Homeland Security Preparedness: Governor's Guideline to Action - Essay Example

?Preparedness 520 White Paper – Governor's Guideline to Action While it is certainly true that if national intelligence had been better able to hear signal from noise 9/11 may have been prevented, if state and local intelligence had pieced together suspicious activity it may also have stopped the tragedy. State and local activity is far from a backseat player in homeland security: In fact, state and local law enforcement, policy and intelligence sharing initiatives are the country's first line of defense. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute joins Heritage Foundation critics further to the right of the political spectrum in condemning the minimal role of state governments in the new security regime after 9/11. “The role of state and local governments as well as the nation's first responder community has been viewed largely as providing quick reaction and consequence mitigation to any attacks that occur despite the best effort of the federal system to prevent it...In fact, this image is not correct; local governments must do a great deal more than prepare for the consequence management role. In particular, they must also pay a great deal of attention to prevention efforts. To date they have not done nearly enough in this regard” (O'Hanlon, 2005). O'Hanlon recommends that state and local governments can be first responders in all arenas. The Governor's office should make sure that there is a dedicated anti-terrorism task force at the state level, and any sufficiently large cities should have an anti-terrorism task force operating out of a major crimes unit. Local miscommunication and planning was part of the slow response to 9/11. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “[A] 'generic' flight plan – prepared to get the aircraft airborne and out of local airspace quickly – incorrectly led the Langley fighters to believe they were ordered to fly due east... for 60 miles... the lead pilot and local FAA controller incorrectly assumed the flight plan instruction to go '090 for 60' superseded the original scramble order” (p. 27). Inadequate protocols for communication and coordination between local, state and federal authorities can have lethal consequences. Similarly, the FBI's limited terrorism response pre-9/11 was due to their being tied too closely with state and local agencies such that they were only interested in pursuing the needs of state and local areas such as organized crime and white-collar offenses (p. 74). O'Hanlon notes that state governments do not have to do everything and be everywhere. “it is not necessary to equip all three million first responders in the United States with state of the art chemical protective gear or interoperable communications systems. Equipping specialized teams within each major jurisdiction with such capabilities, and creating several mobile communications headquarters with interoperable technology, are less expensive and more quickly doable propositions. It is not necessary that every fireman’s radio can talk to every police officer’s radio; a certain number of mobile interoperable communications vans that can be quickly deployed to a problem site are a more cost-effective solution. They can allow quick coordination and cross-communication through the squad or team leaders of each type of organization (that would have been enough to save many firefighters on September 11, 2001 in New York). A large city could purchase several dozen, at $1 million each, for a reasonable cost of several tens of millions of dollars” (O'Hanlon, 2005). The Governor's Office should follow this approach. While all EMS and medical responders, police units, hospitals and other state agencies do not need to have extensive anti-terror preparation, specialized units should and should have access to top-of-the line gear. As O'Hanlon illustrates, doing so not only is cost-effective but in any respect is often fungible to every day operations: Communications vans like the one above can also be used in major crimes like bank robberies. O'Hanlon recommends $5 billion across the entire country for investment: $200 million would be a reasonable two-year benchmark here. Evacuation plans need to be revised to take into account NBC threats such as dirty bombs (O'Hanlon, 2005). Current evacuation and response plans for such attacks tend to be unrealistic. Reviewing them is easy and does not involve spreading new resources out among all first responders but instead providing better command and control. Instead of buying piecemeal, state, local and federal authorities should work together to purchase relevant equipment in bulk (O'Hanlon, 2005). This money-saving initiative also allows coordination as to uniform standards and equipment so there is no overlap or gaps in preparedness. The FBI has 11,000 agents and the DHS does not have substantially more, but there are 800,000 local cops across the nation (O'Hanlon, 2005). The force multiplying capacity of local police is staggering, if their force is brought to bear. The key is an emphasis on prevention. Patrols of key sites such as propane distribution centers, secondary power plants or transformers, self-storage businesses and major product distribution hubs cannot be done by the FBI, but it is not hard to add to local “cop on the block” scheduling. It is important for the Governor to stress that, just because a city or state has not been targeted yet, that does not make it any less dangerous (O'Hanlon, 2005). LA's defenses were lax until they were targeted in the Millenium plot. Terrorists strike exactly where they are least expected. Once realistic assessments of risk are conducted by all stakeholders, they should be stuck to. Mayer and Baca (2010) of the Heritage Foundation note that 9/11 was transformative in the way that state and local governments were involved in national security. “Before 9/11, providing for homeland security primarily involved protecting the United States from external conventional attack. This model rested on the premise that any strike by an enemy would involve military weaponry, thereby