ARTICLE

January 2004

Security Beat

by Geoff S. Fein

More Attention Urged for Maritime Defense

The United States should rely more on naval reserve forces to help boost domestic maritime defense, Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, told a luncheon gathering of the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association.

The U.S. Coast Guard—now part of the Department of Homeland Security—patrols the nation’s coastline, ports, harbors and other navigable waterways, and the Navy takes the battle to faraway shores, he noted. McHale worried that a seam could emerge between the Coast Guard’s “close-in” area of responsibility and the Navy’s “far out” role.

“I think that the naval reserve is ideally suited to filling that seam,” McHale said. The reserve, which represents about 20 percent of the Navy’s total assets, could play a more important role in helping the Coast Guard and the active-duty Navy, he said.

McHale takes a personal interest in the reserves. He is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves, and his wife is a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. In 1996, as a member of Congress, he co-founded the National Guard and Reserve Components Caucus.

In early 2003, McHale took on his current assignment, supervising all homeland defense activities within the Defense Department. That includes the U.S. Northern Command, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., which includes elements from all U.S. military services, including the North American Aerospace Command. NORAD is responsible for aerospace warning and control for Canada, Alaska and the continental United States.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vernon Clark has proposed “a maritime NORAD,” McHale said. “I welcome that concept.”

NORTHCOM’s area of responsibility, McHale noted, contains the sea approaches to all of North America, including Mexico, and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles.

Defending Hawaii and U.S. territories, and possessions in the Pacific Ocean is the responsibility of the U.S. Pacific Command. But it is still a concern of McHale’s office.

NORTHCOM still is a small command, he said, with only 500 civil service and personnel, working to organize its command-and-control structure.

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Security Needs Spawn Small Business Programs
The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) has issued its first Small Business Innovation Research program solicitation.

The agency is seeking proposals for new technologies to detect low-vapor-pressure chemicals, chemical-biological sensors employing novel receptor scaffold, advanced low-cost aerosol collectors for surveillance sensors and personal monitoring, computer-modeling tool for vulnerability assessment of U.S. infrastructure, a marine-asset tag-tracking system, and a ship-compartment inspection device.

Participation in the HSPRA SBIR program is restricted to for-profit small businesses in the United States, with 500 or fewer employees.

Firms can apply for a six-month Phase I award not exceeding $100,000 to define the scientific, technical and commercial merit of a product.

Successful firms will be invited to apply for a two-year Phase II award not exceeding $750,000 to further develop their concepts to the prototype stage.

TSA to Step Up Training of Armed Pilots
The Transportation Security Administration, starting this month, plans to double the number of pilots that it trains each week to provide armed security on airline flights, TSA Administrator James M. Loy told a recent congressional hearing.

TSA’s Federal Flight Deck Officer program, which began last April, trains volunteer pilots to use firearms, if necessary, to defend their aircrafts’ cockpits from hijackers.

To prepare for this responsibility, the pilots are trained, deputized, equipped and supervised by TSA. They attend weeklong classes, which until September had been held at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Ga.

However, Glynco has been “operating over capacity” in an effort to train a major influx of new federal security personnel, Loy said. For this reason, the flight deck officer training has been moved to a new facility at Artesia, N.M., which also is the boot camp for the federal air marshal program.

“Artesia has three environmentally controlled commercial passenger jets on hardstands available for use as tactical training simulators and ample indoor and outdoor shooting ranges,” Loy said.

The pilots are being trained with .40 caliber Heckler & Koch USP40 Compact LEM pistols. TSA awarded H&K a contract worth up to $3.3 million, if all three one-year options are exercised.

Pilots, however, have some concerns about of the program’s requirements. Before being accepted into the program, participating pilots, for example, must be screened psychologically, and firearms must be placed in lockboxes, rather than worn openly in holsters. During transit flights, pilots are separated from their weapons. Also, pilots complained, it is not clear how re-qualification procedures will work.

Nevertheless, the program is growing quickly. Federal flight deck officers already have flown more than 10,000 flights, Loy said. “As more FFDOs are deputized, this number will rise quickly into the hundreds of thousands of flights.”

