Reader Question – CFATS Security Bootcamp

Last week a reader posted a question to an unrelated blog post asking: “Haven't seen you mention this course yet. Any comments on content or instructor?” The reader provided a link to the ‘CFATS Security Bootcamp’ that will be conducted in Orlando, FL on June 15th and 16th. Its taken me a while to get around to this, but here is the answer to that question.

First off let me say that I have seen mention of this course and a few other ‘bootcamp’ courses conducted by DHS Campus. My initial response has been colored by the fact that I spent three years as a Drill Sergeant at Ft. Benning; I am immediately suspicious of any training course that calls it self a bootcamp. Most of the them that I have seen over the years have focused on the stereotype of yelling instructors and behavior that borders on physical abuse to justify that name; needless to say, I haven’t been impressed with those courses.

My experiences had led me to more or less assume that the CFATS Security Bootcamp was more of the same. Thanks to this Reader Question I found that I have apparently been doing Jeremy Kelley and his folks at DHS Campus a disservice by not giving them the attention their course appears to deserve.

The Instructor

The first thing that I noticed when I went to the page to which I was directed by the Reader’s question was the name of the instructor, Edward D. Clark. Ed (I keep wanting to say ‘John’; I’m a big fan of the Jack Ryan novels of Tom Clancy) has been a reader and commentor on this blog for sometime now. His comments and questions over the years, both posted as comments or personally emailed, have always been practical and well thought out.

That is to be expected given his Special Forces background and his work on homeland security issues, both inside and outside of the government over the years. Given this background for the principle instructor I decided that the course certainly deserved a closer look.

The Course

The course brochure provides a brief description of the course agenda. The breadth of the topics to be covered is fairly impressive for a two day course. You have a number of the typical topics that one would commonly expect for a CFATS training course, risk-base performance standards, SSP/ASP, CFATS administration and IEDs. There are some interesting topics added to this course that I haven’t seen before including the fundamentals of risk management and crowd control. I asked Ed about the former and he noted that this was a student requested item; “Probably because it is in the regulations” (actually it is a suggested training requirement in the RBPS Guidance Document, pg 190, table C5).

The time for each of the classes is relatively short, just 45 minutes. This certainly doesn’t give enough time to make the students experts in the topic by any means. Ed explains that the course is “directed towards employees with security duties and like most bootcamps, provide them with the basics of what they need to know when they arrive at their first ‘duty station’ ”. I think this is a reasonable approach to CFATS training, especially for a two-day course.

Recommendation

I have not had a chance to sit through any of this training, so I can’t actually tell you that the course is a good course. I can say that, based upon the information provided and Ed Clark’s background, if I had a limited training budget for members of my primary security team that were not trained security professionals, I would certainly consider sending them to this course.

NOTE: As always I would appreciate any reader that attends this course, or any other CFATS related course for that matter, providing me with their assessment of the training program.