Lawmakers backed pleas for better funding to protect diplomats in an uncertain world, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s absence weighed yesterday on hearings into the Benghazi attack.

Senators probed into the best way forward after a damning report on the September 11 assault on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya found that failures in the State Department’s management led to “grossly inadequate” security there.

The report, by a five-strong Accountability Review Board (ARB), also called for $2.3 billion (€1.73 billion) in extra funding over the next 10 years to fortify and improve some of America’s 275 diplomatic outposts around the world.

“It’s no understatement that our diplomats are on the front lines of the world’s most dangerous places,” Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee said. The changes sweeping the Arab world have shifted the ground rules, meaning that in many places embassies can no longer rely on local police and armed forces to ensure their security, as has been the tradition for two centuries.

But Kerry said Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died along with three other Americans in the Benghazi attack, would have been one of the first to stress that diplomacy cannot be effective if done from behind fortress walls.

“There will always be a tension between the diplomatic imperative to get outside the wire and the security standards that require our diplomats to work behind high walls, concertina wire and full-body searches,” he said.

“We do not want to concertina wire America off from the world,” said Kerry, in what could be taken as a mission statement by the man widely touted to replace Clinton as the next secretary of state in 2013.

Clinton had been due to address yesterday’s hearings, including a later meeting in the House, but has been ordered to rest by doctors after catching a stomach virus that caused her to faint and suffer a concussion.

She has said that she accepts the report’s 29 recommendations and has already begun to implement some of them, including asking Congress to allow her department to use $1.3 billion earmarked for Iraq for diplomatic security.

Some Republican lawmakers had earlier insisted Clinton’s testimony was vital to get to the bottom of the failings that led to the tragedy.

But Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, who stood in for Clinton to testify to the Senate, and Deputy Secretary Bill Burns were met cordially, with many senators wishing their boss a speedy recovery.