'20 under 40' Class of 2018—Colby Meshey

Colby Meshey, 36

Deputy director, security services division, Pentagon Force Protection Agency

Washington D.C.

Colby Meshey began working for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA) in 2007. Prior to joining PFPA, he served in the Air Force for seven years, where he worked in the security forces that protected critical assets at FE Warren AFB in Wyoming, and was a member of the Distinguished Visitor Security Team at Andrews AFB in Maryland.

Working at the PFPA, Meshey led Pentagon Sentry, an effort to modernize both electronic and physical security across the Pentagon Reservation. Efforts included a complete tear-down and reconstruction of regulatory compliant access control points and security facilities.

“We are at a point now where we have modern and standardized facilities that are flexible enough to adapt to the changing threat conditions that face our officers,” Meshey explained. “Achieving this flexibility in post operations is no small feat as we have essentially re-shaped our physical security perimeter across the Reservation in the midst of a dense, complex, urban environment within one of the National Capital Region's busiest transportation hubs.”

In his current role, Meshey manages close to 150 personnel, both contractor and government. “There are a large number of physical and electronic security accomplishments we are particularly proud of at PFPA, including becoming one of the first HSPD-12 compliant DoD facilities,” Meshey explained. Adopting this “enterprise” approach across all of PFPA's protected facilities throughout the National Capital Region is something the team continues to work on today.

In terms of technology on the horizon, PFPA has set itself up to make use of multimodal biometrics (fingerprint and iris) at areas where warranted. Additionally, a key area of focus has been ensuring that alarm information (video, access control, intrusion detection) is useable and actionable for the end-user and responder. “We've spent a considerable amount of effort driving down alarm counts while paying attention to what the experience of alarm management is like for our operations center,” Meshey noted.