Over the course of the Obama administration, the Secret Service has proven itself incompetent in regards to defending the President and his family.

Most recently, a commercially available two-foot long “quadcopter” drone crashed onto the southeast side of the White House complex. The White House claims that the drone posed no threat, but regardless, the fact that a drone can be piloted onto White House grounds at all is cause for concern. This time the drone was harmless, next time it might have explosives strapped to it.

In any case, this is merely the latest in a string of abysmal failures on the part of the Secret Service.

In November 2011, Oscar Ortega-Hernandez was able to fire several rounds from his semi-automatic weapon, hitting the White House and breaking a second-story window. Secret Service agents started to respond when an order came in stating that, “No shots have been fired… Stand down.” The supervisor who gave that order claimed that the noise was from a nearby construction vehicle backfiring. It then took the Secret Service four full days to determine that shots had indeed hit the White House.

Leading up to President Obama’s trip to the Summit of the America’s in April of 2012, nearly two-dozen agents were involved in a prostitution scandal in Columbia.

In September of last year, an armed security contractor with an arrest record was allowed onto the same elevator as President Obama, in direct violation of Secret Service protocol. This happened while the President was in Atlanta visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Again in September the Secret Service allowed Omar Gonzales, armed with a knife, to jump the White House fence. This resulted in the reassignment of four high ranking executives, and the forced resignation of then director Julia Pierson.

Joe Clancy, the interim director of the Secret Service at the time, said that since this failure “was not an intentional violation of the code” that no one would be punished for the breach.

Given the Secret Service’s ever growing laundry list of failures, it is now time to explore more drastic options. One such option would be the termination of the Secret Service entirely, or at least restricting its operations to its less widely known responsibilities regarding financial crimes.

In regards to who should really be protecting the President and First Family, we should look no further then those who already protect American embassies abroad: the United States Marine Corps.

The Marines are combat trained, unlike the Secret Service could ever be. They are trained to respond in an instant, and are already tasked with the defense of American diplomats abroad. Defending the President and the White House should be no harder (if not significantly easier) than defending American embassies in countries where the local populace is actively anti-American.

The level of discipline inherent to the United States armed forces would not allow for lapses such as what happened in Columbia, or collapses in command such that gunshots are not viewed as gunshots.

Even if the President is incapable of running the national defense, he should take his own security far more seriously than he has thus far.