Defenseless
Anyone who’s ever built a sandcastle understands the basics. Every child on every beach starts with a wall. Some dig a moat, place sticks across for a makeshift drawbridge, perhaps crenellations for archers to hide behind.
Those of us who’ve geeked out on Castles, RPGs, medieval history, or even Game of Thrones might tell you about arrow slits, murder holes, talus walls and so on, but everybody has a basic understanding that medieval castles, keeps, fortified cities, even churches of their day were built with defense in mind, because not being overrun was considered important.
It shouldn’t be any surprise that modern seats of government are no different, fewer walls and moats, but equally well thought out defenses.
Washington DC, for example, has a Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA) covering a 30 mile radius around Ronald Reagan Airport, a Flight Restricted Zone (FRZ) within 15 miles, and Prohibited Area 56 (P-56), which covers the area around the White House, the Vice President’s residence, the National Mall, and the Capitol Building.
According to the FAA, “The only aircraft that are allowed to fly within [P-56] are specially authorized flights that are in direct support of the U.S. Secret Service, the Office of the President, or one of several government agencies with missions that require air support within P-56.”
The Capitol Police number close to two thousand. DC Metro Police are on hand and the National Guard is a phone call away. Any number of federal agencies stand ready. In June, during Black Lives Matter protests in DC, Customs and Border Patrol was called in…from…the border I guess.
Get Eathan Mertz’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The Capitol Building is protected to 18,000 feet in the air, with trained officers and troops on the ground and at the ready, and I haven’t even touched on surveillance and intelligence services.
All in all, the United States Capitol is a very defensible space, so what happened on January 6th, 2021?
Are we to believe that a bunch of folks announced their intentions on social media, flew in, found hotels, donned their body armor and/or racist t-shirts, and then, on the day previously announced, overwhelmed the defenses of Washington DC?
I didn’t see insurrectionists stomping across moats so filled with bodies they didn’t have to get their feet wet. I didn’t see forward ranks overtake guard towers in order to cut the chains to release the drawbridge. There was no battering ram to shatter the portcullis, and in more modern terms, the Proudy-Poops didn’t drop in by parachute from 18,001 feet, so what gives?
Anybody see a big wooden horse?
If you ask me, it looks a lot like the gates were left open, the drawbridge left down, the guards ordered to inspect the south wall at the bottom of the northernmost dungeon. In short, somebody on the inside, deliberately and willfully left the Capitol exposed.
Somebody, or somebodies, rendered DC defenseless while both houses were in session, and both the VP and incoming VP were in attendance. The bulk of the line of succession was left exposed while the US Capitol fell to a bunch of social media grand-standers. And people died — not because it was overwhelmed, but because it was allowed to fall.
The only question remaining is, who needs to be held to account.
