A new report from the Government Accountability Office says the Defense Department needs to close a gap in interagency communications to reduce the risk of foreign observation of its testing facilities.

Pentagon and congressional defense leaders are worried that military bases, especially large test ranges, could be potential targets for spying by foreign governments.

“In much of the land that surrounds military bases, part of the federal land is set aside for the installation,” Brian Lepore, director of Defense Capabilities and Management at the GAO, told Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “But the remaining land around it is often managed by other federal agencies.”

“The real concern is actually intelligence collection against the activities that are taking place on the training ranges,” Lepore said. “The way we talk about it in our report is in the sense of a persistent way to have continuous opportunities to observe what’s happening on the ranges.”

The ranges are often used to tryout new weapon systems. Possible foreign adversaries might be interested in observing how those weapon systems perform, so that they could develop effective countermeasures.

“Similarly, the ranges are used for training DoD forces — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines,” Lepore said. “And to the extent that the potential adversary is able to observe how we would fight, there would be a potential to undermine the military superiority that the United States enjoys right now.”

GAO investigators did not uncover any confirmed instances of a foreign adversary observing troop training or weapons testing as Lepore described, but the report stressed the need for DoD to establish a process by which it would be better able to assess potential threats.

“We don’t say in the report, nor can we say for that it is actually happening, or that it isn’t happening,” he said. “We really can’t reach a conclusion either way. But what we think we’ve found, in fact, we’re confident that we found, is a seam between the agencies, a gap, if you will, in the interagency process, that if that gap was closed would position DoD to have a better sense of whether there is a potential, persistent, security threat against a particular training range or test range.”

In its report, GAO recommended DoD strengthen the interagency process to prevent undesirable observations from occurring.

“If the Bureau of Land Management, to use that example, is going to do a minerals mining/extraction lease in near proximity to one of the ranges, the hope is that there would be some way for them to notify DoD about what it is and who it is, even more importantly,” Lepore said. “And then DoD is more positioned to start to think about, ‘Do we have a concern?'”

GAO recommended that DoD determine which test ranges it needed to be most concerned about protecting based on the type of activities taking place.

“That way, DoD is in a position to target its resources, since we’re talking about over 500 ranges, mostly in the United States, but also some in foreign locations,” he said. “So, we wanted to help DoD also think about how do you decide what are the ranges and the activities on those ranges that are most a concern, and which are the ones where you could probably accept a little more risk.”

GAO also recommended that the Secretary of Defense work with the heads of other agencies managing the lands in question to develop a process for improving interagency communications.

If some statutory provision was preventing this from happening, GAO recommended the three main affected agencies — Defense, Interior and Transportation — should joint together and tell Congress what change needed to be made to make it happen.

GAO’s report originated from a House Armed Services Committee mandate placed in a report accompanying the Fiscal Year 2014 Defense Authorization Bill.

“In that report, they mandated that we review several different aspects of concerns about encroachment,” Lepore said. “The way we focused this engagement was to look specifically at, ‘Does DoD have a good process for determining which of the ranges are the most critical?’ And then secondly, ‘Is there a good process within the interagency process for ensuring that DoD has access to kinds of information that it will need in order to tell whether or not there is a particular security threat?'”

GAO inspectors focused mainly on the large DoD training ranges in the western portion of the U.S., including two in Nevada — the Naval Air Station Fallon and Nellis Air Force Base — and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The only facility GAO looked at in the eastern U.S. was the offshore range near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

The scope of GAO’s investigation only concerned land controlled by other federal agencies and did not focus on adjacent properties in private hands or under the control of state or local governments.

“There could conceivably be other threats on all of those areas, but none of those are in the scope of our work,” Lepore said.

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