Everything You Want to Know About National Security Can Be Learned in a Nightclub
by Christopher Paul Meyer
Link Provided By Denise Williams
National security is becoming a sexy topic again. Thanks to the Daesh attacks, foreign policy, military concerns and intelligence issues are as hot as Kylie, Kourtney and Kendell. A re-energized American public now re-litigates issues like the Iraq War, the profiling of Muslims and the length of leash we should give the NSA.
What can the nightclub scene teach us about national security? Quite a lot, actually.
Yet the issues remain muddled. It’s hard to decipher the Pentagon’s jargon, the politicians’ posturing and the intelligence community’s secrecy. Especially if you have no first-hand experience to guide you. After all, less than 1% of the US population has served in the military since 9/11. And even fewer have experience in the alphabet-soup of law enforcement or intelligence agencies.
But damn near everyone knows what it’s like to get buzzed on a Friday night. A lot more people go to nightclubs than to MEPS. But here’s the thing — if you really want to understand the national security issues of today, you just need to understand the security of your Friday night watering hole. What can the velvet rope teach us about border security? What does the size of the bouncer have to do with the defense budget? How is Iran like the partygoer who cops a feel on a passing waitress? Here are the five biggest lessons that nightclubs teach us about national security. You’ll never look at a nightclub the same way again.
1. The Velvet Rope. The first nightclub I bounced in was a rooftop bar with only a five-foot abutment ringing the roof. The club sat on top of thirteen stories of hotel rooms that catered to the party set. And it was located in downtown LA (before its multimillion dollar revival). As the only swank nightclub in downtown at the time, it was a target for partiers of every socioeconomic class as well as every transient, gangbanger, call girl and MMA thug. Oh, and we also had to worry about jumpers looking for a glittery suicide. In short, it was a property rife with the liability issues posed by a dizzying array of potential sources. So, when we manned the velvet rope at the front door, we didn’t just check IDs. We scanned the people as they passed in front of us. Did they have red eyes? Gang tattoos? Bulges where a gun or knife could be? Could they stand up on their own or were they too drunk already? Were they pissed off? Were they carrying a grudge? Had we ever 86’d them before? That wasn’t all. We were master profilers. None of us wanted to earn our $13/hour the hard way, so we favored parties of girls over parties of guys and we favored suits and ties over NFL jerseys and do-rags. We reminded disgruntled patrons that entrance to the club was a privilege, not a right. Every night, I’d end up dealing with pissed off people that we’d turned away, but I never had a major physical altercation.
Of course, there were other ways to run the velvet rope. When I worked a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, we barely screened at the door. The club was smaller and had less obvious risks, but it also just wanted to make more money by flooding the place with patrons. The result? I laid hands on people every night. Our waitresses were harassed more often, fights broke out frequently and even our doorgirl was knocked unconscious. Our incident report binder was three times the size of the one I’d had downtown. Lesson learned — if you don’t stop the problems before they come inside, prepare for a messy extraction of the problems later on.
2. Peace at all costs is a pretty high price. One night, a dude put his hand up a waitress’ skirt. Now usually, he’d have been spitting Chiclets out of his mouth for a move like that. But this dude had rolled deep — at least eight defensive-linemen-sized cats in his posse. Our team was small (that night, only five of us), unarmed and overworked already. Then the dude flashed a gun at me and my boss. My boss opted for the better part of valor and instructed us to leave the dude and his party alone.
I was shocked — I knew we were waist-deep in trouble, but I’d never seen us back down from a righteous fight. The dude knew he had backed us down, he knew the power of his gun and he knew he had the run of the place. Our waitress was at his mercy, and so was the rest of the club (whether or not they knew it). I confronted my boss and we argued until, finally, we agreed to pretend that the cops were emptying the club because someone had seen the dude’s piece and called 911. We offered to sneak homeboy out the back so he wouldn’t get caught. He accepted and we got him and his crew out of the club without any issues.
The lesson? Not every fight requires muscle. But every righteous fight requires a righteous resolution. As we saw when we failed to support Iran’s Green Revolution, or when we equivocated about Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the false peace of capitulation to thuggish tyranny weakens our allies, discourages the victims and emboldens our enemies.
Thanks for the link, Denise! The rest of this article may be viewed at: Havok Journal
Category: International Affairs
AW1Ed, thanks for sharing this, but may I respectfully request “Guest Post by Denise Williams” be modified, qualified, or removed? It seems to infer I was the author of the piece, and though I’d take the assumption that caliber of writing was mine, it would be inappropriate.
As you wish.
Fixed for your approval. FWIW, Poetrooper dislikes “Guest Post” as well. You’re in good company, Ma’am.
Wellllll….I hope you don’t mind if I shamelessly crib this article in conversation and pretend it was my idea….
Excellent post! This should be required reading for every US elected official at every level. Should also be a test on the comprehension of the subject matter and how it relates to our country’s security.
What part of “there are folks out there who want to destroy us” is hard to understand?
This article is spot on. Very clever take on the topic. Thanks for sharing.
It’s all Denise*. Would that she post up more often.
*I’ll take credit for the graphics, though.
This is total horseshit blog content and never would have made it past Jonn’s editorial controls.
MCPO OUT!
Someone piss in your Cheerios this morning, Master Chief?
Dunno. Any halfway professional bartender could probably tell you that once Mr. Thuglife and his entourage pulled the weapon, the flag went up. Some things can be tolerated, some things mitigated, and others earn an instant 86. It’s also known, but normally left unsaid, that an 86 can potentially require escalation from a couple of beat cops, to a SWAT team, and on up to a company of Marines if needed. There might even be a chapter on this in the Mixologist Training Manual under “Effective Customer Relations Through Superior Firepower”…
Yeah, pretty much.
