Charlie Kirk murder: Another failure of the close protection concept
11/09/2025
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Executive protection has undergone a significant shift in recent years. Tragic assassinations of figures with armed protection in Latin America, as well as assassinations in various parts of the world and assassination attempts on prominent personalities such as Donald Trump in the United States, demonstrate that protection strategies based on a last-minute armed response have proved fatal. This misconception has taken a heavy toll in human lives. In Mexico, in the last two years, 21 protégés and 32 of their armed escorts have been killed. In the case of Donald Trump, even the highly trained and heavily armed Secret Service agents could not prevent his protégé from being wounded in the head. A teenage, inexperienced assailant managed to fire seven shots before the world's best protectors, including snipers with guns in hand, were able to neutralize him.
This failure is due to the fact that traditional executive protection was based on the concept of concentric circles of security in space, designed to make it difficult to access the protected and react to an imminent attack. However, this strategy has proven ineffective; an analysis of 137 attacks against prominent public figures over the past 124 years and in 60 countries reveals that this approach has had disappointing results, with effectiveness of less than 14%. Surprisingly, the use of empty hands was effective in stopping attacks in 10.2% of cases, while firearms were only decisive in 3.65% of incidents.
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Modern executive protection therefore requires a radical change of approach. The distinction between traditional and modern security lies in its emphasis: the former focuses on the control of space, while the latter prioritizes the control of time.
For a protection strategy to be truly effective, it must neutralize attacks far from the executive, both in time and space, and reduce the likelihood of a blunt attack occurring.
This approach is structured through the three Time Rings:
Logistics is critical to reducing vulnerability. By meticulously planning the protégé's every move and managing human and material resources, attack vectors are limited while spreading out. This forces the attacker to retract or make critical mistakes at the last instant, giving security teams a crucial advantage. This is why we call it the Short Time Ring, as it allows us to act shortly before an attack occurs.
Early Warning focuses on a particular phase of attack preparation known as deployment. Minutes, or sometimes even hours, before an attack, criminals must position themselves at strategic points. Early Warning identifies these locations and intervenes in advance, defusing the attack minutes before it occurs.
In the first attack on Donald Trump in July 2024, the assailant was seen positioning himself at strategic points well in advance of the attack. However, Secret Service agents failed to monitor these points in a timely manner, thus missing the opportunity to thwart the attack in its early phase.
However, in the second attack, only two months later, the agents learned their lesson. They identified these strategic points and intervened in advance, several minutes before the protégé was in the attacker's sights. In this way, they managed to defuse the attack far away from Trump, both in time and space, without posing any danger to the Republican. Because of its characteristic of stopping an attack minutes or hours in advance we call it the Medium Time Ring.
Criminals, especially well-prepared ones, need time - days or even months - to follow their target, study their routines and define their vulnerabilities. Even the inexperienced teenager Thomas Matthew Croocks who attacked Trump monitored the area of the political rally for ten days before the attack, even using a drone for this purpose repeatedly-without being detected. Counter-Surveillance, through specialized operations, makes it possible to detect these activities and defuse attacks in advance, days or months before they materialize. This is why we call it the Long Time Ring.
The Time Protection Rings approach is far more effective, discreet and economical than traditional close space control based protection operatives. Good logistics, intelligence and communication, coupled with a well-trained Early Warning agent and targeted Counter-Surveillance operatives, can achieve results that small armies of heavily armed escorts have not.
This is evidenced by a comparison of the last two attacks against Donald Trump: in the first attack, the Secret Service had two teams of snipers with long guns in hand, two Rapid Reaction teams armed with long guns, an undetermined number of close protection agents and local police with small arms. Despite all this force, they were unable to stop the attack or prevent the candidate from being wounded in the head, surviving by a miracle. However, in the second attempted attack, a single Early Warning agent operating properly managed to prevent the attack without endangering the protégé at any time.
In this way, we can see how operating through time turns out to be much more effective, unobtrusive and even more economical. Changing the concept of executive protection from a spatial perspective to one based on the rings of time can make our profession much safer for both protectees and protectors.
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