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Drones can carry any payload, fly without GPS or a radio link, and sit at a SCIF's weakest point. Phil Chance on why drones break both halves of inspectable space, how HPM/IEMI puts mission-critical labs at risk, and the questions design teams should raise with their CTTA and AO.

Our first ICD 705 class in Boston brought builders, Navy security officers, and government contracts staff into one room. Here's what they learned, why a refresher matters when policy and tools change, and two ways to join us next: in person in San Diego this October or on demand.

A PSC commentary on a field letter from Charlie Peart, Secure Facility Integrators, LLC. A colleague of ours, Charlie Peart of Secure Facility Integrators, recently circulated a letter to the secure facility construction community. Charlie has been doing this work since the Cold War, and he wrote to raise a flag about a shift he is seeing in the RF shielding requirements attached to the ICD705 projects now moving through the pipeline. We think his warning is worth reading, an

Every time we finish a consulting engagement, we walk away thinking about the twenty other project teams facing the same questions we just spent three months answering. They are not going to hire us. Most of them do not need to. But they do need a shared understanding of ICD 705 that they do not currently have, and the gap costs them time, money, and sometimes an accreditation. The desk where the Series got made That gap is what we spent the last year building for. The ICD 70

The first real budget number on a SCIF project is almost always a surprise. The surprise has a pattern. The team built the early estimate off commercial benchmarks, the secure facility realities were not in the assumptions, and the gap between the early number and the real number creates a crisis right when the project should be gaining momentum. The cost estimate that will not survive contact with reality The crisis is avoidable. The cost drivers are known. The early plannin

There is a specific moment on every SCIF project where the Construction Security Plan stops being theoretical and starts driving cost, schedule, and accreditation outcomes. That moment is the 30 percent design milestone. Miss it and the project pays. Early-phase design, when the CSP still has room to breathe The Construction Security Plan (CSP) is the document that governs how a SCIF or SAPF is protected during design, construction, and accreditation. ICD 705 requires it. The

Every SCIF project I have been on has stalled at least once because someone was routing a decision to the wrong person. The problem is not usually skill or effort. It is role confusion. The people on the project are capable. They just do not know who owns what. Who owns which question ICD 705 names three roles specifically. The Accrediting Official (AO), the Certified TEMPEST Technical Authority (CTTA), and the Site Security Manager (SSM). Knowing what each one actually does

A SCIF on a military installation is not built the same as a SCIF in a leased downtown office building. The difference is not the standard. The standard is the same. The difference is what sits around the perimeter. Everything outside the SCIF wall shapes what has to happen inside it. That framework has a name in ICD 705 work: Security in Depth, or SID. It is not a new idea. The principle goes back to the ring fortifications of the Roman world, where successive concentric wal

There's a step in every ICD 705 project that teams quietly skip because it looks like paperwork. It's the analytical risk management process, and it decides more about a SCIF's final cost, schedule, and configuration than any other single activity. Done well, it's the document that explains why every other document looks the way it does.

The facility category is one of the first decisions made on a SCIF project and one of the last to get scrutinized. ICD 705 recognizes four permanent categories — Secure Working Area, Open Storage, Closed Storage, and Continuous Operation — each with different construction requirements and cost implications. Which one gets picked early tends to be the one that gets built.

Most people who work on a SCIF project use ICD 705 as if it dropped from the sky in 2010. It did not. The policy stack behind the standard goes back to 1947, and knowing the history is how you tell a real requirement from someone's strong opinion from a past project.

Now available for preorder. First printing ships Friday, May 22, 2026. Book Cover What we built The Department of War Construction & Protection Standards is a single bound reference that consolidates the three documents most SCIF, SAPF, and Open Storage Area projects rely on: DoDM 5205.07 — Special Access Program Security Manual DoDM 5105.21, Volume 2 — SCI Administrative Security Manual DoDM 5200.01, Volume 3 — the physical security standards excerpt Every section is reprodu