Benghazi ARB Follow-Up: Quick Comment Part 2

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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Better Late Than Never

Design sketch of a new U.S. Embassy Beirut

While the saga of the on-and-off new consulate construction project in Jeddah plays out, I should point out that the U.S. government recently issued a solicitation for the design and construction of a new U.S. Embassy in Beirut. That's always a good thing.

What's not such a good thing is that the solicitation was dated March 28, 2013, which is just three weeks short of thirty years since the Beirut embassy bombing. That incident led to the Inman Commission and to the business of building Fortress Embassies which has gone on ever since. Now, thirty long years later, we might be close to finally building a Fortress in Beirut.

From the solicitation:

This will be a design-bid-build project. The resultant contract shall be fixed price. The estimated construction cost is $526.231 million.

The new Embassy compound will be constructed on U.S. Government-owned property located in Aoukar, approximately 11 km north of Beirut city neat the site of the existing U.S. Embassy compound. The complex of buildings will be in the range of 78,636 gross square meters in area and will include a new Chancery, General Services Office/support buildings, parking structure, TDY lodging facility, Marine Security Guard Quarters (MSGQ), Chief of Missions Residence (CMR), Deputy Chief of Missions Residence (DCMR), Staff Housing, Compound Access Control (CAC) facilities, RSO Annex, Utility Building, Community Center, and vehicular/pedestrian screening facilities. The project site is approximately 17.8 hectare (43 acres) located on a steep hillside in a neighborhood of residential and light commercial uses. The land slopes east to west with a topographic change of approximately 100 meters. This project will be designed and constructed to achieve, as a goal, a LEED Silver rating.

By the way, the sketch I inserted above is not connected to the present solicitation. It is from the very first attempt to build a new U.S. Embassy in Beirut, back in 1957. That project was suspended during the Lebanese Civil War of 1958. History keeps repeating, huh?

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U.S. Consulate Herat Officially Opens

Deputy Secretary William J. Burns delivered the remarks at today's ceremony to open the new U.S. Consulate in Herat, Afghanistan:

And so we are here to celebrate the opening of the consulate -- this remarkable refurbished facility, leased from the Municipality of Herat. This was truly a community effort – we purchased local products to use in the refurbishment, some of which you can see on display in the waiting room next door. World-class quality, Chesht-e-Sharif marble now graces some of the floors. Every week, on average, more than 70 Afghans contributed their time and skills to the consulate’s construction. One expert carpenter turned plain packing crates into beautifully carved room dividers. And artwork produced by students from Herat University is displayed on the walls of the consulate.

That "remarkable refurbished facility" is not bad. Kudos to OBO.

As for the other remarkable refurbished facility in Afghanistan, the less said, the better.

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A Tale Of Two Consulates (Or, "Well, At Least Herat Wasn't Screwed Up")

Photo from Qavi Engineers Website

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It's been one full week since the WaPo disclosed the totally screwed-up minimally excellent conversion of the Mazar Hotel to serve as one of our two new U.S. Consulates in Afghanistan. The Mazar project was so very, very, minimally excellent that the building was rejected by Ambassador Crocker after the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) worked on it for three years and spent $80 million. (See more here).  

I am astonished by the lack of any particular public or Congressional outrage to that slow-motion train wreck of a building project. Maybe that outrage happened and I didn't notice it, or maybe we have become numb to costly fiascoes on the part of the government.    

In the For What It's Worth Department, I notice that the other new consulate acquisition and fit-out project in Afghanistan, the one that happened in Herat, appears to really have been excellent. That means OBO is 1-for-2, and that is something it could say in its defense, assuming some Oversight Committee ever wakes up and inquires.

How did Herat go so right? It looks like a combination of picking the right kind of property, and hiring the right kind of local contractor.

