U.S. Anti-Terror Strategy Focused on ‘Last War’
Concentrating on the “last war,” rather than on the
next one, is a fundamental shortcoming in the Bush administration’s
national security policy after September 11, said a recent Brookings
Institution report, titled, “Protecting the Homeland: A Preliminary
Analysis.”
After the release of the report, U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.,
told reporters: “Absent a [national security] strategy, we
are fighting the last war,” and the United States is unduly
focused on how to respond to attacks that have already taken place.
“A piecemeal security strategy does not a national security
strategy make,” she said. “We will continue to be vulnerable,
particularly in those gaps that we are not filling, because we are
not dealing with this in an organized, systemic way.
“The administration owes us a strategy. It gave us a budget
before it gave us a strategy. It gave us a color-coding system before
we had a strategy. It’s given us some things that I think
are admirable, like a smarter border system with Canada, and some
other improvements, before we had a strategy. But until we have
a strategy, there is no sensible way to put our resources, which
are not infinite, against our biggest vulnerabilities, and then
make sure that all levels of government follow the strategy.”
One strategy that the Bush administration might consider, she said,
is one based on “stopping the terrorists we know about, stopping
the terrorists we don’t know about and, then, stopping people
from wanting to become terrorists.”
U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., meanwhile, praised the report
as a major contribution. “It’s an assist to the administration,
as they come up with their strategic plan for homeland security.”
Thompson said he supported Bush’s approach, especially on
border security. “We have to prioritize risks, and perform
cost-benefit analyses,” he said. “The fact of the matter
is we have to rank risks in terms of severity, and in terms of likelihood,
and marry those two things together to decide how we’re going
to spend the resources that we have to devote.”
He acknowledged that there is not enough funding for every security
measure. “We’ve learned in this country that resources
are not unlimited. We can’t have guns and butter, and this
is going to be part of a national, overall debate for a long time
to come,” Thompson said.
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NorthCom Chief to Set Up Contingency Plans
By the time the U.S. Northern Command (NorthCom) is up and running
on October 1, the Defense Department expects to have a number of
contingency plans that will outline how the U.S. military services
will respond in any future terrorist attacks.
NorthCom will be part of the worldwide military command structure,
and will focus exclusively on homeland security. It will be headquartered
at Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado Springs. Air Force Gen.
Ralph Eberhart, currently commander-in-chief of Space Command and
the North American Aerospace Defense Command, will become commander-in-chief
of NorthCom. It is not clear what will happen with Space Command.
Discussions are under way about merging Space Command with the U.S.
Strategic Command.
NorthCom is expected to coordinate armed forces reserve and National
Guard duties and military responses to natural disasters. It also
will assume territorial responsibilities for Canada and Mexico,
which have not before been assigned to combatant commands. The force
structure of NorthCom is still undefined.
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Bio-War Exercise Tested Emergency Response
A recent regional exercise served as a national test bed for bio-terrorism
response for states and counties. The McAlester Army Ammunition
Plant, about 90 miles south of Tulsa, Okla., was a participant in
a community-wide exercise that simulated a plague attack, followed
immediately by the appropriate response, said the plant’s
commander, Army Col. Jyuji Hewitt. The McAlester plant, a Tier I
depot, is the prime producer of bombs for the Navy and the Air Force.
The exercise began with a small airplane spraying a liquid, simulating
a toxin that would cause plague, over an area that encompassed three
counties. Then, first responders worked together to call upon a
national stockpile of medications to treat themselves and the rest
of the community. More than 13,000 participants, private citizens,
lined up to receive the cocktail of antibiotics, which, for the
purpose of the exercise, was a small bag of jellybeans.
Hewitt said he wanted his Army civilian employees involved in this
exercise, because “It is a readiness issue. We need to know
how to go out and distribute antibiotics to our first responders
and our work force. ... Most of the employees at the plant are Army
civilians, who live in those counties,” where the toxin was
sprayed, he said.
