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WHAT DRIVES THE GS, THE 3 POSITION & 2 POSITIONS SWITCH

The last 2 days of blogs have been all about the GS the 3 Position Switch and the 2 Position Switch.  What type of protection it involves and how it works.  Today I want to touch on what, if not WHO drives these types of security personalities.

The client: Clients range from corporate CEO’s, at-risk people, notables, Government types, to celebrities.  Each of them demand a certain type of protection that is associated with their profession and lifestyle.  In doing so, we also must realize that there is a certain sect out there that is adverse to having security in the first place.  They are the corporate CEO’s.  For the most part the corporate CEO is forced into having protection by his insurance company, board members as well as due to decisions they’ve made in their respective businesses.  They strive on privacy within their ranks and having a couple of security types around them makes them uncomfortable at best.  That’s where the GS is important.  Having the uncanny ability to be able to manage where you are internally, with automatically dictate your positioning, response and overall footprint.  The ability to scale down on the GS is important in many ways.  Having someone walk within your protective formation is something we all have to get used to.  Having someone walk within the formation who is displaying “red behavior’ is different.  Pushing people out of the way to stop them from walking within your formation is not only illegal, but it’s embarrassing and could be civil.  All it will take is to have one specialist rise to a GS-4.5 or higher and the rest of the team in or around a GS-2 can cause the whole day to go bad. That’s an example of how a client can dictate what drives the type of scale is used.  GS is better for corporate types.

Environment drives the type:  Lets say you’re working a shareholders meeting, where you know that shareholders have time at the microphone to speak their dismay.  A certain shareholder gets up and starts his/her rant.  Pre-security meetings would dictate that someone from the company would respond first and then the microphone would be cut off.  It is my opinion that all three scales would respond differently because they are wired a certain way.  There is no “On or OFF” scenario and the meeting doesn’t dictate 3 position switch either, unless of course this meeting or something similar was held in Iraq. In that case there is no room for the GS or the 2 PS.  The 3 PS would already be in position 2 of the 3 PS and ready for anything that arises, whereas the pure GS specialist with no high threat training would be fluctuating.  Fluctuation in this environment could be deadly.

Celebrity environment:  For the sake of this blog we’ll use a concert as the environment.  Your protectee is on stage and while he is performing an avid fan jumps up and starts dancing.  For a GS specialist he probably won’t see this as an attack, the 3 PS operator is already on position 2 by the way he’s wired and may or may not rush the stage immediately.  The 2 PS bodyguard is, on 99 out of 100 times, going to rush the stage and lay down the fury that’s “expected” of him.  His response undoubtedly helps substantiates his worth and further secures his employment.

In as much as all of these types are within our industry, one can not easily scale up or down to the other type without modification to the type of principal and the environment.

In my humble opinion the GS Specialist has the easiest transition to the other two types.  He can train up for High threat protection or dummy down to the 2 PS work.  At 3 PS Operator has to train mindset to tone down his response reactors and revamp his protective techniques to meld in covertly.  One area in particular is on arrivals and departures.  PSD/HTP types do arrivals stringently whereas in the EP world we may scale back our footprint on arrivals to bring less attention to the client, yet remain effective.  The pure 2 PS guy has to train “UP” for every other two types.

These are some of the subjects that I will be adding to the eBook after I thought long and hard about it.  So if you plan on using this subject in your course make sure you remember where it came from, because no one has broken this down before so that the guys/girls in the industry can see where they are and why they do what they do.  More importantly, WHY they do what they do

1 comment

  1. Tommy Smith

    The past few days have been really informative and educational, after reading Eric’s blogs on GS, 2-PS and 3-PS scales. This is another example of how Eric and BPI is setting itself apart from the rest of the industry. Touching on subjects that no one else has thought of or dared to include in “THEIR” EP courses.

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