ARTICLE

August 2003

Security Beat

by Geoff S. Fein

Lack of Security Funds Puts States at Risk
Emergency responders at the state and local level are seriously under funded and lack the equipment, tools and training necessary to deal with a terrorist attack, according to a report released by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The politicized appropriations process, and bureaucratic red tape at all levels of government and the lack of national preparedness standards have also hampered the allocation of homeland security funds, the report found.

The study, released June 29, said funding for the country’s emergency responders will need to be tripled over the next five years in order to meet their needs.

Current federal funding for emergency responders is $27 billion for five years beginning in 2004.

“America will fall approximately $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs over the next five years if current funding levels are maintained,” according to the report. If states and municipalities must rely solely on federal funds, it would require the federal government to increase its current funding level from $5.4 billion per year to an annual federal expenditure of $25.1 billion.

Funds will be needed to expand the emergency-911 system nationally to providing protective gear and WMD remediation equipment to firefighters and to improve training of public health professionals for biological, chemical, and radiological events.

Among the recommendations outlined in the 66-page report, Congress should work to establish a system for distributing funds based less on politics and more on threat, make emergency responder grants in fiscal year 2004 and thereafter on a multiyear basis to facilitate long-term planning and training. Congress also should require the Department of Homeland Security to work with state and local agencies and officials and emergency responder professional associations to establish clearly defined standards and guidelines for emergency preparedness.

The task force also recommended that the U.S. House of Representatives transform the House Select Committee on Homeland Security into a standing committee and giving it a formal, leading role in the authorization of all emergency responder expenditures in order to streamline the federal budgetary process. The U.S. Senate should consolidate emergency preparedness and response oversight into the Senate Government Affairs Committee.

States also should develop a prioritized list of requirements in order to ensure that federal funding is allocated properly and quickly to achieve the best possible return on investments.

Alabama at Forefront in Homeland Security
Alabama is the first state to establish its own Department of Homeland Security. The agency will mirror its federal counterpart and should make it easier for the federal government and the new state department to better communicate, said Pepper Bryars, a spokesman for Alabama Gov. Bob Riley.

The problem, Bryars said, was that people in Washington didn’t know whom to talk to at the state level.

“[Establishing a state Department of Homeland Security] was in direct response to a lack of communication with the federal [DHS],” Bryars said. To get around that issue, everyone working in the new Alabama department will have a counterpart at the federal level.

“We wanted the state department to be reflective of the federal department,” Bryars added.

The new department will also make it easier to get federal Homeland Security dollars, Bryars said. The state legislature, which unanimously approved the new department earlier this month, budgeted $1.2 million to fund it.

‘Dissuasion’ Campaign Need Against WMD
Speaking to a gathering of military and defense industry representatives, Bill Schneider, director of the Defense Science Board, said the nation must focus on dissuading potential enemies from using weapons of mass destruction. That includes having an active missile defense capability.

The ability to intercept missiles not only in all phases of trajectory, but even before launching could be enough to dissuade some nations that they may never get the chance to sue their weapons of mass destruction.

“So when a nation is contemplating the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction as an instrument of its foreign policy, it faces not only conditional risk of retaliation, but it may never get to use its weapons of mass destruction,” Schneider said.

The threat of cruise missile attacks also must be deterred, Schneider said.

“We have been concerned with the cruise missile problem from the outset. One consequence of having effective missile defense is that adversaries will go quickly to cruise missiles,” Schneider said at a Capitol Hill Club breakfast briefing in June.

In the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq fired a cruse missile into Kuwait. “As we’ve seen in Iraq, [there is} something to the tactic of using mix strike—with cruise and ballistic missiles,” Schneider said. “But the cruise missile problem is technically more difficult than the ballistic missile defense problem.”

The Defense Science Board will review how the Air Force’s patriot missile system operated. “The focus on cruise missiles will intensify as we move ahead on ballistic missile defense.”

Air Force Tackles Threat Analysis
The United States is better prepared to deal with a radiological or chemical attack than a biological event, said Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Smolen, director of nuclear and counter-proliferation. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations.

He likened a biological attack to something out of science fiction.

