A terrorist has a smorgasbord of potential ways to launch an attack — chemical, nuclear, biological or conventional explosives — along with a plethora of potential soft targets including ports, public transportation, schools and the food and water supply.
“Our aim is to remove seams. That’s what the Department of Homeland Security is all about,” Jay Cohen, undersecretary of science and technology told National Defense. “Because the bad guys will work the seams against us.”
Meanwhile, technology programs at DHS, whether or not they originated in the S&T directorate, have not enjoyed the best reputation. Nuclear and radiological detectors at ports have not performed as hoped. Explosive sniffers at airports have clogged. And the separation of liquids in hand-carried bags at airports serves as a constant reminder to the general public that the Transportation Security Administration still has its own technology seams to fill.
Cohen, former head of the Office of Naval Research, took the helm of the directorate on Aug. 10, the day British authorities arrested a dozen men for allegedly plotting to blow up U.S. bound aircraft over the Atlantic. He accepted the job only 10 days after retiring from a 42-year career in the Navy as a rear admiral.
“Once you have a taste of public service, it’s hard to walk away from it,” he told National Defense.
Aug. 10 was either an auspicious or inauspicious day to start his new job depending on how one looks at it. Auspicious perhaps, because authorities were able to thwart a major attack; inauspicious in that the incident pointed to another shortcoming in homeland security technology — namely the ability to detect liquid explosives.
The directorate has also had a high rate of personnel turnover. Only 66 percent of its allotted slots are filled.
Congress remains skeptical. At a hearing, Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., chairman of the House subcommittee on technology and innovation, accused DHS of chasing after technologies that don’t match the risks facing the nation.
“Frankly, it’s been a rough start,” Wu said of the directorate’s short history.
Cohen told the subcommittee that he expects to be fully staffed by the end of the calendar year. Overall, Wu praised Cohen’s efforts to reorganize the beleaguered agency.
Six months after taking the job, Cohen said his duties are similar to what he did at the Office of Naval Research, but “the breadth is so much larger.”
His “customers” at ONR were the Navy and Marine Corps. Now, they are the 22 agencies that comprise DHS. Border Patrol agents, TSA screeners, immigration and customs personnel, Coast Guardsmen, secret service agents, along with every firefighter, police officer and emergency medical technician in the nation, all need better tools.
Cohen has transferred some of the procedures for vetting technology he developed at the Navy lab to his new job.
Once a DHS agency spells out a gap it needs to fill, the directorate offers it a technology solution. These solutions can come from national laboratories, industry, academia or foreign partners. What he calls an “integrated product team” is created for each program. The DHS agency seeking the technology leads the team, which also includes representatives from the acquisitions department and the technology provider.
Cohen said he personally reviews each program every six months to assess whether it is meeting its cost, schedule and requirement goals. He gives the technology a yellow, green or red tag after each assessment depending on its potential. It is a system he employed during his six-year tenure at ONR.
“This metric holds me accountable,” he said.
One aspect that hasn’t changed since Cohen’s arrival is the formula for how much funding the directorate can invest in technologies that are “immature.” The law that created DHS dictates that Cohen put most of his resources in mature technologies — ones that are at the prototype level or above — and are up to three years away from fielding. If a technology comes to a DHS agency fully developed, the directorate is in charge of ensuring that it works.
For basic research, the law says the directorate must leverage national laboratories under the purview of departments such as Energy and Defense.
The directorate cannot tell the Defense Department labs what to work on, but it can borrow what they have developed.
Cohen does have some funds for high-risk, high-payoff technologies. About 10 percent of the directorate’s budget can go toward basic research and about 1 percent of that can be used “to roll the dice,” as he put it.
Cohen has taken some heat for investing in such programs. But using 1 percent of his budget for such high-risk projects isn’t unreasonable, he said.
“I expect those to fail, but if they don’t, wow, we have made a fundamental breakthrough and change in the near term.”
Besides, he added, “we have bad people sitting in the caves of Tora Bora who every day are rolling the dice with 100 percent of their budget, trying to figure out how to use our technology asymmetrically against our country and our people.”