placing the vast majority of responsibility for preventing and responding to a strike on the federal government—largely by way of the Defense Department and outward-facing departments and agencies, such as the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The role for state and local governments was simply to prepare for a potential attack and to respond to a foreign military strike as they would to a catastrophic natural disaster. This role largely involved putting in place local civilian defense councils that conserved resources, organized response capabilities, and practiced air raid drills” (Mayer and Baca, 2010). But the post-9/11 security paradigm has made it seem that the threats are very different. John Lewis Gaddis in Surprise, Security and the American Experience argues that terrorism changes the security game for Americans utterly: Under the Cold War regime, conflicts were rare and actual threats to the homeland minimal but the risks at any given trigger point were omnicidal. Like playing the lottery, Americans had almost no chance of any one encounter with the Soviets or a proxy state of ending in serious bloodshed, particularly no chance of that harming the homeland or civilians directly, but the one time it did would be a doozy. But in the post-9/11 regime, threats were omnipresent. None are likely to ever escalate to global thermonuclear war: The magnitude of threats is lower. But the certainty of threats and their ability to affect the homeland is higher. In this new regime, Mayer and Baca (2010) insist that “The post-9/11 paradigm replaced the nation-state threat embodied by the former Soviet Union with non-state actors like al-Qaeda, and replaced intercontinental ballistic missiles with suicide bombers on airplanes and trains. This shift shrunk the role of the federal government and placed much larger responsibilities on state and local governments”. “Soft targets” like civilian buildings, hospitals, etc. were not only under real threat but were preferred. Yet Mayer and Baca (2010) allege that federal government action still eclipses the security landscape. Homeland Security employees, like any other federal employees, draft papers when they come up with an idea or an observation. This is circled among federal agencies but not state agencies. The Governor's Office should officially request that the DHS liaison and the state special operations or devoted counter-terrorism unit be forwarded on all draft papers and should respond in turn by forwarding all ideas to DHS. The National Response Plan under the status quo is also largely created by the federal government, with only review powers available to states, no veto power or serious input (Mayer and Baca, 2010). “Further demonstrating the lack of any meaningful role by state and local governments in the adoption of the NRP is the fact that the officials who approved the NRP do not include a single non-federal representative. The Department of Education, an entity with no role whatsoever in domestic incident response, is a signatory to the NRP, while FEMA is not. Not one governor or mayor signed it” (Mayer and Baca, 2010). This lack of participation at the state and local level exacerbated the failure of responses in Katrina, as Blanco, Nagin and FEMA all were operating off of a different playbook with “widespread confusion on operations, communications, and protocols”. Regrettably, the new National Response Framework still gives no actual veto power or direct input power to the state. Nonetheless, the Governor's office should mandate that state and local law enforcement, medical regulators and state-run hospitals, and other departments review the NRF then send in concerns and ideas, allowing the Governor's office to draft a comprehensive approach. This has two functions: First, it will make clear the implementation of the NRF on the local level, insuring that the federal government knows how state and local authorities will be responding so as to minimize the need for chatter and the risk of confusion; second, it has the potential to change the NRF to be more appropriate. To foster interdepartmental and cross-jurisdictional coordination, Mayer and Baca recommend “fostering a national culture of preparedness”, “[shifting]... focus on building and sustaining a resilient national infrastructure”, increasing international cooperation, “develop[ing] a framework for domestic intelligence” and establishing “national programs to improve professional development”. Many of these require federal government changes, but the Governor can insure these changes through a number of means. 1. Continue to pressure the state's Senators and Congresspeople and exert political influence 2. Pay for continued training and professional development for key personnel 3. Redesigning key infrastructure to be easy to secure and resilient 4. Fostering preparedness through drills and information circulation 5. Coordinating with other Governors to establish unified protocols; at the very least, invite all neighboring states to participate Eack (2008), in line with the above, recommends state and local fusion centers. He notes that, contrary to popular belief, neither counter-terrorism nor intelligence gathering functions are new to state governments. McVeigh was investigated and caught by Oklahoma police including a major traffic stop by a Oklahoma trooper, and others such as the Olympic bomber and the FALN were apprehended directly by or with the assistance of local authorities. Similarly, intelligence-operating elements have been part of local and state police programs for decades: Undercover investigations, infiltrating and collecting intelligence on gangs and criminal enterprises, etc. What's new is crafting policy and protocol to match the difficulties posed by a foreign threat that has the power to launch major attacks on US soil and that routinely crosses state lines while staying below the federal level of chatter. The problems include a lack of a unifying strategy for how, where, and when information should be shared, too many networks that cause confusion and an unwillingness of the DHS and FBI to work together (Eack, 