Today the United States faced tragedy as 12 people were killed at the military base in Washington DC. One or two gunmen entered the Washington Navy Yard (in DC) and killed people on the base. On his Facebook page, Wayne Dupree (News Ninja) wanted to remind people that in order to get onto the base, you had to have clearance. As a former anti-terrorism officer, I happen to know a little bit about base security. Just because you need to pass security in order to get onto a military base doesn’t mean that the base is 100% safe. While the Pass & ID office is important and does keep the random terrorist from entering a military base and shooting the place up, it will never be 100% foolproof. Diligence is always important, even on base.
As part of my duties as the anti-terrorism officer, I was in charge of all of the Pass & ID offices on four bases. We had one entrance two the hospital, the housing base, and the shopping base. There were two entrances onto the main working base. Although there was a NATO base in the area, that was a separate deal that I wasn’t involved with (although I did train many of the NATO personnel in terrorist protection).
We had a lot of people coming and going on those bases. Most of the people coming onto the bases were the people that worked there every day. They were either military personnel or civilians that worked in the various offices there. We also had a lot of family members that lived in the area. They were able to enter all of the bases with their ID cards. Friends would also be able to enter the base, if accompanied by the military member. In addition to these groups, there was another group of people that would regularly enter the base: the contractors.
Contractors would have access to the base as needed to perform their duties. On the bases that I worked at, there was often a lot of construction going on. At a Navy Yard, you would also expect a lot of construction to be going on. Some contractors needed regular access to the base. Others might only need to come in once or twice, if they had a specialized, non-regular need to come in. The Pass & ID office had to manage all of these people wishing to gain entrance.
I managed these Pass & ID offices after the September 11th attacks. For probably about six months after these attacks, we were under a very high level of security. Many of the security workers had to work twelve hour days during this time just to keep the security up. We often had checkpoints where we would inspect a person’s bags as they entered the base. While I do not know what the level of security was at the Washington DC base, it’s doubtful that they were at a higher security level than we were at. Still, our base was never 100% secure. No base will ever be 100% secure. Nothing is ever 100% secure.
There are a few ways that a bad guy could access the base in Washington DC. They could have stolen someone’s ID. They might have been able to forge an ID. They could have even taken jobs as construction workers and come onto the base legitimately as contractors.
The facts of this incident are still coming out. We don’t know exactly how the suspect(s) gained access to the base. What I do know is that a determined terrorist can find a way to get the job done. Terrorists, like progressives, can be very patient. They are willing to take ten years (or more) to plan an attack, if necessary. Now, an attack like this wouldn’t take ten years to plan, but it would be very simple for a terrorist to plan and execute an attack like this in about a year. All they would have to do is recruit someone that had skills that could be used on a military base like this. This recruit would start working as a contractor for the base, and then make the attack. There’s not much you can do to protect against an attack like this except to have good intelligence. That’s not scan and save everybody’s email intelligence either. It’s actually monitoring the organizations that are known to be committing terrorism. But we don’t do that.