Thanks for asking!
Someone give “Turd” Bolling at Ambassador Worldwide Protection Agency (both national and international) a call and get his input.
http://a-w-p-a.com/contact.php
Yeah.
The have gone silent….
The problem is, and I’ll call it as I see it, that Denise Williams provided the link. She did so in another thread and AW1Ed posted it as an article. It could have been a misunderstanding or it could have been, as I suspect, AW1Ed’s deference to Denise. Either way, I think we can handle it. Personally, I don’t like the piece, but others do, I’m sure. I think it’s safe to say that Foreign Affairs won’t be publishing it and the bouncer-turned-writer really should stick with bouncing. (I know. Everyone is a critic.)
Email sent to Master Chief SEPCOR. Doubt he’ll like it much, so it goes.
Got your email. Thanks. Happy New Year!
Another headed your way.
Sophomoric, oversimplified nonsense. Worthy of a solid C in a Jr High School English Comp class.
Metaphors have a place in debate- they are useful tools for illustrating a point. However, they have limits. If your entire argument is a metaphor based on anecdotes that only the tale-teller experienced, then there can be no discussion because the tale-teller controls the entire fabric of the universe they created. If any point is countered, the person telling the story counters with a new fact.
I will counter nevertheless:
1. The desired patronage of a club owner cannot adequately equate to the immigration policy of the sovereign nation that is the US. Sure, there are parallels, but (thank God), we have a legislative body and a people with a voice, not a single person who can indisputably dictate all policy.
2. These anecdotes actually reinforce liberal immigration policies and refute Trumps agenda:
-Physical barriers aren’t the solution. The rooftop bar had no physical barriers, but relied successfully on increased surveillance and human interaction to screen undesired customers. However, there was increased violence and danger at the dive bar due to a lack of interaction with and inability to screen the patrons and a liberal admission policy.
-Catch and release’ programs are a great way to avoid trouble for you, even if it is unleashed on others. When the writer stands on ‘principle’ and agrees on the compromise of a faked call to the police, he is essentially acting as a sanctuary city with a catch and release program. As an alternative, what if he actually called the police And removed the threat from society?
-We should actually show hard power in support of our interests abroad because of the long term implications of appeasement. So, for instance, keep troops in Syria IOT 1) ensure ISIS is defeated and cannot reconstituteIn particular, and 2) counter Russian aggression in Europe.
Look, it was a great movie, but despite what the author and Doug Heffernen think, there is more to National Security than watching ‘Roadhouse’.
Oversimplification can still be useful even while not being entirely accurate. It can spur discussion and lead to real solutions. That should be good.
Not unlike asking open border advocates if they lock the doors to their homes and cars. And carry insurance in case the locks are not enough and maybe even have burglar alarms. Point being, sane folks take precautions to protect their premises with sufficient redundancy to increase the level of protection as much as is possible. Why should we collectively expect less for our country?
Obstacles (barriers) alone are not a complete counter to unwanted movement. See Lima Site 85 for one example; there are many others (including the Ardennes, multiple times).
However: obstacles – under observation, and backed by even modest force given the will to use it – are a far more effective deterrent to undesired movement than sensors and observation alone. As a military professional, you should know that. I believe you do.
Further, the nightclub scenario above doesn’t advocate barrier only security. Rather, those barriers are under observation and backed by force – called “bouncers”, as I recall.
To date on the southwestern border, we’ve tried precious little in the way of effective barriers. Where they have been tried, it’s my understanding they’ve rather dramatically slowed uncontrolled cross-border movement, forcing it to occur mainly in areas without said barriers or via far more difficult means (e.g., tunnels).
Anyone who has a fence around their back yard (or any other part of their property), or locks their doors and/or windows, understands this concept. So what’s so difficult to understand about extending the same concept to the national borders in areas where there is a demonstrated pattern of major uncontrolled cross-border movement?
Is there anywhere in the US that a barrier is NOT required to keep people away from swimming pools, for instance? Seems like a good idea, actually, but what’s so magical about swimming pools that does not also apply to citizens in general?
And another thing – for those who deny the argument that every one of the victims of an illegal alien would not be a victim of said illegal alien if the illegal alien had not been in the country illegally – who do you think you are kidding with your denial of the obvious?
My backyard has at most a few hundred feet of fencing designed mostly to keep my dogs in, and the fact that I lock my windows and doors is really security theater. A real bad guy that wants to get in real bad will get in no matter how good the locks are. Neither of these examples or the nightclub examples, are good parallels to building roughly 2,000 miles of ‘big, beautiful’ wall with hard earned Mexican tax dollars.
Any student of land maneuver warfare knows that an unobserved or unenforced obstacle is useless. Obstacles disrupt, fix, turn, or block maneuver, and can only do that when supported by fire.
The author makes it clear that his rooftop bar used only velvet ropes- it was the enforcement that made the security effective.
Of course, we already have physical barriers at various places on our southern border, where it makes sense. In some places the terrain itself is a better barrier than anything we could build. Once again, without surveillance systems and a force to do something about it, these barriers are useless. Determined bad guys will climb/fly/jump over, cut through, or tunnel under anything you can build. THis is just the tactical level.
At the operational level, a real bad guy that wants to get in the country real bad will either fake the appropriate documents or simply come in via the other land border to the north or take a boat or fly in to another point of entry.
All of the 9-11 hijackers came to the country legally, none of them through the Mexican border. They were able to stay here illegally because we didnt have the systems in place to find them and expel them.
I grew up on the border in South Texas. I am not an open borders fool. I am all for increased border security and stricter immigration policy. Sadly, I think the president made an off the cuff and uniformed comment and is too stubborn to back away at this point.