Scandal-tainted U.S. Secret Service to hire 1,100 staff – sources
Facing accusations that it cannot adequately protect the White House, the U.S. Secret Service plans to hire 1,100 more officers and agents for an agency besieged by embarrassing scandals and security lapses, two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the plans said.
The addition of 700 uniformed division officers and 400 agents over five years would expand its staff of 6,647 by nearly 17 percent, the biggest hiring increase in more than a decade at the 150-year-old agency whose job it is to protect the president, his family, and senior officials, along with fighting financial crime.
When resources are free, focusing efforts on quality before quantity are ignored, in favor of a quantity-based problem resolution strategy. This deep psychological perception will emerge under r-selected conditions in everything from manufacturing mass quantities of crappy products in the Soviet Union, to military tactics emphasizing throwing as many raw soldiers at a problem as possible instead of only deploying smaller numbers of highly trained soldiers on highly-prepped and researched surgical strikes. This mentality is embodied by Stalin’s famous line as he signed an order to kill 50,000 people, asking ‘what did 50,000 lives really mean in the big picture?’
Here, an agency which has always done spectacularly protecting Presidents suddenly experiences a number of high-profile failures, and its response is to immediately hire more troops, doubtless using DOJ affirmative-action guidelines designed to select against innate skill and cognitive ability.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] r-selection is About Quantity Over Quality – […]
My friends from DC tell me that the SS has been a clown show since the early 90s. They didn’t start the decline under Obama, they’ve just accelerated.
If there is airstrikes involved which kill the capable and incapable indiscriminately which inflict larger casualties than ground combat which typically selects for quality?
Can modern warfare be considered a k-selected phenomenon still? Or has artillery and airstrikes change the k-selected nature of warfare?
It is an interesting question, since one feature of the r-selected is “specialist intelligence,” a trait designed to use mastery of technology to escape selection. I’ve come to see war now as selecting for individuals who can most capably self assemble into a group with maximal ability to survive. To that end, some tolerance for r-strategists who can contribute to the group is adaptive to the individual, and it fosters the evolution of complex, technologically advanced societies.
The big question is how, or if, evolution will ever deal with the cycles of civilizations, and come up with a model of human which is resistant to splurging on the glut, and then having to pull it all together when the collapse happens. I have to think each cycle culls the herd in some way to even out the peaks and troughs, and produce a steadier ascendancy, but I have yet to see it.
We do rise higher each time, seemingly. Perhaps the cycle is necessary and unavoidable.