, ignore it. You don't have the time, or the money, to chase down one malfunctioning little widget.
Then the oil does get low. The check engine light comes on, you ignore it. It comes on and goes off on it's own all the time. However this time your engine seizes up, the oil leaked out of a broken fitting while you were driving to a city some two hours away. You had learned to ignore the unimportant warning, and then assumed all of the warnings were unimportant.
That is the systemic failure. We grow complacent with the plethora of false alarms, and our first reaction is always that it's some sort of mistake. It's human nature.
How should this work at the White House? Guards. People can instantly determine that the thing on the lawn is a frisbee, or a madman running across the grass headed for the door. But guards are a pain. You have to schedule additional guards in case someone is sick, or has a car accident, or just calls in to say he can't deal with work today. You have to train the people, review their performance, which means more management in an already overcrowded building. Then people don't like the optics. They don't like feeling like they are coming to a building with more guards than workers. They suggest that we have too many, and perhaps a few less would be better. Then a few less, and we have the alarms, why do we need so many guards?
It's a systemic failure, a human failure. One that we're all guilty of. One we are loath to correct. Because we don't want to drop whatever we're doing at work when the damned alarm goes off. We don't want to set our shopping down and head for the exit every time the lights flash and the alarm screams because some kid is having a smoke in the bathroom. We'll run, when there is smoke, or flames, or someone shouts fire.
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