Hammer Time During my time in Hammer, the


programme suffered from many issues, but the key factor was that constant travel and deployments degraded everything, while providing a false sense of security and experience. In campaign years some members worked well over 1,000 hours of overtime. Good people were worn down and used up through exhaustion and jet lag. People who aren’t so good do not improve under these conditions. Jumping from one trip to another to another was common. Getting stranded by aircraft failure was not uncommon, sometimes for days in odd places. Leave was cancelled or postponed, birthdays and anniversaries were missed. Divorces happened. Personality conflicts flared under the stress of being around each other for weeks at a time. Exhaustion was definitely a key feature of my life at that time. Vehicles and equipment faced


similar tolls. We never merely wore out a vehicle in Hammer - we used them up


completely. In 2003, for example, it was a rare week when all four Lineback vans were in service. Detection and identification equipment was managed as an additional duty by the author, and calibration and maintenance were sometimes stretched. As the programme grew in size, equipment got stressed even more. Any Hammer team leader at the time would know about going to a distant airfield to receive a half-way broken van full of busted kit and dead radios accompanied by three exhausted team members capable only of sleep and mumbling. Team members were always running afoul of the normal USSS bureaucracy such as travel vouchers, monthly reports, and monthly pistol qualifications. Management often blithely assumed you were sitting at your desk all week. While members had good training


and some - not all - had extensive expertise from other jobs, skills and expertise atrophied due to disuse and


simple lack of time for refresher training or further development. Few incidents ever happened, and when they did, they were minor. Experience sitting in the van was not the same as actually responding to incidents. Indeed, in some cases this would lead to false confidence. “I’m highly experienced – I did 200 missions last year” would be easily counterpoised by “Did you ever put on your mask once in a real situation?” because nothing ever happened in those 200 missions besides sitting in the van. CBRN is an evolving area, and as people could do little to stay current, there was every risk of Hammer being frozen in time. All of this meant that Hammer’s


overall capability was inconsistent. One doesn’t really know how a serious CBRN incident would have played out because ‘the big one’ never happened. Hammer’s presence on trips provided both deterrence and reassurance to other components of the USSS. The image, however, was not always supported by reality. The ability to deal with the first few minutes of the core scenarios of a nerve agent attack or an odd substance on the president’s limo was always fairly solid, as these drills were heavily emphasised in training. There was, however, a wide divergence in skills and experience across the members of the programme. This meant that the deal with incidents beyond a very simple playbook was dependent on having one or team members present on a given day, with enough expertise to adapt quickly. Whether this was the case depended entirely on who was assigned to the trip. Likewise, whether the equipment


Hammer’s CBRN capability was inconsistent ©D Kaszeta


was up to snuff on a particular day depended on people taking time to look after it, what day of the month it was, and whether the USSS had paid its bills on time. Additionally, the ability to identify unknown substances was not well supported by either training or equipment during the first decade of the programme, although significant technical improvements were in the pipeline when I left. We can hope that the programme, in its current home in the special operations division, has been able to address these systemic issues.


www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018


February 2018 CBRNe WORLD


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