If the Bush administration budget proposal stands, Cohen will have fewer funds to invest. The 2008 budget request for the directorate is $799.1 million, a 9.5 percent decrease from 2007.
Meanwhile, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, a separate DHS agency created last year to tackle radiological threats, received a 17-percent boost in the proposal.
A second change Cohen imposed was the creation of the human factors division.
“The Brits got it right,” he said of the Aug. 10 arrests. “They got the bomber. You get the bomber, and you don’t have to worry about the bomb.”
The new division, according to DHS, “applies the social and behavioral sciences to improve detection, analysis, and understanding of threats posed by individuals, groups, and radical movements” ... and advances “national security by integrating human factors into homeland security technologies.”
Going after the bomber doesn’t necessarily mean profiling terrorists, which involves judgments on race, ethnicity or religion, Cohen said.
The directorate is putting its money into what he called “attributes screening.”
“This is not about identifying who you are, it’s about trying to identify what your intent is,” he added.
For example, if a state patrol officer sees a driver weaving on the road, it is perfectly acceptable for him to stop the suspect and give him a breathalyzer test.
In settings such as airports, the directorate is investing funds in systems that can detect a passenger with a sweaty brow, a quickened heart rate or “micro-features” on a face that may indicate nervousness. Perhaps the passenger is nervous because he’s running late for the flight. Or perhaps it’s something more nefarious. As is the case with the weaving driver, it is legitimate to separate the nervous passenger for secondary screening, Cohen asserted. It would be no different than a TSA screener stopping a passenger when a metal detector goes off, he added.
“These are new areas in psychology and sociology that are well worth our looking into,” he added.
The other five divisions in the reorganized directorate are: explosives; chemical-biological; border and maritime security; command, control and interoperability; and infrastructure/geophysical. Cohen outlined his wish list for each of the divisions.
For explosives, DHS is seeking the ability to predict, detect and destroy improvised explosive devices and bomb-laden vehicles at ranges of at least 100 yards. That includes the means to detonate a bomb remotely without having access to the detonator. “When I can do that, we will change the calculus of the bomber because the bomber will blow up when we want, not when he wants.”
In the chem-bio field, Cohen is looking for a real-time, digital sensor that can detect appropriate levels of pathogens, biological or radiological threats and fit in a cell phone. He envisions a world where every phone has a sensor installed. If it detects a threat, the phone automatically calls 911. The user would have the option to turn it off.
“It is a dream, but we are pursuing it,” he said.
For command, control and interoperability, the directorate has borrowed the movie character E.T.’s catchphrase for the “Phone Home” project. First responders need the ability to communicate with each other during emergencies. The directorate is developing a communication device with “infinite frequency, infinitely variable wave forms and middleware so that you can select any communication, any frequency and any standard.”
However, it has to be small enough to fit in one hand and affordable for jurisdictions with small budgets. “We think we’re close,” he said.
For border-maritime security, Cohen wants to transfer the sensors the military has used on the battlefield to create persistent surveillance and real-time awareness — day or night, in all weather. That includes detecting clandestine subterranean passageways in a program he’s dubbed “Tunnel Vision.”
His top priority in infrastructure protection is finding ways to mitigate the effects of blasts if a terrorist should succeed. Advanced materials that protect buildings and other structures are being investigated.
On the geophysical side, Cohen has a lofty goal: to control the weather.
The notion of using technology to send a hurricane out to sea and away from U.S. shores, or breaking up a tornado, has been studied in the past, he noted. Research petered out in the 1980s, but the directorate is taking a second look at the esoteric science. Levee technology is of particular interest. Most victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans died from flooding.
Japan has built large caverns to drain storm surge waters. Such options need to be explored, he said. These events only last one to three hours and a drainage system can lessen their effects, he added.
Is there really a way to stop the power of a storm surge or send a hurricane harmlessly out to sea?
“I don’t know. That’s why it’s science and technology,” he said.
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