As the Coast Guard reels from criticism of its mishandling of the Deepwater acquisitions program, one filmmaker hopes to counteract that negative publicity and bring some positive exposure back to the service.
Her answer is a documentary called, “Heroes of the Storm.”
Dawn Willson’s movie, which she’s calling a “non-scripted film feature,” focuses on four Coast Guard search-and-rescue personnel who responded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It will feature footage taken from the National Guard, as well as from news media organizations that covered the storm and personal video taken by storm victims. The pilots and rescue swimmers will be reunited with some of the victims they saved, who will talk about their experiences in the days after the storm.
About one-third of the service’s air fleet deployed to the Gulf of Mexico region after Katrina. Almost 5,300 personnel rescued more than 33,000 people in 11 days, according to Coast Guard statistics. Despite this huge mobilization, Willson said she didn’t hear anything about it in the media, which chose to focus on the failings of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Bush administration.
“We wanted to get the truth out that the Coast Guard was helping,” she said.
Andy Davis, who filmed last year’s Kevin Costner movie on rescue swimmers, “The Guardian,” is directing. Mike Gray, who penned “The China Syndrome,” is writing the script. It will premier in New Orleans on Nov. 1 on the sidelines of the Coast Guard Innovation Expo, which begins on Oct. 28. After the premiere, the survivors will meet with the service members who rescued them at a “Meet Your Hero” day. The reunions will be filmed and added to the movie before its national release.
“It’s definitely a feel-good movie. We wanted to be able to show the heroes,” Willson said.
The United States is trying to fight 21st century wars using World War II intelligence approaches, said Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the CIA.
“We have started to recognize that intelligence is inherently operational,” he said during a recent Air Force defense strategy seminar in Washington, D.C. “That recognition involves moving away from a mathematical approach that has been a powerful part of Air Force intelligence since the air plan that defeated Hitler.”
That plan focused on pure math and science, Hayden said. It identified a modern economy and the key nodes of that economy, and asked questions such as “how many bombs are needed to destroy those key nodes?”
“We still have a tendency to think that way,” Hayden said. Citing his experience working at the U.S. European Command during the Bosnian War, he said, “We still talk about the end product of intelligence being a cursor on a target.”
The war on terrorism requires a fundamental shift in how the military and intelligence communities do their jobs. Instead of focusing on the so-called “find/fix/finish” strategy used in World War II and the Cold War, in which the enemy was hard to find, but relatively easy to finish off, it’s all about “find,” he said.
“In the war on terrorism, the equation is reversed: our enemy is easy to finish, he’s just very, very hard to find.” Intelligence officers are looking for individuals or small groups that have enormous power to plan suicide bombings, run jihadist web sites and act as conduits between al-Qaida and potential nuclear, chemical or biological experts.
The CIA and military intelligence communities are improving their ability to obtain useful intelligence by relying more on social sciences rather than hard math and natural sciences.
“We need experts in Islamic studies, Middle Eastern history and the politics, religions and cultures of North Africa and South Asia,” Hayden said. “We need military and intelligence officers with a deep and comprehensive understanding of cultures and societies very different from our own, and very different from those we have had to study and understand in the past.”
Human intelligence under Hayden’s watch is beginning to receive the attention it deserves, he asserted.
“The last five and a half years have shown us, time and time again, that the best sources of information on the target is the target themselves, and that the best sources of information on terrorist groups and their plans are the terrorists themselves,” Hayden said.
Even though there is still much work to do to maximize the effectiveness of the intelligence community, Hayden said that it is moving in the right direction.
“Today’s war is unlike any this nation has ever fought, and it requires us to apply our talent in ways we haven’t thought of yet,” he said. “When the different disciplines come together, when analysts and operators are indistinguishable, our chances for success increase dramatically.”
National Guard equipment readiness has plummeted in recent years, hampering the service’s ability to respond to domestic emergencies, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Investigations and Oversight.
“National Guard readiness has been compromised by rotations abroad, most notably as part of the global war on terror,” Blum said.
While equipment readiness was not at 100 percent before 9/11, it now stands at a low 50 percent, which means the Guard will in some cases be unable to respond to regional disasters, he said.
Overseas deployments for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a hefty toll on Guard equipment. Recently, the equipment has stayed in-theater to be used by replacement units, which has created a shortfall at home, Blum said.
Unfortunately, most of the equipment left overseas is the kind needed for disaster response, he said. Blum presented a list of 10 categories that included 342 items of equipment that are “absolutely essential” for maintenance, aviation, engineer, medical, communications, transportation, security, and logistics and power generation.
Aging equipment and wartime losses have exacerbated the shortfall problem. Maj. Gen. Robert French, deputy adjutant general of joint force headquarters, Pennsylvania National Guard, lamented the fact that the Guard is operating 40-year-old trucks for disaster response. Blum argued that those trucks are here in the United States because they are not good enough to go to war, but they are being used by the Guard.
Rotary-wing aircraft such as UH-60s and CH-47s are in short supply because of wartime losses, said Maj. Gen. Roger Lemke, adjutant general of Nebraska. These aircraft are essential to supporting large disasters like Katrina, he said.
The Defense Department has proposed allocating $22 billion for equipment over the next five years, but even those funds will only take the Guard to 75 percent readiness, which is the level at which it stood before 9/11.
“We are in a post-9/11 world, and I am not certain that those levels match today’s requirements, Blum concluded.