As you, dear readers, likely recall, and as I mention it frequently, I’m a retired Air Force officer. I put in more than 25 years of active duty and retired as a lieutenant colonel. The smartest decision I ever made, career-wise, was to earn a commission in the Air Force and then to stay for more than 25 years. I’m quite proud of my military service, which included a wide range of diverse assignments. I taught American Government and the Constitution, as well as other subjects at the USAF Academy here in Colorado for much of my time. And while at the Academy, I had the great honor of having two different tours working on the National Security Council (NSC) staff at the White House during the summer academic breaks of 1997 and 1998.

I started my military career off as a “finger-on-the-button” guy in the ICBM world. For that work, after extensive paperwork and investigation, was granted a TS/ESI clearance, which stands for Top Secret/Extremely Sensitive Information. That clearance is one of the highest there is, and allowed me access to nuclear stuff, which is all I will say about that. And when I was selected to work on the NSC, I had to pass an even more intrusive security investigation to be granted the highest clearance around, TS/SCI, which stands for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, which is a fancy way of saying I had access to stuff a White House national security guy would need access to, which is, well, a lot. My military readers will know what I’m talking about.

One day, back in my 1997 White House tour, I noticed that my office mate, a civilian working Soviet issues, had departed for the day. I also noticed that he had left his computer’s removable hard drive in his computer, rather than removing it and locking it in the appropriate safe for a TS/SCI hard drive. Now, we were in a secure SCIF – a room designated for storage of such classified, but he hadn’t taken the final step of putting the hard drive in the safe.

I sighed, and pulled his hard drive out of the computer, and locked it away securely. The next day, I told him of his mistake, and he just shrugged and went back to work. Herein lies a fundamental difference between civilians and military personnel: the attitude toward classified. All too often, civilians don’t take security classifications seriously enough.

I’m guessing it’s pretty obvious what I’m about to talk about?

In recent news cycles we’ve seen President Joe Biden – or far more likely a staffer or two – improperly stored classified information, from his time as vice president, that should have gone to the National Archives. Though they were in a locked and secure area, that area had not been properly certified to hold classified materials. And that’s bad.

Naturally, the Republicans are bouncing with glee, as they dearly hope the American people will accept the false equivalency they are spinning about the classified documents repeatedly found, in large number, in the Trump home and office. Oh, and they also hope it will distract attention from GOP Congressman George Santos, whose remarkable trail of dishonesty and outright lies have still not generated a single negative comment from GOP leadership.

Now, I hope you, my civilian friends, won’t be too irritated at me, but I suspect most military members who dealt with classified information share a similar view: civilians rarely understand the role of classified materials and the required security precautions to keep such documents secure. In fact, there is a term we short-haircut types use from time to time for such folks: silly-vilians. Just like the guy in my White House office, from time to time, civilians don’t fully grasp the importance of classified materials and often shortchange security. Hopefully (and almost always, in my experience) there is a military person who can keep things secure.

Having had literally thousands of pages of highly classified materials in my hands over the years, I can see how some civilians would become complacent and would stop paying attention to every single document. And having been an investigation officer for one possible case of a highly classified document being misplaced, I can tell you that it can happen, even with some military folks (spoiler: my investigation showed a documentation error and no actual loss of classified).

So, let’s take a look at a couple of the factors involved in both cases, shall we?

The GOP are snorting about the supposed delay in notifying the American public when classified documents were first found in the Biden papers a few days before the last election. “Shenanigans!,” shout the Republicans. Well, as it turns out, apparently on the very first day the Biden documents were found, the National Archives was notified. As I noted above, I did an investigation into a possible leak of classified, and it takes a few days to get investigators spun up and working. So a delay of a few days – or even a week or two – is not crazy when setting up a full investigation.

But even if you reject that, and assert the public should have been alerted immediately, I’d ask why then have these same strident GOP voices not previously condemned the Trump operation for a far longer delay. Heck, the Trump hoard of documents (far larger than the Biden cache, apparently) wasn’t even acknowledged for months, after the Archives had repeatedly asked for the documents’ return. It took ignoring multiple subpoenas and an FBI raid before the Trump folks even admitted having any classified documents.

So, the Biden people notified the Archives the same day and turned over all the documents they could find, including the ones found in the locked garage later, and the Trump team sent a letter stating they had no classified even though they had hundreds of them. Biden’s team turned over what they found, and Trump’s team ignored legal subpoenas.

I’m willing to guess neither Biden nor Trump were the actual sets of hands that packed classified documents away for shipment to the home offices. I’m willing to bet it was staffers who were, well, silly-vilians, with only a passing familiarity and/or respect for classification. And both Trump and Biden should be chagrined by the discoveries. But to buy into the GOP claims that these were similar violations of the public’s trust is nonsense.

You don’t get to yell at Biden for not making a public announcement when Trump, to this day, has not made one. And you are not intellectually honest if you assert that a few documents in Biden’s files, immediately turned over to the Archives, is the same as Trump’s team lying about having any and then ignoring subpoenas until a FBI raid turned up hundreds.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.