Many of the 130 key foreign installations already meet U.S. standards of assurance that essential services will remain intact during the Year 2000 transition. Verga said that number is expected to rise rapidly during the final three months of this year as efforts intensify to collect information from host governments. There are 300 U.S. overseas installations worldwide. But it hasn't always been that way. Verga said DoD went through several frustrating months during which host nations or local officials were reluctant to or unable to provide U.S. commanders with reliable information on their systems' abilities to handle the Year 2000 date change.
Nobody likes to put themselves on report.
The turnaround, Verga said, came when DoD and the State Department co-chaired an international interagency group specifically designed to work with host nations and to compile realistic assessments of their Y2K status in areas critical to DoD operations. The interagency group then formed teams to visit embassy personnel, local officials and service providers in assigned regions. We've been able to fill in a lot of the blanks. In many cases, the information we needed was unknown. Those unknowns, he explained, were of particular concern.