The exercise included participants and observers from the governor’s
office, White House Office of Homeland Security, FBI, Department
of Health and Human Services, Joint Civil Support Team, Department
of Justice and Center for Disease Control.
“What this did for us was to help in developing the relationships
that we need to have with local agencies. Local agency coordination
is very important in a bio-terrorism response, and with that, we
are the better for it, should anything happen in the future,”
he said.
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Texas A&M to Establish Homeland Security Hub
U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, introduced a bill in March to establish
a national center for homeland security at Texas A&M University.
The legislation includes $120 million over five years for the Texas
A&M center, which would serve as an umbrella organization coordinating
research throughout the A&M System facilities and possibly other
U.S. universities. The funding needed for the center would come
not only from the federal sector, but also from state sources and
private donors, said Matt Lloyd, Brady’s spokesman.
“There is clearly a need for a nationally coordinated university-based
activity to collect and disseminate information, focus on critical
research and educational needs, and to provide resources for response
and recovery to ensure homeland security,” Brady said in a
statement. The legislation is a “high priority item”
for the congressman, Lloyd said.
An A&M document presented to the Texas Board of Regents said
the university is “uniquely qualified to establish a university-based
national center for homeland security,” because of A&M’s
strengths in genetics, food, biology, marine and social science
research. The university created a 62-member Texas Task Force that
provided assistance and technical advice to New York City after
the terrorist attacks.
According to the document, the idea for the center grew out of
an October request by Chancellor Howard Graves to establish an A&M
system-wide initiative in biotechnology and homeland security.
Since December, an A&M Homeland Security and Biotechnology
Task Force has been developing a Web site that would serve as a
national clearinghouse for anti-terrorism information.
Brady’s legislation has been referred to the Committee on
Transportation and Infrastructure, where it awaits further action.
Most likely, the legislation would be passed in the form of a rider
on a larger appropriations bill, said Lloyd.
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Augmenting the Air Marshal Program
The newly-created Transportation Security Administration is expanding
the Federal Air Marshal program, but there are limits to what the
marshals can accomplish, a top law enforcement official said.
“There are 26,000 flights a day,” said Mark Winscher,
coordinator of the FBI’s non-lethal weapons program at Quantico,
Va. He spoke at a recent conference on non-lethal weapons, sponsored
by the National Defense Industrial Association. “They’re
not going to be putting air marshals on board every one of those
flights.” Instead, he said, authorities are considering a
number of alternatives, including providing additional training
for aircrews, issuing them non-lethal weapons and allowing law enforcement
personnel traveling as passengers to carry firearms.
In addition to suicidal hijackers, authorities are concerned about
increasing incidents of “air rage,” Winscher said. Over
the past five years, he said, assaults against aircrews have increased
by 80 percent. Air rage is just as dangerous as terrorism, he said.
In one incident, he said, a 260-pound Samoan had to be restrained
in-flight after he stripped naked and demanded to speak with God.
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Nuke Explosion Would Make ‘Nasty Cleanup’
Nuclear-weapon facilities may not be so much at risk of a September
11 kind of attack, but any explosion at those places would result
in the dispersal of toxic substances, “which would cause a
pretty nasty clean up,” said retired Air Force Gen. John A.
Gordon, the undersecretary of energy for national nuclear security
and the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“It is pretty hard to hit something coming down that is not
a very large area,” he told reporters at a breakfast briefing.
“I don’t think they are highly attractive, and I think
they are very difficult to hit, because they are fairly plush to
the ground.”
Nevertheless, Gordon said the administration has bolstered the
external and physical security of the facilities. “Everyone
is sort of looking out a little bit more carefully at what goes
on,” he noted. “But the emphasis ... is to make sure
we get the physical security right and really have spent a lot of
time, a lot of money and a lot of effort in that area.”
People working at the facilities have gone through extensive background
checks, and “those continue to be re-upped on a regular basis,”
Gordon said. This investigation process, he added, “is as
good or better as any we’ve ever had.”