The TESS Report · Security
Building the Detail
The most common way to build a protective detail is backwards. Someone counts heads, assigns bodies to posts, and calls it coverage. Then the principal moves, and everyone finds out at once what was never decided — who owns the route, what happens when the plan breaks, and who has the authority to say stop.
That is the problem Nic Moretto takes apart in “Building the Detail,” published September 1, 2026 on EP Wired, the executive protection magazine. The article walks through how a detail is actually assembled — assets, ground, team, rules of engagement, and a final check before anyone deploys — and why the sequence matters more than the size of the roster. You can read it here: “Building the Detail” on EP Wired.
The article opens with the standard it holds the work to:
A protective detail is not a number of people. It is a set of functions, assembled in order, and the order is not a preference.
Those are the article’s words, and they are the way we run our own executive protection work. Our executive protection service is built the same way: the advance work comes first, the people are assigned to functions rather than scattered across a schedule, and every contingency has one named owner — with one person holding go, hold, and abort. Headcount is the last decision, not the first.
This piece also sits one layer down from another of Nic’s EP Wired articles on why security programs fail before a threat ever arrives — the organisational layer above the individual detail. Read together, the argument is consistent: whether it is one movement or a whole program, security holds when functions and owners are defined in advance, and it fails when they are assumed.
Nic has been writing for EP Wired’s CSO and EP manager readership throughout 2026, and this is the most recent entry — a practitioner’s sequence for a single detail, written for the people who would run one. If you are responsible for a principal’s movement and want to see how the assembly order works before your next deployment, the article is worth your time at the link above.
