The Deeper Meaning of the Number 27 (High Threat Posts)

Consumer Notice: This post is certified 100% free of Matters of Official Concern that are not referenced from publicly available sources of information.

Those lazy, hazy, crazy, days of summer (a good song, BTW) have rolled on for quite long enough, and it is now time that I take up something that has been bugging me for a few weeks - the State Department's clumsy post-Benghazi term of art, "high threat post."

The Department has used the term pretty extensively, but has never explained what it means, at least not in any public forum that I've seen. Official spokesman have said there are 27 high threat posts, but they have not indicated how or why those posts were selected. The Department hasn't even said which posts they are, although there have been at least two news media reports that named names and claimed official sources.

Confusion reigns, as Department employees try to reconcile the 27 posts that the news media has named with their danger pay or hardship differentials, their unaccompanied status or - more often - its lack, and the strange absence from the list of some posts that are indisputably high threat by any common meaning of the words. Beirut, for instance. None of it makes much sense.

Domani Spero has framed the question nicely: State Dept Now Has 27 High-Threat, High-Risk Posts — Are You In One of Them? That's a good question, and the Department hasn't yet provided any good answers. Has the Department even informed the staff at those 27 posts of their special status? I don't know.

As for exactly which 27 posts it is that are so special, here's what the news media tells us.

CBS News reported on December 8, 2012 (here) that the following posts are now under the purview of the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for High Threat Posts:

The scope of the expanded High Threat Unit has widened to include Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen. Previously the only posts that fell under the High Threat designation were in Iraq and Afghanistan.

National Review On-Line reported on November 30, 2012 (here) that the mystery posts are:

The State Department said in an announcement that the new assistant secretary will be responsible for “evaluating, managing, and mitigating the security threats, as well as the direction of resource requirements at high threat diplomatic missions.” Those missions include American diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.

There are two minor inconsistencies between those lists. CBS listed Niger instead of Nigeria, and NRO listed Algeria but not Afghanistan. Putting that aside, just focus on the fact that both lists are of 17 countries. That's countries, or diplomatic missions, and not posts. The 17 countries have a total of 27 U.S. diplomatic posts between them (because Pakistan is one country but four posts, Nigeria has two posts, and so on).

So we have 27 posts that are of some special, but unspecified, security concern. If the 27 were referred to as "posts of special concern," or some such formulation, I think that meaning would be pretty clear. Unfortunately, the Department is referring to them as the "high threat posts," as in the name of the new office that will oversee them, and that naturally makes people assume the State Department has, literally, only 27 posts that are ranked High on its Security Environment Threat List. That assumption would be wrong.

Slight digression. The Security Environment Threat List has been described in multiple publicly available sources of information, such as this one by the General Accountability Office, so it's in the public sphere and may be mentioned by blogs such as mine. Here's how the GAO describes the SETL:

Diplomatic Security, in consultation with posts, other State bureaus, and other government agencies, uses these standards, called the Security Environment Threat List, to assign threat levels to each post. There are six threat categories: international terrorism, indigenous terrorism, political violence, crime, human intelligence, and technical threat. Each post is assigned one of four threat levels for each threat category. A post's threat level dictates what security measures should be in place. The levels are as follows:

• Critical: grave impact on American diplomats
• High: serious impact on American diplomats
• Medium: moderate impact on American diplomats
• Low: minor impact on American diplomats

If you think about the Security Environment Threat List, you might get even more confused by the term "high threat post." Are they the posts that are ranked High for all six categories of threat, or only for some categories? And what about the posts ranked Critical? Are they automatically included, as in high-threat-and-up posts? End digression.

Lately, I see official spokesmen have been referring to these 27 special posts as the "high threat / high risk" posts, which is a mouthful but also an improvement on the original term because it suggests that some kind of risk analysis went into the selection of those special posts.

The only public discussion I've seen of this matter was in the Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing of July 16, which featured testimony by the Acting Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, Gregory Starr, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for High Threat Posts, Bill Miller.



The hearing had low press interest, low attendance by committee members, and – maybe because of that – some uncommonly intelligent discussion about how the Department prioritizes its needs for new embassy construction, security upgrades, and security training. The entire hearing is worth listening to, but a ton of good sense and plain talk about risk management occurs between the 25 and 28 minute marks.

I noticed three particularly interesting things in the testimony of DAS Bill Miller:

• At the 1 hour 8 minute mark, he directly addressed the confusion over terminology. "High threat post," he said, is “a very often-used and not well-defined term," and he stressed that the 27 diplomatic posts which he oversees are not simply those that are rated high on the Security Environment Threat List.

• At the 19 minute mark, he testified that after the attacks of September, 2012, the Department selected certain posts for a higher level of security attention. “The Department weighed criteria to determine which posts are designated high threat / high risk, and there are now 27 posts which fall under this designation.” That statement appears on page 3 of his written testimony. He did not describe the selection criteria.

• At the 1 hour 6 minute mark, he gave a nice capsule description of the risk management process. The Department, he said, needs to constantly balance a host country's capability and willingness to provide security support to our missions with the local threats to those missions and the physical vulnerability of our mission facilities (for example, office buildings that are too flimsy to harden up against attack, or that are too close to surrounding streets, etc).

Considering the totality of DAS Miller's testimony, I think we can see how the 27 posts were selected. Their particular combinations of the big three risk factors - weak or unreliable host country support, high security threats, and physical vulnerabilities to those threats - made them stand out as Diplomatic Security's top tier of concern. Neither DAS Miller nor any other official spokesman has said that in so many words, but if one did, I would be satisfied with that explanation.

Assuming I am interpreting this correctly, a diplomatic mission could have one, or two, or even all three of those risk factors to varying degrees, and that wouldn't necessarily make it an official High Threat Post. But if a post has all three of those things to an exceptionally high degree, then it has won the trifecta of suckiness and gets to be an HTP.

If that's not a good enough explanation of the deeper meaning of the number 27, then I have some more. It's the only number that's a perfect cube (3 to the 3rd power). There are 27 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was the age at which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse all died. And there was that movie about 27 dresses.

But I think I'm right about the Trifecta of Suckiness theory. As I was typing this post this evening, I clicked on a press release about an appropriations bill introduced today to authorize next year's funding for Department of State operations and embassy security. Lo and behold, it includes a section requiring the Department to identify its high threat posts, and defines that term as follows:

The term 'high risk, high threat post' means a United States diplomatic or consular post, as determined by the Secretary, that, among other factors, is -

(A) located in a country with (i) high to critical levels of political violence and terrorism; and (ii) the government of which lacks the ability or willingness to provide adequate security; and,

(B) with mission physical security platforms that fall below the Department of state's established standards.

Ah, ha! The same big three risk factors that featured in DAS Miller's testimony before the SFRC. If that section makes it into the final bill, then next year we'll have an official notification of exactly which posts are HTPs and why.

Until then, if you are serving at a post that is experiencing pervasive suckiness of an exceptionally high degree, then you just might be at an HTP.