The Pentagon mistakenly posted online plans for its new office building in Alexandria, showing exactly how big a bomb would have to be to destroy the facility. The 424-page Army Corps of Engineers document detailed the bomb-proofing design of the Mark Center near the intersection of Interstate 395 and Seminary Road, into which 6,400 defense workers are expected to move this fall, raising questions about security not only at the new office building but other Defense Department sites.
“If a bad guy can get his hands on that information, then he can know to bring a little bigger bomb,” said Kirk Martini, a professor of structural architecture at the University of Virginia. “It gives someone a big head start on trying to go around the engineering and make it fail. That’s going to make anyone very nervous for that information to make it out there.”
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., said the corps’ error is further evidence of the Army’s poor handling of the move to Mark Center, which was part of a Pentagon realignment of military bases and facilities. Local officials have been complaining that the site isn’t at all convenient to public transportation and will likely cause traffic gridlock.
“It’s been a comedy of errors except that nothing is funny about the situation we face,” Moran said. “This is further evidence why the Mark Center was a poor choice. Not only will the Mark Center cause a traffic nightmare, its size and location next to I-395 make it a target. As I said when the Army’s site selection was made, this was the wrong decision and one we’ll all be paying for for years to come.”
Reuters news service, which first discovered the document online, reported that the Mark Center was designed to withstand the blast from 220 pounds of TNT-like material if it’s detonated outside the Mark Center’s security perimeter, or 55 pounds if the perimeter is breached. That limit is a fraction of the size of the bombs used in attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993 and an Oklahoma City office building in 1995.
The bomb-proofing of office buildings varies greatly, Martini said. There are no industry standards for such threats.
“Probably [the Pentagon’s] greater concern is that the information in those documents probably applies to lots of other buildings, and that their entire strategy here may be compromised because of the release of something like this,” Martini said. “It’s not just about this building.”
The plan was removed from the Army Corps of Engineers’ website and from Internet search engines, according to corps spokesman Ken Wells.
It’s unclear how long the document was online. The file was dated 2009 and could have been online since then.
“This was a mistake, and obviously this is something we regret,” Wells said. The Army is investigating how the document got on the Web, he said.
Wells declined to say if the Pentagon was considering any security changes to the Mark Center in light of the leaked document.
