EVER since Sun-Tzu put pen to parchment two thousand years ago, nine-tenths of all the elements that make for a successful, overarching strategy have been found in textbooks. Whether it's warcraft, statecraft, business management or even administering the affairs of a 20-square mile island, the same central principles always apply - a long-range plan, a variety of short-term tactics which will help achieve this overriding objective and the need for rapid, suitable responses to sometimes rapidly changing conditions.

While most of the essentials of sound strategic planning can indeed be found in books, the always elusive final tenth is only found in a leader's personality.

Col. T.E. Lawrence described this combination of intuition and instinct as well as anyone. He said this "irrational tenth" represents the lightning-fast ability to react to unanticipated circumstances in an unflustered and logical way and called it the only true test of leadership. It's a built-in capability, a sixth sense of sorts, that needs to be sharpened by constant use so that at "the crisis it is as natural as a reflex."

In Bermuda, though, when the irrational tenth manifests itself it tends to be, well, simply irrational. In the entirely unreasonable sense.

There was one such example last week. In the wake of rising juvenile delinquency and criminality in Bermuda, the Premier, proposed the creation of a Special Weapons & Tactics unit.

This amounted to a declaration of war on young offenders, a mailed-fist threat to use armed and overbearing force against young people who already believe themselves cast aside by mainstream Bermudian society.

There's no denying the poor, the deprived and the growing number of unemployable young people emerging from our schools are drifting into gang life in ever increasing numbers.

They do so because these undergound enterprises provide them with precisely the sense of identity, purpose and belonging they feel is denied them by a community that has undergone a radically transformative social and econonomic revolution in recent years.

They are not inherently wicked. But a great many of them don't believe they have any other option but to gravitate towards criminal activity given an economy increasingly dominated by industries requiring highly-specialised skills that can only be acquired in London or Zurich or New York.

Mounting middle class frustration with the criminality now so conspicuous in Bermuda is entirely understandable. But for Government to respond to this rising moral panic with shock tactics will no more address the underlying factors at play than pouring gasoline on a brush fire will extinguish the blaze. Pursuing policies that would alleviate poverty, reduce inequality and create jobs which are socially valued would have far more impact on reducing current levels of violence

It's always possible the Premier's zero-tolerance message was a public relations gambit rather than a serious plan of action. If his main objective was indeed to reassure distressed Bermudians that increasingly violent criminal and anti-social actions will from now on be met by equal and opposite reactions on the part of the Police Service, his statement may well calm some frenzied nerves as well as have some short-term deterrent effect.

If, on the other hand, this was a serious proposal then it's a case of overkill on a par with using a pile-driver to crack a walnut.

Introducing a SWAT team to Bermuda would amount to the most spectacularly disproportionate response to a local crisis since Governor Sir Edwin Leather urged adopting emergency legislation, then in use in Northern Ireland, that would have allowed for the indefinite internment of suspects during the island's brief experience with paramilitary extremism in the 1970s.

Like those draconian measures, SWAT teams and their counterparts are usually found in jurisdictions where police are routinely expected to contend with well-organised and heavily-armed criminal gangs or to act as the spearheads in counter-terrorism operations,

They are not generally associated with communities boasting populations that couldn't fill an average-sized American football stadium and where the majority of criminality stems from social frustration rather than political extremism or large-scale narco-trafficking.

But with a Governor who retains titular responsibility for Bermuda's internal security (if not actual day-to-day operational control) standing beside him, the Premier seems to have received Government House's assent for his proposal if he opts to implement it.

The Los Angeles Police Department once defined a SWAT unit's operational purpose as providing "protection, support, security, firepower, and rescue to police operations in high personal risk situations where specialised tactics are necessary to minimise casualties."

How such a heavy-firepower force would be effectively deployed against Bermuda's criminal and social problems is anyone's guess. There's already a Police Service Emergency Response Team trained for low-level urban combat situations. But it has never once been called on to engage in the close-quarters fighting that would be necessary to take out the island's major drug distributors. For obvious reasons.

Upgrading to a SWAT team would simply squander further money and resources, giving Government bragging rights to an elite force that would likely serve as little practical purpose as a Swiss navy.

Bermuda's Police Service is already notorious for its lack of visibility on the streets and a perceived failure to act on intelligence that could close down some of the island's more well-established and profitable criminal enterprises literally overnight.

More vigilant and more visible policing rather than a Police Service backed up by a group of Dity Harry wannabes is a more practical short-term solution to violent crime in Bermuda.

In the longterm, though, perhaps the Premier might want to pause before he threatens to slap any more young Bermudians upside the head with the rolled-up copies of the reports on their deviant behaviour that he's recently been brandishing.

Dr. Brown might want to actually spend some time reading these documents, familiarising himself with the root causes of the spiking violence statistics in Bermuda. If he did so, chances are he'd be able to hone that "irrational tenth" of his leadership skills into something entirely more reasonable than what exists now. - Tim Hodgson