Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
And my point is that those are all Project assets, people for whom risking their lives is part of the job description and whose loss is an unfortunate cost of doing business. You do not necessarily need a "safe zone" to have those assets exposed and in use, but you DO need one to have your civilians out. How long does it take to secure things adequately to take that risk? I would be surprised if there was a "good" situation where you really felt you could secure the area and assemble housing and overcome the other problems in less than a year or two. And security concerns are likely to drive that back a couple of years more. At the point where you are so free to operate openly, it probably makes more sense to move major operations out of Nevada anyway!
Heck, if I were designing Prime and Second Base, I would design Prime to be in charge for the first 2-5 years and design Second to take over once open operations were possible. Prime Base needs to be tremendously secret and secure to get to and through the first stages of the Project, getting through after that has very different design considerations!
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I do see where you are coming from and agree the security risk arising from being overrun by refugees, warlords and religious fanatics in the early years if Prime has a more or less permanent surface structure is great. A permanent settlement in the early years is problem. But we are talking about people with families and the desire to get back to a "normal" existence again. What policies were in place for this is the question. One that gets very murky.
The Counsel of Tomorrow was assembled by Bruce Morrow. He told them what he saw and must have had a way to reasonably prove he traveled time. Prime Base is part of the plan the CoT was working toward, but Bruce Morrow wanted no knowledge of its location. How much of the leadership adopted a similar viewpoint, assigning plans for Prime Bases location and construction to the equivalent of a Special Access Program. Only those in the SAP would know where Prime Base would be and what the operational protocols would be with no oversight and review except in a need to know situation. The members would most likely be engineers, psychologist and the workers building and planning for many years underground. Those with extensive military and security backgrounds would have been pressed into the role of instructors doing combat training for team members as they enter the Project and not available to be in the SAP. Security planning might get limited to operational security during construction. As such, the discussions mentioned in the Prime Base module that lead to building the settlement could have been discussed prior to the war and considered acceptable risks. This would seem to be supported by the lack of sound military planning during the failed rescue and the porous security perimeter that allowed insurgents to bring in two WMDs into the settlement.
Better planning could have been done, that is a given. The compartmentalized secrecy in the Project tends to work against coordination and sharing of limited resources.