ARTICLE

July 2003

Security Beat

by NDIA Staff

Homeland Defense Chief Assesses Priorities
The U.S. Northern Command, responsible for domestic security, needs to improve its capabilities to defend the land and the waterways, said Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.

While Northern Command’s ability to protect the air space of the United States is undisputed, the land and maritime defense missions pose more of a challenge, for several reasons, McHale told a meeting of industry executives in Washington, D.C.

When Northern Command was created last year, it already had an air-defense organization, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. NORAD is the bi-national command for air space warning and control for Canada, Alaska, and the continental United States.

Air Force Gen. Ralph “Ed” Eberhart heads both the Northern Command and NORAD. Even though Eberhart reports directly to the defense secretary, McHale oversees all NorthCom activities.

So far, the Northern Command has been assigned “very few land forces,” mostly due to historical resistance by the United States to have a “large standing Army” participating in domestic operations, McHale explained.

Having a small land force is not a problem as long as there are no major crises on the continental United States, he noted. The difficulty for Northern Command is figuring out how it could quickly surge the land force and ensure that those troops are “mission ready,” in the event of a terrorist attack, for example.

The command also is grappling with how to boost maritime security, a job that typically has been done by the Coast Guard. For air defense, NORAD’s jurisdiction extends 500 nautical miles off the Pacific Coast and 1,500 miles off the Atlantic Coast. The Coast Guard’s only reaches 12 nautical miles, making it more difficult to prevent a ship suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction from approaching U.S. shores. Maritime security can be problematic with 7,500 foreign-flag ships making 51,000 calls annually to U.S. ports.

In a domestic security crisis, Northern Command would provide military forces to support civilian authorities, but those forces always would remain within the military chain of command, McHale stressed. By law, military troops cannot engage in domestic law enforcement.

McHale’s office, meanwhile, is involved in redefining the role of the National Guard. The Guard’s training largely is designed to meet its war-fighting strategic reserve function. In the future, said McHale, the Guard needs to be “more deeply involved in homeland defense.”

The Guard will continue to serve in its war-fighting role overseas, he said, making it unlikely that it will become “exclusively a homeland defense force.” Rather, the goal is for the Guard to be a “balanced force,” said McHale. He noted that the Guard already has taken on significant homeland defense responsibilities. It is deploying 32 “civil support teams” that would respond to incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Even when there are no WMD, in any instances of terrorist activities that require military presence, Guardsmen generally are the first forces on the scene.

Using U.S. Transportation Against Terrorists
One arena where information technologies could be put to good use against terrorists is the nation’s transportation system, said Arthur E. Johnson, senior vice president for strategic development at Lockheed Martin Corp.

“The ability to detect the presence of any biological, chemical or even nuclear weapon that might be moving through our country’s transportation system will be crucial to homeland security,” he told the 2003 Coast Guard Innovation Expo in Baltimore.

The U.S. transportation system is more than simply a target for terrorists, Johnson said. They use it to move their people and weapons, he explained, and that presents an opportunity.

“If the terrorists operate within our transportation system, they of course must expose themselves and become vulnerable,” Johnson said. “We just need to think about the security challenge in a slightly different way.” Realistically, Johnson said, it never will be possible to harden the entire transportation system against terrorist attacks. “It’s too big, and we will never have the money or the time.”

Instead, homeland security needs to “become more predictive and more anticipatory,” he said. “By taking that path, we can turn our transportation system into a ‘Venus fly trap’ of sorts … And in doing so, we can make sure that it is the terrorists who are isolated and constrained by our transportation system—not us.”

He noted that, since September 11, industry’s role in helping civilian agencies with their electronic-information programs has changed dramatically.

Previously, industry focused on helping agencies become more efficient and making it easier for citizens to interact with them, Johnson said. “Now, these agencies are re-examining and redefining their priorities in the new context of homeland security. … They must be able to share information across agency borders, while preserving the privacy and civil liberties that are so fundamental to our American way of life.

Those responsible for homeland security should be able “to convert massive amounts of raw data into useful knowledge that can be acted upon,” Johnson said.

