Has the USA learned anything about Perimeter Security in the Past Decade?

Case #1: The USS Cole -- a man in a small boat who has not been identified in any way approaches to within 10 yards of the USS Cole. He looks like he might be delivering vegetables. But actually his boat contains a bomb. Many US lives are lost.





Case #2 Ten years later a man approaches a CIA Camp in Afghanistan. He is unidentifed, but he is wearing the uniform of the Aghanistan Army. He's allowed into the camp. Under his uniform he's wearing an explosive vest. Many US lives are lost.





Now, you may be thinking, yes but why didn't you tell the government about perimeter security right after the USS Cole incident. I did, as a consultant to NCIS, at the direction of the Secretary of the Navy, I did.





Since that time the methods available for very reliable biometric identification have gotten cheaper, simpler and faster. They rely on the veins in the hand, which are just as distinctive as the iris of the eye, or the structure of the face.





That CIA camp in Afghanistan only had a few dozen people who were authorized to be in the camp at all. Let's say 100 people. Well, that data could be stored in .0000000001% of a chip, in a very small battery power machine. It's not a budget buster for the US government to get that done. With such a machine, and a single gate, there would be no need to speculate about somebody's identity based on their uniform. Any person gaining ingress into the camp would be positively identified. Total cost, amortized over say 10,000 hand scans, about 17 cents per scan.





Hillary's got $100 Billion to drop on the enviros at Copenhagen, but we can't find 17 cents to keep patriots and heros safe from harm. In 10 years we have learned nothing, nada, nihil, zip, zilch about perimeter security. We can't keep bombers off our planes, crashers out of White House dinner parties. We are hapless, lame, feckless.





We accept this because we are not very political people. Most of us just don't care. In a more mentally alert nation, like Switzerland for example, the kind of failures we routinely have would be corrected. Someone would take steps -- fixes would be put in place. If I gave my perimeter security presentation to the Swiss, they would have done something about it. Caring is actually important to getting things done.|||We have learned plenty from our failures. If you have ever been to a comabat zone, you will see the security. The problem with Afghanistan we are a largely international force there. That means you have soldiers from all over the world there providing security. US forces actually dont handle security alone on some of the biggest bases in Afghanistan. You also have smaller firebases that are joint US, Afghan, and ISAF. If you have a sympathizer there and let someone through the gate, it won't make a difference how many biometric systems you have in place. Technology isnt always a fix for human error. How would a biometric system stop anyone from running a boat into a ship? Thats a human failure, not something a system can fix.





That FOB is not a CIA only base. It has soldiers there as well. The story now is that the attacker was let into the FOB because he was being turned into an informant by the CIA.