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Letter Re: Bureaucratic Restrictions on Defensive Wire and Obstacles
Sir
[Regarding your recent mention of the
ban on barbed wire in the city of Newark, New Jersey,] they aren't the
only ones. I am currently in Kabul [, Afghanistan] doing contract security
work and we wanted to improve
the
security
of
the compound
we live
in. We are doing so by adding
HESCO
bastions made
into
fighting positions on the outside of our perimeter wall. As our workers were
finishing the last of them, the police came by to tell us that we could not
put up HESCOs on the street. When I got out there I asked the police why we
could not put out HESCOs. The reply was that someone in parliament thought
it made the city look like a war zone and that they would no longer be allowed.
This ignores the fact that Kabul actually is in a war zone. We also
had the bombed-out hull of a BTR-152 [Russian Armored Personnel Carrier] alongside
the
building but that was fine, apparently.
I solved the problem by saying that they were not HESCOs, that we planned to
face them with plywood and plant flowers in them. It wasn't for force protection,
it was part of our neighborhood beautification program. The workers laughed,
the police scowled and within a week we had them enclosed in lumber and had
flowers planted on our fighting positions. - Jake (Vacationing in Kabul)