“We are today awash in data,” he said. “Sifting knowledge from raw data is a large and complex challenge that mainly involves advanced applications of information technology—perhaps more advanced and complex than people have ever seen.” Included are improved forms of data mining, data fusion, pattern recognition, networking, distribution and information sharing, he said.

National Guard Launches Reorganization
The National Guard’s plan to consolidate its three headquarters in each state into one “joint force headquarters” will enable the organization to improve the readiness of its operational units, according to Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau.

By Oct.1, the Guard plans to reduce its number of headquarters units in the 54 states and territories from 162 to 54, Blum told a Pentagon news briefing. Currently, he said, every state, the District of Columbia and each of the other territories has separate Army National Guard and Air Guard headquarters, plus a state headquarters.

“That is just too excessive,” Blum said. “And it is not in keeping with the way that the Department of Defense needs […] to deal with emerging realities.”

The three headquarters will be consolidated into one joint force headquarters. “We fight jointly,” Blum said. “We need to train and operate on a daily basis in a joint environment, so that we can make that transition very quickly.

“After all, our symbol is the Minuteman,” Blum noted. “The Minuteman symbolizes the transition from a citizen to a soldier in minutes. And frankly, with the kind of threats that we are facing today, that will be a necessary capability for the National Guard.”

Blum said he plans to redirect the money and personnel freed by the consolidation to meet readiness shortfalls. “The biggest readiness shortfall for the Army and Air National Guard is in our manning,” he explained. “We need to push our human resources to where the readiness requirements really are crying out for help.”

Among the units slated for expansion, Blum said, are the Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams. There are now 32 such teams, and Congress and the Defense Department “are working furiously to ensure that each … state and territory has at least one … in the near future,” he said.

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Administration Undermining Port Security, Says Senator
The Bush administration’s commitment to domestic port security has been disappointing, according to Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C. He recently requested that the General Accounting Office investigate current port security efforts.

Despite requests for additional funding for the Coast Guard, the administration has failed to propose any “serious level of funding to implement the necessary port security mandates,” Hollings wrote in a letter to President Bush.

The president’s proposal does not address budget shortfalls in customs-related law enforcement activities and Transportation Security Administration port operations.

Hollings said the TSA is planning to cover its cost overruns in aviation security by transferring $105 million that Congress dedicated for port security grants and $28 million in funds for cargo security programs.

“The economic disruption caused by a terrorist attack on our ports would be catastrophic, and currently, we have no reliable process in place to re-secure the system and reopen ports without jeopardizing the security of millions of Americans,” he said in the letter.

Hollings will work with the Senate Appropriations Committee to ensure that no money will be transferred out of any port security programs and that the administration pays out the money necessary to create “a sound port security system,” he said.

Hollings noted that the administration is willing to spend $8 billion annually on missile-defense programs. “Yet, ironically, we spend comparatively little to stop a similar weapon of mass destruction delivered simply and clandestinely through one of the six to eight billion marine containers imported into the country each year. … It makes no sense at all.”

Pentagon Intelligence Shop Will Be Lean
The new office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence headed by Stephen Cambone will need at least a year to settle and “carry the whole weight,” said Richard Haver, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld is considering reducing the size of Cambone’s staff, said Haver. The cutbacks, he explained, are consistent with Rumsfeld’s belief that large staffs tend to get in the way of decision making.

“The key to staffing small is that you keep them elevated up the right policy line,” said Haver. “This will be an example for all about how we can reduce the size of the department overhead and make the entire operations more efficient.”

The Pentagon’s intelligence shop will have sweeping authority over the direction, policies and budgets of all Defense Department intelligence programs and organizations.

Critics view it as an attempt by the defense secretary to take over functions previously performed by the CIA. Rumsfeld contends that he created this office to enhance, rather than undermine the work of the CIA.

This is “not a massive plot to marginalize central intelligence or reduce the effect of the CIA,” said Haver in remarks to the 2003 TechNet conference. The intent is to make internal Pentagon intelligence operations more efficient. “Instead of making the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] and his immediate subordinates … come down to four or five ‘departments of defense’ at any one time, they now have one-stop shopping,” he said.

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