2008). Problem areas Eack identifies due to these issues are picking the right communication network at the right time, civil liberties training and privacy issues, coordinating with both DHS and FBI, and a lack of well-defined role. The Governor's office must take leadership to solve each of these issues thusly: 1. To solve the issue of having too many communication networks, a task force should be created in conjunction with DHS and FBI liaisons. This task force should err on the side of caution: While degrading the signal-to-noise ratio by sending redundant messages is bad, not having the right message reach the right person is far, far worse. Once these protocols are done, they should be included in counter-terrorism and national security seminars and training of law enforcement. When individual state and local authorities wonder if something is topical or salient or what network to report to, they should be instructed to consult their local DHS/FBI liaison as well as their local or state counter-terrorist force. They should make sure to comply with the 2007 National Strategy for Information Sharing (Eack, 2008). 2. To solve the issue of civil liberties and privacy issues, the task force should also bring in civil rights lawyers from the ACLU or other relevant groups to inform the task force of its obligations. This is always difficult: Law enforcement resent people they view as getting criminals off the hook. But it essential. No one wins if a terrorist cannot be tried because their civil liberties were violated, or if an innocent person's privacy is violated because of unwarranted and premature suspicion. When official directives offer no room for local and state officers at the rank-and-file level to make errors, then those errors can be controlled. These should be included in the same counter-terrorist and homeland security seminars. 3. Coordination with both the DHS and FBI should be solved simply by forwarding all relevant communication and information to both DHS and FBI liaisons. Most of the time, turf wars are about being kept out of the loop. Unless there is a compelling reason otherwise, information should be shared as fully and freely as possible. 4. The unique role of the state-local-federal fusion center is first detection. The state and local jurisdictions do not have the resources, expertise, manpower or time to fight the war against terror. But they can see suspicious behaviors and people, begin an initial investigation and get the machinery of the federal government started quickly. Eack makes clear that, despite challenges, state and local governments are up to the task. “However, from the perspective of state and local fusion centers, great strides are being made in creating a lasting network across the nation through which terrorism-related threat intelligence can be effectively shared. In some cases that capability extends to “all crimes” and “all hazards.” Those in the intelligence community who may have at first doubted these centers would ever play a role in our national security, now see these fusion centers gaining in strength and sophistication. In some cases, these centers are breaking new ground in the use of new and innovative methods for effective intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination” (Eack, 2008). In Intelligence 2000: Revising the Basic Elements, Peterson, Morehouse and Wright make clear that their review of the intelligence process, training, security and so forth regarding counter-terrorism applies not only to federal governments and intergovernmental groups like Interpol. The process of collection, collating and evaluating, analysis and synthesis, dissemination, intelligence reports and evaluation are no different (Peterson et al, 2001, Section II). The only elements that the Governor should change have to do with implementation for limited funds. State and local police should collect data and flag it for potential terrorism concerns, then direct the collating and evaluating to either the FBI/DHS liaison or to the state counter-terrorism unit. Hulnick (2004) notes that redundancy in data collection is a major source of wasted resources (p. 64). At both the state, local and federal levels, he recommends that data collectors and investigators meet to establish goals, create committees that cut across department lines, and split up issues. If a terrorist cell is detected in a major city, for example, but is between the borders of the major city and an outlying town, the ideal way of handling the situation is to bring in both local law enforcement agencies, the state counter-terrorism unit, the FBI and DHS, and have the highest ranking member such as the state police chief coordinate tasks, nominate leadership of the task force and make sure that each department is bringing the full brunt of their brains to bear. The Governor's Office can be a key bulwark against terrorism even without federal assistance if it adopts these proposals unilaterally. Works Cited 9/11 Commission Report. (2004). W.W. Norton. Retrieved 2/12/2011 from http://www.9- 11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf  Eack, K.D. (2008). State and Local Fusion Centers: Emerging Trends and Issues. Homeland Security Issues. Supplement No. 2: 2008. Retrieved 2/12/2011 from http://www.hsaj.org/? special:fullarticle=supplement.2.3 Gaddis, J.L. (2005). Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Hulnick, A.S. (2004). Keeping Us Safe Secret Intelligence and Homeland Security. Praeger. Mayer, M. and Baca, L. (2010). Want Real Homeland Security? Give State and Local Governments a Real Voice. Heritage Foundation. Backgrounder #2467. Retrieved 2/12/2011 from http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/want-real-homeland- security-give-state-and-local-governments-a-real-voice O'Hanlon, M. (2005-08-14). “THE ROLE OF STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN HOMELAND SECURITY”. Brookings Institution. Written Testimony for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs/ Peterson, M.B., Morehouse, B. and Wright, D. (2001). Intelligence 2000: Revising the Basic Elements. IAELIA and LEIU. Read More