Lessons learned from the military’s response to Hurricane
Katrina showed too many ad hoc solutions and not enough pre-disaster
planning, said Paul McHale, the Defense Department’s assistant
secretary of homeland defense.
“We performed well, but we intend to get better,” McHale
told a gathering of military writers. An after-action review will
point out flaws and areas in need of improvement, he said.
He noted that the department’s response was historically
the largest and fastest deployment in support of a civil crisis.
The department received 93 mission requests from the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, McHale said.
One example of an on-the-fly solution was the disbursement of 1,500
Motorola radios to emergency responders in New Orleans after the
city’s communications system was destroyed. The radios were
in storage at the Washington Navy Yard and are normally provided
to military personnel detailed to security duties at sporting events
such as the Olympics or the Super Bowl.
In the future, the Pentagon must do more to prepare for catastrophic
events, McHale said. The Pentagon certainly will assist civil authorities
in similar crises, but proposals calling for the military to take
the lead role in disaster management are unreasonable, McHale said.
Comments by President Bush to that effect have been misinterpreted,
he noted. The Defense Department would be called on only during
“catastrophic events,” similar to Hurricane Katrina,
or a terrorist attack where weapons of mass destruction are employed.
Such catastrophes are “once or twice in a generation”
occurrences, he said, unlike the dozens of natural disasters that
take place regularly over the course of a year.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors released a position paper at its
annual conference endorsing the idea of the military stepping in
when state or local authorities request help. “The current
legal paradigm is that the military is viewed as the ‘resource
of last resort’ deployed to restore order,” the position
paper said. “However, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have given
us reason to re-evaluate this paradigm.”
Definitions of such catastrophes are not set in stone, McHale said,
but Katrina or a terrorist attack where local authorities are overwhelmed,
or perhaps wiped out, would be an example.