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Task Force Eyes ‘Early Warning’ Cyber Protection
Private companies and government agencies need “early warning” capabilities to help avert cyber-attacks, said Guy Copeland, vice president of information infrastructure advisory programs at Computer Sciences Corp.

“Corporations have visibility of what is coming at [them] on the net, but they don’t have the big picture [to] see operations on networks that can be malicious,” he said. “We are working on a system to identify patterns, gathered from individual companies, that give us a warning that something is coming.”

Copeland led an early-warning task force at the National Cyber Security Summit held in December in Santa Clara, Calif. Task force participants were asked to prepare a brief one-page write-up suggesting actions that could be taken to contribute to early warning. That information was compiled into a detailed planning document.

The task force met on Dec. 17 to review its recommendations.

“We got an amazing set of ideas,” said Copeland. “We are working on a timeline that results in implementable actions by March 1.”

One concern Copeland raised is that the lack of borders, in the cyber world, adds to the difficulty of preventing computer attacks.

“The very nature of the Internet [makes it so that you] can’t be assured where an attack is coming from,” he said. “It makes forensics very difficult.”

Copeland added that it’s a hard case to make to Americans, who cherish privacy, that technology may have to be changed so that hackers can be tracked and future cyber attacks prevented.

“It’s an obvious area for research and development,” he said.

Government, on the other hand, has a good understanding of the problem.

“The Department of Defense has the budget and people to do it. They are in a ‘have to [do it] situation,’” said Copeland.

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DHS Reaching Out to University Students
The Department of Homeland Security is providing scholarships for students pursuing degrees in physical and social sciences.

The Homeland Security Scholars and Fellows Program will support the development and mentoring of the next generation of scientists to study ways to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States, according to DHS.

In September 2003, the agency announced the program’s first 100 recipients—50 undergraduate and 50 graduate students studying subjects as diverse as mathematics, engineering, social science and psychology. The students are attending a number of colleges and universities across the United States.

About one-third of the awards went to engineering students.

In addition, students receive tuition and fees plus a stipend for nine months.

Guy Copeland, vice president of information infrastructure advisory programs at Computer Sciences Corp., said universities are incorporating security issues into MBA and engineering programs.

Copeland is on an advisory board for the University of Maryland MBA program. The board is looking at a dual track MBA that will include information security and homeland security, he said.

Schools are starting to explore programs designed to protect critical infrastructure, said Copeland.

George Washington University and the University of Southern California also are looking to incorporate homeland security into their curriculum.

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Terrorists Strive on ‘Perverse Hopes,’ Says Official
Contrary to popular belief, many suicide bombers come from middle-class, well-off families rather than from destitute ones, according to a Pentagon official. Therefore, the solution to stopping this kind of terrorism is not economic in nature, but requires a changed strategic approach, said Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith.

“Westerners commonly assume that only a person ensnared in deep despair could be a suicide bomber,” Feith said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation.

The assumption that the root causes of terrorism are poverty and political hopelessness must be reassessed, he said.

“This diagnosis … blinds us to opportunities [where] we have to confront terrorism strategically.”

Mohammed Atta, for instance—a key figure in executing the September 11 attack—was a middle-class Egyptian whose parents were able to send him to study abroad. His education meant that he could look forward to a relatively privileged life in Egypt—“hardly grounds for extreme despair,” said Feith.

A strange mixture of “perverse hopes” characterizes terrorists, in Feith’s opinion. “Some bombers cherish a perverse form of religious hope. The promise of eternity in paradise is a tenet of many faiths, a noble incentive and consolation to millions of people,” he said.

A second reason is the terrorist’s hope for praise as a hero from political leaders and honor for their parents.

Suicide bombing is what defense analysts categorize as a form of asymmetric warfare, a means for the weak to fight the strong, said Feith.

“Some terrorists are motivated by their hope that it is a winning strategy,” said Feith. “This suggests a strategic course for us: attack the sources of these malignant hopes,” he added.

Feith said that the Western world can do more to support moderate clerics, defend them and help them protect their religion from “extremists who want to distort and hijack it.”

World leaders would need to reinforce the message that suicide bombers are not martyrs, but murderers, said Feith. “It is important that terrorism be seen as a losing strategy,” he said.

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