Stand Down

How can it be that the suits that start our wars are afforded the highest level of protection while our guys on the ground have absolutely zero? In another tragic tale of budget cuts and apathy 12 of the finest men and women our country had to offer were sitting ducks while an unbridled monster went postal. It took. 3o minutes to take this guy out, he should have never had the ability to get off one single round. How many horrific tragedies  need to occur before something is done to prevent this from ever happening again? This is not meant as an insult to WDP (civilian police force) because every day brave men and women suit up with whatever gear is provided and this means for most little pay, low morale, a shoestring budget, little or no ongoing training etc..How many of the WDP  were actually trained in CQB(close quarters combat) and how to respond to this exact situation? It certainly isn't their fault, its the system that is broken and it has been that way since day 1. Does anybody remember our Fema director during Katrina? His background was in bankrupting Arabian horse operations and absolutely zero in disaster first res ponder relief. In fact Fema was for throw away bureaucrat failures and this is where they were sent as  punishment since its almost impossible to fire inept government officials.This is as serious as it gets because now Americans lives are at stake and  there are more innocent victims, our countries finest and many generations of their families. Ft Hood, now Washington DC, the WDP  were down to 6 men, (from 13) their radios were ancient, batteries went dead, there was little or no communication, Swat was told to stand down  while these men had to delay response time even longer because they had to resort to runners and cell phones and manually shut the gates behind them. The coms situation was just as bad for the (fire dept ems) who were first on the scene. Their radios didn't work either and this was known about for years previously. More lives could have been saved inside building 197 and without question some were lost due to this cataclysmic meltdown of budget cuts and apathy.   After 9-11 and Katrina Interoperability was supposed to be the goal for us all, here it is 8 years later and a few miles from the White House and this happens? All of us must dig deep and figure out a way to play on the same team. It doesn't matter if the men hired as our guardian angels are military police, civilian contractors, local law enforcement, in fact these soldiers were all trained to take out the enemy why didn't they have the ability to protect them self as well? Lets just get the job done and get it right from here on in, don't we at least owe this much to our nations finest?.