The site that OBO leased in Herat was formerly a hotel, the same as in Mazar. But this hotel is located on top of a hill in between two parks on the outskirts of the city, and has substantial distance between the building and the nearest road. Therefore, it avoids the problems that make the Mazar site so inherently vulnerable, i.e., uncontrolled buildings adjacent to our perimeter wall, near-by higher buildings and other overlooking points, and short setback. I could find out that information after a few minutes of searching on the term "Five-Star Hotel, Herat." 

The contractor that OBO used in Herat was one with a ten-year track record of successful performance on other U.S. government projects, according to its website.
 

This Project [the conversion of the Five-Star Hotel] was awarded after QEL’s outstanding performance at US Consulate, Lahore. The project was awarded on a “sole source” basis making QEL the first Pakistani Construction company to be awarded a sole sourced construction contract in a third country.

The contractor's website lists the project scope of work, which includes heavy-duty security upgrades such as a perimeter wall with guard towers, compound access control facilities, rated anti-ram vehicle barriers, inspection and screening areas, hard doors and windows, and a safe haven inside the office building.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of all that stuff personally, of course, but the website quotes the OBO Project Director saying complimentary things, and it has a photo of  a Certificate of Appreciation signed by the Consul General and Senior Civilian Representative, Western Afghanistan. They can refute it if it's false.

To misquote Dickens, "it was the best of projects, it was the worst of projects, it was the age of wise management, it was the age of foolish management, it was the epoch of good site-selection, it was the epoch of poor site-selection, it was the season of Care, it was the season of Carelessness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way if Congress ever makes us explain how this happened."

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Mazar-e-Sharif - The Mud, The Manure, And The Money

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

[Note on Monday morning - The 'hover color' of the links is now back to a color that you can actually see. My apologies. While I am tempted to claim color-blindness, the truth is that I was careless while messing with the template several days ago, and I didn't notice that the links were no longer noticeable. And my links are important to me, since they are there to document the public availability of so many Matters of Official Concern.]

I'm having a pleasant weekend at home, getting my fly fishing gear ready for an outing next week, reading the excellent George Kennan biography (see the review by Henry Kissinger), and just generally lazing around. But the biggest reason why I'm having a pleasant weekend is that I am not the Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) today.

As you may have read in the WaPo, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan has declined to occupy the newly-completed interim consulate facility in Mazar-e-Sharif due to concerns about its poor security. It was newly completed by OBO. Completed at what the WaPo reports was a cost of $80 million. And now it's worthless.

As Domani Spero pointed out earlier today, that's a lot of money and wishful thinking down the drain, leaving behind a lot of good questions that now need to be answered.

The WaPo has a leaked memo, reportedly signed by the DCM in Kabul and dated this past January, which documents serious security deficiencies of the interim facility. The memo is reported to be "previously undisclosed" but the WaPo does not say that it is classified. I have seen nothing as of now that indicates the memo is classified, as opposed to just "leaked," therefore, it seems to be fair game for public comment by me.

I'll do a point-by-point reaction to the memo snippets that were quoted in the WaPo. But first, let's go to what will be the the most often commented upon feature of the interim facility. I refer, of course, to the manure.

"The structure’s outer perimeter wall is composed of sun-dried bricks made from mud, straw and manure, and the contractor used untreated timber for the roof, the memo says".

Now, bricks made of sun-dried mud, often with straw and manure added to the mix to reduce cracking, are usually known as "adobe." Adobe is a time-honored construction material. Some of the oldest structures in existence today were built with adobe. The bricks have excellent thermal properties. Plus, it's all 100% organic, locally-sourced, and produced by small entrepreneurs, so hippies ought to like it. No large corporations are involved in producing it, so Occupy Wall Street ought to embrace it.

Mud bricks drying

The interim facility already had a perimeter wall made of sun-dried mud bricks when OBO leased the place. It is not clear to me that it necessarily needed to be replaced with a wall made of something else, especially when the facility was to be a short-term fix. Perimeters can be upgraded by supplemental measures, anyway.

But forget it! "Mud and manure" makes the perfect laugh line for a Congressional oversight hearing.

