I think most people would describe Arron as the Director of the Criminal Investigations department as competent, but I think it is telling that when he decided that shit was fucked, he reverted to being Major Arron Kepler more or less right away – there was good reasons for that, as it placed him outside the authority people he was suspicious of, but I think he also reverted in much more than just the authority he was acting under – from that point forward he approached his problems with a more and more military mindset.

He is almost certainly giving the military too much credit here, and they likely were trying to tell him nothing more than that they didn’t want trouble, but this is sort of his pivot to realizing that hammers cannot really clean up messes, that’s what mops are for, and perhaps a bit of a change in how he views the actions of some other people.

That Minerva just jumps to assuming that he had a convoluted plan all along is probably somewhat informative to how people view the Keplers in general. We saw a similar thing from the IDS Analysts, where they just assumed that Peter being rogue meant there was a convoluted high stakes plan playing out rather than taking seriously the idea that Peter had gone wrong. While Arron has a more military mindsight, he is not necessarily immune to this sort of behavior in his past, though he tends to operate somewhat fundamentally different than Peter or Kyle. While convoluted plans might be common among Keplers, they all tend to operate in somewhat different flavors.