Well said. I'm a little tired of all the armchair amateurs, news reporters, politicians criticising the base for not preventing the activists from getting onto the base. I've worked on a number of Defence Industry and MOD bases and the critics simply don't appreciate how big some of these are, how long the perimeters are. The technology and manpower required to patrol this in the manner that these critics expect is enormous and the budget just isn't there. And if that was to be rectified the same bunch of critics would be out complaining about defence spending.
No one talking about the "attack" on the RAF refueling aircraft?
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The "military" grade ones are using multiple camera sensors and/or with the latest ones AI to literally be able to detect a person at up to 2km at night down to extremely low light levels the second part of my post was commercial variants which information is more readily available which may be more limited.
With AI these days it could automate panning and scanning a large area rapidly anyhow even with cameras which need to zoom to obtain sufficient details.
Not sure why you keep throwing obstacles in which aren't insurmountable and/or have been solved for years now on civilian commercial sites, etc.
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Unfortunately this seems to be the way with our military over the years - like some of the posters above with military connections, stuck in the past and would rather throw obstacles in the way of doing anything different until forced to adapt as happened many times i.e. when confronted by the Boers, but these days our military is to small and concentrated to necessarily recover from learning the hard way from a serious attack.
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Military grade - poor specs written by someone who doesn’t understand the subject matter, a dodgy contract with no legal input, bid for by a company who doesn’t understand the product in question, and awarded to the cheapest contractor.
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Add to that - contract awarded to the cheapest contractor who then applies eye-watering rates for any work (like changes) that is not covered by the initial statement of work.
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Wouldn't a simple solution just be to electrify the fence?
Problem solved, even in the unlikely event they find a way to disable it that would set off alarms and security would know to scramble as the base was under attack.
They make tools specifically certified cutting live cables and in any case almost all tools come with rubber insulated handles for this very reason even if they are not certified.
That’s also before you consider any liability for someone who just happens to touch it while not attempting to break in.
An off the shelf battery angle grinder from Aldi can cut through most metal fencing is seconds and it’s made from plastic…
I’ve seen a video of someone cutting through an EV charging cable which was plugged in and charging a car (can draw up to 500A at 800v e.g. insta death) with an off the shelf angle grinder. Lots of sparks, charger shuts down, thief runs off with cable to weigh in for £3.50.
Short of speed spending £lol building ‘the wall’ and makingmexico palatine action pay for it, I’m not sure there is an easy way of stoping a determined person from attempting to enter the base without people, lots of people (and lots of money).
That’s also before you consider any liability for someone who just happens to touch it while not attempting to break in.
An off the shelf battery angle grinder from Aldi can cut through most metal fencing is seconds and it’s made from plastic…
I’ve seen a video of someone cutting through an EV charging cable which was plugged in and charging a car (can draw up to 500A at 800v e.g. insta death) with an off the shelf angle grinder. Lots of sparks, charger shuts down, thief runs off with cable to weigh in for £3.50.
Short of speed spending £lol building ‘the wall’ and making
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Yeah just “Airforce stop stand still”. Turned out it was some guy that gets drunk and tries to walk onto camp for whatever reason. He completely ignored me… lol
When I was on my fitters course at Cosford someone on guard was bored and started playing Soldier a bit too much and had a ND into the ground and ricochet over the married quarters.
Yes, not to mention things like ground radar also detect people - the idea that detecting the difference between a human and a rabbit is a significant issue here is a bit farcical.
In fact, many years ago, even when I was a kid in cadets, I remember a friend leaning on the fence at the camp we were staying in and shortly after, a landrover pulled up asking us not to touch the fence - it had wires/sensors running along it which had triggered an alarm in the guardroom.
And doing so should trigger an alarm and send a vehicle up there, or in this case, perhaps trigger a phone call to whoever was at the flightline.
It's not just that they got into the facility, it's that they also made it to the flight line (where there should be additional security), and not only that, they managed to take the time to vandalise some aircraft and get away without being caught.
This isn't some small RAF base either, it's one of the major ones, that they seemingly weren't even detected is an absolute failure and there isn't much excuse for it.
You might want to look at a satellite image of RAF Brize Norton and what is surroundings actually are. Where are you imagining a person is going to be seen 5.5km from this base?
I’m not sure why you are quoting me here. Your reply has no relevance to the context of my post and what it was responding to (the problem would be solved by a simple electric fence). At no point did I say it wasn’t a massive security failure and a massive embarrassment.
The whole context of my posts in this thread is that adding the layers of suggested security improvements is much more expensive than people give it credit for at such a scale, as you say these bases are massive. The impression given in the thread is that they’ll stick up a few cameras and its job jobbed, the reality is miles away from that.
The cost of any additional security measures starts in millions and probably ends in the 10’s of millions, per base. Anything that involves people has a perpetual ever increasing cost.
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I'm quite aware of the perimeter at Brize Norton, I was replying to a poster who was throwing complications seemingly based on the limitations of CCTV in the 90s/early 2000s.
No one claimed it was free, that it costs money seeme like a completely mundane point to make - in the grand scheme of things some CCTV and sensors isn't a huge expense, in fact do we know for sure we didn't have much of that in place and there wasn't some human error/negligence on the part of the people who were supposed to be providing security (mixture of RAF Police and civilians IIRC) and perhaps a management failure too here?
Management and/or human error wouldn't surprise me - we have a largish site at work which once had the fuel storage robbed (despite plenty of fences and CCTV, etc.) due to a mixture of one person on security being absolutely lazy and the other being in on it.
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shouldn't they atleast have motion sesnors, thermal cameras or something.
Putin would have been doing all kinds of crap if he would have knew how pathetic base defences are.
wasn't there a real risk of a terror attack/lone cell attack from Iran around the same time this happened too. you'd think they would atleast have beefed up security even temporarily
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From the reports it seems Russia have been dry running, possibly for intimidation purposes, drone attacks from off-shore "ghost fleet" ships against some military bases in the US.
I suspect the Russians (and our other enemies) know in very great detail just where the holes in our defenses are.
Should things escalate, we're going to find that out the hard way.
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We will happily let a terrorist outfit remove a very expensive plane from service with a repair cost of £15-25M because we don't want to spend £1m-£10m on overhauling base security to stop this happening, gotcha..
Having lots of mates in the armed forces and civil service, the next thing that is obvious is the perimeter guards will need to be on a 3 day remote working pattern with a day off for 'planning' , I'm sure the HR specialist base commander has already got the safe spaces prepared, 5 counsellors per headcount and an extra 20 duvet days added to the already generous allowance because of some hurty words on X/Facebook.
As ridiculous as I tried to make that sound, from conversations I've had it's not a million miles from reality either..
Having lots of mates in the armed forces and civil service, the next thing that is obvious is the perimeter guards will need to be on a 3 day remote working pattern with a day off for 'planning' , I'm sure the HR specialist base commander has already got the safe spaces prepared, 5 counsellors per headcount and an extra 20 duvet days added to the already generous allowance because of some hurty words on X/Facebook.
As ridiculous as I tried to make that sound, from conversations I've had it's not a million miles from reality either..
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