That Randy’s first published writings on the topic of unarmed American soldiers including combat veterans being slaughtered on their American homeland base by a single handgun-armed attacker and having to wait ten minutes for civilian police officers with no combat experience to save them did not show any anger at our troops being treated as if they were unworthy to defend themselves made me feel abandoned and angry.

If Randy Herrst wanted to argue the pressing need for a new security policy on military bases, why didn’t he even address the issue of the unarmed soldiers at the point of attack? If anything, the murder of disarmed American combat veterans on base should have angered Randy even more than it angered me.

But at least from what he published in the five days following the Fort Hood shootings before I wrote and published my column, Randy was silent on this issue. And that silence was unacceptable.

Randy challenges me, “If the military is going to allow soldiers on base to be armed, the following parameters ABSOLUTLEY MUST be decided: Who, What Conditions, When, Where. If you refuse to address that question, there is ZERO chance of ever implementing self-defense carry on miliatry bases. ZERO.”

No, sir. You’re the expert. You write it. If you have no other outlet I’ll publish it right here as a bylined Guest Column.

My previous discussions of self-defense principles with you were almost entirely in the context of civilian self-defense, so my analysis of reactions dealt with the way a lone civilian would be likely to confront criminals, not the way military units would face terrorists. There is a small amount of overlap, but the differences are much greater than the similarities.

I reiterate that every military unit should ALWAYS be in Condition Yellow, 24/7, and they can afford to do that because they always have lots of trained soldiers at their disposal….unlike the typical civilian or civilian police force. The problems are somewhat different, as are the solutions.

Ask any military unit in hostile territory, and they will tell you that they are ALWAYS ready for overwhelming immediate response if they are attacked, so there is never more than a few seconds of surprise in the enemy’s favor. My point regarding Ft. Hood was that they have a duty to be on a similar level of alert, even though they are on U.S. soil, becuase the enemy has been bringing the war to us since 1993.

To this point, no one who is criticizing me has been willing to address the single most important question: If the military is going to allow soldiers on base to be armed, the following parameters ABSOLUTLEY MUST be decided: Who, What Conditions, When, Where.

If you refuse to address that question, there is ZERO chance of ever implementing self-defense carry on miliatry bases. ZERO.

There is not the slightest possibility that the military will allow armed off-duty soldiers to enter WMD bunkers, base armories, ready-alert sites, or C3I facilities. There are a number of other places where armed on or off-duty soldiers will not be welcome. Work on that and there might be some hope.

As for my lauded techniques and GCIVC, note that my approach has always been fact based in order to expose the lies of the other side, so I am not guilty of abandoning my principles. I know enough about the military to know that the military is ultimately about maintaining the security of the country, and not primarily about self-defense for its soldiers. So if you want to ever achieve a wider range of rights for the soldiers, you must educate the military about the facts, and you must educate yourself about the military imperatives. The military is neither a democracy or a republic, but a duty-based organization wherein the soldiers voluntarily accept some restrictions on their rights for the length of their contract.

In any armed attack there is always (1) an element of immediate surprise and confusion. Then there is (2) an understanding that an attack is taking place. Then there is (3) an attempt by the defenseless to evade being attacked. Then there is (4) an attempt to sound an alarm for help. Then there is (5) a lapse of time before the alarm reaches the armed responders. Then (6) the armed responders have to make a tactical assessment of who are the attackers and who are possible on-scene defenders and then position themselves. Only now — at step (7) — can the armed responders do anything … and in the meantime the attack has been going on unabated with as many casualties and taking of hostages as the attacker can muster.

Now I come back to you with the very lessons you taught me about how there is no substitute for having the potential victims be armed so they can respond at stage (1) to an attack that the time and place of which is unknown — and you criticize me for not being politically realistic because the current political climate is hostile to the reality I’ve just described.

The political climate was just as hostile to this reality when you started training me up in 1990. Only then you didn’t care what the odds were of winning — only of being on the right side and making the strongest case with the most effective arguments based on facts and logic.

Sorry if you made me in your image.

I never wrote or said, and in fact have never even thought, that “a few MP’s checking cars at the gate do enough searches to make the place any more “gun free” than anyplace else.” You should know better than to claim I somehow believe that the concept of “gun free zones” is generally workable. Again, I will be more than happy to state my specific positions on any topic, so that you need not interpret or paraphrase. Straw-man arguments will not provide credibility to your position.

My idea of proper base security WITHIN EXISTING AND QUICKLY CORRECTED PRACTICES, which I stated in several online lists recently, was that a military base should have BOTH substantial numbers of MP’s on patrol (what does the presence of civilian LEO’s on a military base tell us?) AND regular armed patrols by substantial numbers of infantry soldiers armed with M-16s/M4s/M203s/M240s/M40s/M2 Browning HMGs (the infantry must have practice in patrol and quick-reaction tactics for their field work, so it makes sense to give them practice at home). This allows a two-level armed response anywhere in the base within a minute (and yes, an armed off-duty handgun carrier might be useful for that minute). MP’s for purely police-type enforcement, with instant backup by heavy-duty infantry for counter-terrorist action.

As much as I believe in GCIVC and the principle of self-defense, that does not make it the “main event”. The main event is proper base security in accord with the duties of the commander, including against heavily armed, multi-man terrorist teams, which would not be easily handled by the typical CCW licensee. Would civilian carry POSSIBLY be helpful for that? Yes, but it still isn’t the “main event”.

It gets back to what I stated earlier….civilian carry on base is nearly impossible to implement within the next 5 years, and we need a higher level of security LAST YEAR, not today! In fact, I will go farther and state that civilian carry on base has essentially NO CHANCE of enactment so long as someone like Obama is in the White House. However, it should be possible for the military to FORCE their base commanders to live up to their explicit and implicit responsibilities without being stymied or delayed by the White House.

You also misrepresent my approach when you write, “Military culture doesn’t change the basic security paradigm that the perimeter defense is doomed to fail.” At no point did I ever state that perimeter defense is my sine qua non, or even that I thought it was a modestly viable general tactic. I have seen, on some bases and would expect everywhere, robust internal security forces sufficient in size, ubiquity, and firepower to destroy any terrorist forces immediately.

There are two different types of security on a military base: personal and institutional. Both are desirable, but it does us no good to think that personal security is the “main event”. The Main Event is the prevention of unauthorized access, destruction, or theft of military weaponry which can be used to inflict massive damage on the base or elsewhere.