Security and law enforcement analyst James Gagliano says Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who the Texas public-safety chief said “chose to put the lives of officers before the lives of children” during the massacre at Robb Elementary School, should not have been the on-scene commander once law enforcement from larger organizations arrived on scene.

In the aftermath of the massacre at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead, officials around the nation have been questioning why it took 77 minutes for police to breach a pair of adjoining rooms where a gunman was mercilessly slaughtering fourth grade students and their teachers.

Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent who served on the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and as a senior SWAT team leader, told National Review in a recent interview that the police response in Uvalde represented a "colossal failure of the incident command system."

"The ICS is put in place to make certain that local, state law enforcement and federal law enforcement understand how they fit together — the symmetry, the synergy," he said.

"Why was a police chief of a six-member school-district police department left in charge as the on-scene commander as long as he was?" Gagliano said. "I would argue a sergeant or lieutenant from a larger police department, whether it's the Department of Public Safety in Texas or another local police department with a bigger department probably has more experience in training."

He said Arredondo, who has been placed on administrative leave, should not have been in the position of continuing to make life and death decisions, including the choice "not to put police officers in harm's way when you had children using notebooks and three-ring binders as their only defense."

Law enforcement had a large enough presence at the scene of the shootings to have stopped the 18-year-old gunman within three minutes if the on-scene commander had not kept officers from entering the rooms, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw testified before a state Senate committee earlier this week.

Police officers with rifles gathered in the hallway outside the classroom for nearly an hour while the gunman, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, carried out his attack.

Arredondo previously told the Texas Tribune that he and another group of officers tried to open the doors to classrooms 111 and 112 but that the doors were reinforced and impenetrable.

While reports have indicated police were waiting for a master set of keys to enter the classrooms, an officer said a Halligan bar, an ax-like forcible-entry tool, arrived eight minutes after the shooter entered the building, according to McGraw. Authorities did not use the tool, which was not brought into the school until an hour after the first officers entered the building, and instead waited for keys, according to a Texas Tribune report.

McGraw said the classroom door could not be locked from the inside and testified that the officers never tried to see if the door was unlocked.

"The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander," McCraw said, calling the police response an “abject failure.”

While Arredondo previously said he did not believe he was the on-scene commander, the Texas Tribune reported that "at least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school." Arredondo also seemed to be issuing orders directing officers to evacuate students from other rooms, according to the report.

Asked if the botched police response was a breakdown of planning, leadership or coordination, Gagliano replied, "It's all those things."

While a default response may be to say that the officers needed better training — though reports indicate that officers on duty had received active-shooter training just two months earlier — he is more convinced the collapse of the incident-command system was the most impactful failure.

Gagliano said it was the responsibility of someone from a larger organization to arrive and tell Arredondo they were taking control of the scene. Without that, Arredondo felt he was in charge and was left to make the "horrific decision . . . to wait for the cavalry to show up."

"That is antithetical to what we've all learned post-Columbine,” he said, referring to the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999 that left twelve students and one teacher dead. “It's been 23 years — almost a quarter of a century. Why are we relearning the same things we've already learned?"

Gagliano noted that from the 1970s to the late '90s, the commonly accepted police response to mass shootings was to wait for a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team because a better trained, better equipped law-enforcement response was needed for such incidents.

However, the conversation began to shift after it took law enforcement in Colorado 47 minutes to make entry into Columbine High School while two perpetrators attacked students and staff.

At the time, the protocol was "still deeply rooted in the 1970s paradigm" which treated the mass shootings as hostage situations, where police focused on containing and negotiating.

"And the lesson learned there was no, you can't wait on the perfect homogeneous tactile response team to arrive,” he said. “You have to go to the sound of guns."

"These guys aren't looking to negotiate in these instances, especially at schools," Gagliano added. "They're not looking for you to bring a Cessna jet with 15 pepperoni pizzas and fly them to Aruba. They're not looking to get political dissidents in Cuba released from Castro's jails. They are looking to ratchet up body counts and we have to go to the sound of guns."

Gagliano noted that in February 2018, the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff members were killed, did not go to the sound of gunfire.

Now the officer, Scot Peterson, is charged with seven counts of child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury. He has said he didn’t enter the building because he didn’t know where the gunman was and thought a sniper may have been targeting the building.

“I’m not suggesting that Chief Arredondo, or anyone else on scene should be charged with anything — I think the investigation will flesh all that out,” Gagliano said, adding that it “pains” him that armed law enforcement officials left children “at the mercy of a diabolical madman.”

Some officers on-scene were questioning why law enforcement was not entering the rooms, the Texas Tribune reported.

A special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety arrived 20 minutes after the shooting began and asked if there were still kids in the classrooms, saying "if there is, then they just need to go in."

Another officer said it was unknown. When the agent again said, "If there's kids in there we need to go in there," someone replied, "Whoever is in charge will determine that."

When Arredondo called Uvalde police dispatch, at least eleven officers had entered the school, at least two of whom are seen on video carrying rifles. Arredondo requested a SWAT team, saying "we don't have enough firepower right now."

"It's all pistol and he has an AR-15," he said. "If you can get the SWAT team set up, by the funeral home, okay, we need — yes, I need some more firepower in here because we all have pistols and this guy's got a rifle."

While Arredondo forced officers to wait for backup and keys, “children probably died because they couldn’t get the medical attention they needed,” Gagliano said.

“It’s unconscionable,” he added. “It literally is gut wrenching and it turns my stomach and I am a guy who defends and supports law enforcement but realizes that the profession is fallible, just like any other profession in the United States or across the world.”