The interim consular facility in Mazar was not constructed by OBO. It is a short-term leased property, the former Mazar Hotel. OBO's plan was to fit-out and refurbish the place as office and residential space for 37 'desk positions' plus support staff, in response to an urgent requirement from Special Envoy Holbrooke to establish a diplomatic presence in Northern Afghanistan. A permanent facility elsewhere in Mazar was to follow. (I take those details from a published official report on U.S. civilian uplift in Afghanistan.)

That is the kind of hasty acquisition and fit-out that OBO has done many times before. Waivers of security standards and public law (here) are almost always necessary in those situations, and the WaPo reports that it was necessary in Mazar. That alone is not particularly notable.

The embassy's key concerns with the finished product, as reported by the WaPo, are:

"The embassy memo says the facility was far from ideal from the start ... The space between the outer perimeter wall and buildings inside — a distance known as “setback” in war zone construction — was not up to U.S. diplomatic standards ... "

I am not surprised. The setback distance required by standards is 30 meters, as noted in many publicly available sources, including 12 FAM 300, and it is notoriously difficult to find an available existing urban property with that much setback.

"The complex was surrounded by several tall buildings from which an attack could easily be launched."

That one also leaves me unsurprised. Nearly any building in nearly any city will have taller buildings within the effective range of commonly available small arms, which is about 500 meters in the case of the RPG, for example.

"Among the corners cut in the interest of expediency, the memo says, was failing to assess how well the facility could withstand a car bombing, a task normally carried out by the department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations ... "

This strikes me as the most serious of the concerns reported. Sheer reality dictates that some security standards may have to be waived to inhabit a preexisting building, but how can we know whether we are accepting an unreasonable amount of risk for the employees posted in Mazar unless we have a clear idea of how large a bomb it would take to knock the building down?  

"We believe the survey will show that a [car bomb] would cause catastrophic failure of the building in light of the local construction techniques and materials,”[DCM] Kelly wrote. The structure’s outer perimeter wall is composed of sun-dried bricks made from mud, straw and manure, and the contractor used untreated timber for the roof, the memo says."

I'm not so sure. Maybe it would catastrophically fail, but not merely because the building is of local construction. Anyway, what basis does the DCM have for his belief it would collapse? How will we know unless a blast vulnerability study is conducted? Presumably, OBO will not conduct one now. Regarding the mud-and-manure perimeter wall, a perimeter wall has nothing to do with the structure of a separate building, so it really doesn't matter as regards blast survivability.  

"The entire compound is surrounded by buildings with overwatch and there is almost no space on the compound that cannot be watched, or fired upon, from an elevated position outside the compound”

As I said above, any city will have elevated positions outside the compound. A city in mountainous terrain, like Mazar, will have more of them than most.

And so, the first finger of blame has been pointed. Will OBO point one back?

OBO might have some cause. According to page 12 of this interview with a Foreign Service Officer who served in Mazar from December 2009 to June 2011 and helped to prepare for the opening of the Consulate, the post insisted on at least one expensive and time-consuming change to OBO's original plans.

Q. This one is not a hardened facility [referring to the interim consulate in the Mazar Hotel]? I thought that’s how we build these things.

A. This is a temporary facility and it is being constructed with a number of security construction waivers. It meets the minimum security requirements and in fact we had several visits by OBO (State Department Overseas Buildings Office) leadership and one of the reasons for the delay in the project is, it was decided to replace all of the 104 windows in the facility with the 15 minute FEBR (Force Ballistic Resistant) windows rather than a locally constructed compromise, which would have been five minute windows. By the time that these were ordered, manufactured, air freighted, and installed, the project was set back four to five months.

That many security windows would cost a good chunk of change, and installing them in a preexisting building might cause even more expensive building structural complications. Was that a reasonable change to make for a temporary building? I can't say, but, it is exactly the kind of thing that OBO might cite in its own defense.  

This promises to get good. I mean, it does for those of us who don't work in OBO or Mazar.

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