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| U.S. embassy life can be an endless series of temporary projects |
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In Part 1, I commented about a couple of those Wise Men who are to shed their wisdom on the Department regarding best practices for security in high threat / high risk locations. Now, here's something else that I think is puzzling.
Recommendation 5 of the ARB report called for the Department to develop security standards expressly for temporary mission facilities. That makes great sense to me, since there is a vast difference between the sort of hasty facilities that we need to acquire and fit-out in expeditionary environments and the permanent Fortress Embassies that the Department might build in more stable places. 'Expeditionary' has to happen right now, making use of available materials and funds to improvise a minimum level of protection, whereas Fortress Embassies take several years to design and build and cost several hundred million dollars.
Two such different situations need two different sets of standards, right? You might think so.
Here's what the ARB recommended:
The Department should develop minimum security standards for occupancy of temporary facilities in high risk, high threat environments, and seek greater flexibility to make funds rapidly available for security upgrades at such facilities.
Here's how the Department's press release reported its action on that recommendation:
The Department has re-affirmed that Overseas Security Policy Board Standards apply to temporary facilities.
We identified flexible funding authorities to make improvements to our overseas facilities.
Aren't they talking past each other here? The ARB recommended the Department develop security standards for temporary facilities because, you know, it doesn't have any such standards now. The standards it has are intended for permanent situations.
To "reaffirm" that we'll apply the security standards we already have to temporary facilities seems to be a refusal to deal with the recommendation. Worse, it leaves those temporary facilities in the same bureaucratic limbo as Special Mission Benghazi, lacking the money and direction for serious security upgrades because they lack a permanent status.
To quote from the ARB report:
Special Mission Benghazi’s uncertain future after 2012 and its “non-status” as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult, and left responsibility to meet security standards to the working-level in the field, with very limited resources.
Having appropriate standards for temporary facilities - which means standards that aim for a lower, albeit more realistic and achievable level, of protection - would regularize what is now an ad hoc practice.
By the way, not all permanent U.S. diplomatic missions around the world meet those Overseas Security Policy Board standards that the Department just reaffirmed. Not even half of them do, according to none other than Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy.
As he told Congress:
More than half the U.S. diplomatic posts overseas may not fully meet security standards, a senior U.S. official told a hearing on Thursday that follows an attack on the mission in Benghazi in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans died.
Pat Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management at the State Department, told a House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee that the United States had a diplomatic presence at 283 locations around the world.
He said 97 safe and secure facilities had been completed since the 1999 passage of a U.S. law authorizing additional funding for security upgrades, including 70 full replacements of embassies or consulates, as well as some building of Marine guard quarters and office annexes.
"There remain approximately 158 posts that have facilities that may not fully meet current security standards," he said.
"Many of these facilities were built or acquired prior to the establishment of the current security standards, and others are subject to authorized waivers and/or exceptions."
The Department has completed many new construction projects since 2000, however, according to a publicly available presentation by the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, only one in four U.S. government employees overseas (about 20,500 out of a total of 85,000) works in a Fortress Embassy.
The other three out of four work in a wide range of facilities, some better than others, but all of them somewhat less secure than a purpose-built modern embassy. They are either grandfathered or "subject to authorized waivers" due to the impracticality of fully meeting security standards retroactively in buildings the Department did not construct.
If that's the situation for our permanent facilities, then surely our less-than-permanent facilities will likewise fail to fully meet Overseas Security Policy Board standards. Why not accept that reality and develop security standards that are suitable and achievable for temporary occupancies?
I'll have another quick comment tomorrow or Saturday about the practical limits of hardening up conventional buildings.
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