“A biological attack is tough to characterize,” he told the gathering of defense industry and military representatives on Capitol Hill. “We are just beginning to look at how we’d manage under circumstances like that.”

The scope of XON (director of nuclear operations) has changed, he said. “[We are] looking at a whole spectrum of what is counter chemical-biological-radiological and nuclear.”

For example, XON will draft a concept of operations over the next year looking at procedures on how to deal with a dirty bomb and with explosives, Smolen said. “How do you train, manage and mitigate risks with explosives.” Another issue is how explosives are defined.

Other nations could claim that some of America’s weapons fit that category of WMD. That could also put the U.S. into the position of trying to defend the use of weapons of mass destruction simply based upon the military’s definition, Smolen said.

Managers Jeopardize Security at National Labs
Many low- and mid-level managers at the U.S. national laboratories fail to realize the importance of reporting a security breach to the upper management, said Ambassador Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The administration is looking at changes in organization and training to address this concern, Brooks told reporters at a breakfast meeting. “In at least two of the labs, we have had problems with lower level managers failing to realize the seriousness of the kind of events that happen.”

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a set of security keys went missing and their disappearance had not been reported to senior lab management for more than a month. LLNL holds the country’s most sensitive nuclear secrets, as well as material used to make thermonuclear weapons. A security officer’s access badge also vanished, and that went unreported for six weeks.

“If you have keys, sooner or later someone will misplace them. That is simply true,” he said. “We clearly have an educational problem, and I have got to think through what that says about the way we are doing physical security.”

Brooks said that he was going to focus on how to teach some of these low-level managers to take certain incidents seriously. The problem, however, is how to ensure that people use common sense, he said. “You don’t want to wake up the secretary of energy every time somebody puts his key in his left pocket rather than his right pocket and for a minute forgets where it is.”

Organization and training need to be changed in the long term, he said. “Short term, it is obvious what you do with it—you pull everybody in and say, look, this is important. You remind them. You do all the things you do when there is a problem.”

Debate Intensifies Over Nuclear Testing
The National Nuclear Security Administration would resume nuclear testing if it detected a “critical problem” with a weapon in the stockpile, according to the head of the NNSA.

Ambassador Linton Brooks told a media roundtable in Washington, D.C., that the NNSA is trying to stay consistent with the policy espoused in the Nuclear Posture Review. “We are trying to preserve the capability to adapt to changing circumstances,” he said. “[We are] trying to preserve it in terms of testing, because if we were to discover a problem with the stockpile that needed testing, it takes us about 18 months to diagnose such a problem. So, we want to be able to test at the end of that period.”

It takes 18 months to figure out what the problem is and design the test. “From my perspective, shortening the period doesn’t [do] anything because I wouldn’t be ready to test anyhow,” he said. “But lengthening the period extends the time in which I might have a problem with the stockpile that I can only fully understand.”

Brooks admitted that he does not know whether a problem in the stockpile would even be discovered. But “we want to be ready to deal with it,” he said.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that there is a near-term need to face that decision of resuming nuclear testing, said Brooks.

“My lab directors and I are unanimous that there is no need now. There is no condition in the stockpile that would call for a resumption of nuclear testing,” he said. “I am pretty sure that will be true next year and the year after that.”

By definition, he added, nobody can predict when a previously undiscovered problem will be discovered. “But I have no reason to believe that that time is near,” he said.

However, if a significant problem crops up in the stockpile, “it would be irresponsible not to make a recommendation to test. And that’s why we preserve test readiness,” Brooks said.

The decisions to test are made year by year, he said. “The farther we get into the future, the harder it is to predict,” he said. “The nature of technological problems, if you look back at problems that we’ve discovered in the stockpile historically, they aren’t typically the things where each year you did things and gradually the trend accumulated and you finally decided you can’t live with that any more.”

The problems are discovered by surveillance, he said. “Then you go and increase the surveillance, and you find the problem is more widespread, and you do calculations, and you realize you’ve got a problem,” he said.

While there could be other circumstances that would prompt nuclear testing, his responsibility as the administrator of NNSA “is for safe, secure and reliable stockpile,” said Brooks.

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