Washington is organizing and funding national security with a Cold War paradigm ill-suited for preparedness vis-à-vis asymmetric threats. This paradigm predisposes Americans to accept uncritically that more resources must be expended on counter-terrorism to prevent attacks.
Alone, this Maginot Line/Mississippi levee-mindset fails to provide all-hazards security for the homeland. If applied to fire safety, building managers would focus more resources on smoke detectors than sprinkler systems. However, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrates what happens when in effect a fire occurs and overwhelms inadequate sprinkler systems—i.e., if prevention fails.
Non-state adversaries declared war on the United States. They said they will pursue it using weapons of mass destruction, including improvised nuclear devices. As for the likelihood of such a device detonating on U.S. soil, virtually every national and homeland security leader has said, "It's a question of when, not if."
And yet, these leaders fail to organize and prepare the nation for a nuclear detonation in an American city, a category five hurricane making landfall, or pandemic flu. Why?
Sixty years ago, national leaders with a bipartisan, command-attention world view grasped the urgent need to mobilize against the Soviet Union. They applied emerging scientific breakthroughs to advance revolutionary new technologies with defense applications. A new national security bureaucracy came to dominate Washington budgets and solidified into a public-private partnership—i.e., the military-industrial-scientific-academic complex. This national security establishment defined the problems, set priorities, determined trade-offs, and decided solutions.
By mid-1998, policy-makers came to recognize two new national security threats—radical Islamic terrorists and rogue states with ballistic missiles. Addressing the former in two presidential directives, the Clinton administration framed a policy for Department of Defense (DOD) support to civil authorities if prevention failed.
But others identified a state-to-state problem offering a solution that served the Cold War-era establishment. Citing threats emerging in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, they found expression in Donald Rumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.
When the Bush administration arrived in Washington in 2001, it seated Rumsfeld in the Pentagon to implement a national security policy informed by his commission. After 9/11, it chose a counter-terrorism strategy focused on the so-called Axis of Evil, the purported state sponsors of terrorism, the very rogue states identified by Rumsfeld's commission. It followed that the post-attack Kean-Hamilton 9/11 Commission focused primarily on intelligence failures instead of emergency response, which got only one day of hearings, a predisposition that wrongfully guided the organizing and resourcing of the Department of Homeland Security.
To put things right requires a second bipartisan, command-attention national security reorganization and reallocation of fiscal resources on the grandest of scales. For the homeland, national leaders must adopt a resilience paradigm that prioritizes response and recovery from mass-casualty catastrophes—be they terrorist or natural. The incoming administration and Congress must put teeth into consequence management for when prevention fails.
Twenty-first century industrial sectors and their work forces have different solutions for response and recovery objectives to help drive policy, planning, and funding. Procurement must support a government-created market for these sectors. Departments, agencies, and components must have the statutory powers to generate all-hazards homeland security requirements and exercise budget and program management authority. They must also have operational command and control of equipment and personnel.
Reorganization to this degree has already been achieved in the Department of Health and Human Services. The newly established Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), led by Dr. W. Craig Vanderwagen, is the lead for federal public health and medical response for emergencies or disasters that activate the National Response Framework (NRF) for national incident management.
During an incident, Dr. Vanderwagen has operational control and deployment authority over all federal public health and medical personnel and assets except those belonging to DOD. Equally significant, Vanderwagen also has acquisition authority to oversee advanced research, development, and procurement of qualified medical countermeasures. The stand-up of ASPR is the model for a Goldwater-Nichols for homeland security necessary to fully organize and resource American resilience now.