Extend the Defensive Umbrella

Protecting and securing our military interests from terrorist attack also means protecting and securing the communities that host our bases and facilities.

The U.S. armed forces have failed to account for the real possibility of massive attacks on the infrastructure and communities that support critical Department of Defense facilities. They also have failed to address the ways in which such attacks might affect our readiness to assemble, deploy, and employ various elements of our military. This includes the staging areas and equipment stores of conventional, special operations, consequence management, and humanitarian assistance forces. Base commanders and emergency preparedness planners must abandon their pre-11 September security postures and address these new threats if they are to fulfill their duty to minimize the disruptive effects of future terror attacks.

Military installations have plans in place to respond to long-recognized threats, including small-scale penetrations of their security perimeters, low-level vandalism, and natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes. But the threat environment now includes the unique dangers of "spectacular" mass-casualty terrorist attacks, from suicide truck bombings to assaults on the civilian infrastructure to massive area denial attacks using chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear means. The increased probability of these threats—terrorist attacks are now at least as likely to target rear echelon or supporting installations as frontline units—warrants new response plans. This threat is all the more significant given the growth in recent decades of the role of contractors; much of the work of the Department of Defense now is conducted outside the relative security of military installations.

As some targets become increasingly denied, the threat will radiate out to softer targets—the communities that house DoD facilities, the infrastructure that supports them, and the sea, air, and land lines of communications that sustain them. Consider the impact on the military of a temporary closure of commercial shipping seaports, a persistent regional power outage, or—worse yet—a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack that could put an entire region under quarantine. Any one of these could dramatically affect the access necessary for military deployment or the production of essential military equipment. Only substantive, deliberate, and thorough advance planning will enable effetive defense against these threats.

Potential Impact

We live in an increasingly interdependent "system of systems" world in which modern communication networks are the backbone of commerce. These networks rely heavily on the national power supply. Similarly, the interstate and international commerce systems rely on safe and open highways, ports, and borders, and on reliable fuel supplies. The examples of interconnectedness go on and on, and they create the potential for multiple points of failure in our collective security. If future attacks affect lines of communication, power supplies, commercial transit areas, or other critical infrastructure, the ripple effects will be felt across every facet of the Department of Defense, but perhaps most especially in its bases and the businesses and communities that sustain them.

Consider commercial cargo arriving by sea. Every year millions of shipping containers are moved globally, and by most estimates, even today, no more than 4-5% is ever inspected by U.S. Customs. In fact, the technical limitations of the inspection equipment mean even inspected cargo cannot be guaranteed safe. What happens if terrorists use one of these ships to get a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon into the United States? What happens if they stage an attack using a hijacked tanker by crashing it into one of several key nodes in our highway system or scuttle the ship to block a major shipping channel? In the immediate aftermath, would DoD be able to or even want to use commercial shipping options for its transport needs?

Today, DoD relies on the commercial shipping industry for the rapid and cost-effective transportation of many of the goods on which the military relies, including staging and predeployment of materiel. While efficiency remains important, in the post-11 September era we cannot afford to maximize efficiency at the cost of being able to move required goods and materiel in a secure and guaranteed manner, especially in the critical hours and days immediately following an attack. What legal provisions have been made so the military can access its own goods if they are in a civilian company's warehouse when an attack disrupts the transportation network?

The impact of the dockworker strikes in 2002 on the "just-in-time" commercial and agricultural sectors is instructive in depicting what DoD could face. The ten-day worker's strike that led to the closure of 29 docks was estimated to cost the U.S. economy up to $2 billion a day because those ports handle approximately 21% of goods imported into the United States and 9% of all goods exported, as determined by value. The labor strike forced some manufacturers, including Boeing, GM, and Toyota, to shut down or realign their assembly processes because they could not get necessary parts. Perishable goods spoiled, and even after the strike ended, it took weeks for the domestic rail, truck, and air transportation networks to work through the backlog. And there was no damage involved, no crime scene to investigate, and no area to be quarantined. There was just a ten-day labor strike.

What would be the impact on a base or other installation that relies heavily on commercial shipping to solve logistics shortfalls? The answer is that it will have both foreseeable and unforeseeable effects, and in the absence of fresh mitigation planning, none of them will be sufficiently countered.

Things We Can Do

The risk DoD faces is a function of two variables: the probability of an event taking place and the severity of any event that does occur. Steps that decrease the severity, therefore, reduce the overall risk. The following actions will help military leaders, base commanders, and emergency planners update their response plans to reflect the new realities and threats posed by terrorism:

* Conduct new and thorough vulnerability assessments to identify each installation's most critical assets and determine ways to protect them. Reexamine dependence on civilian support infrastructure and create redundant communications, power generation, and food, water, and fuel supplies. Update previous assessment methodologies to incorporate lessons learned about terrorist tactics, techniques, and procedures, beginning with the truck-bomb attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. Significant emphasis also must be placed on countering the increased risk of suicide and chemical/biological attacks.

* Develop comprehensive consequence management plans identifying critical care facilities and assets, decontamination centers, and command-and-control response units. Delegate secondary units in case primary units become disabled in the attack or are deployed to other sites. Ensure the widest reasonable basic training in specific areas such as decontamination, first response, and search and rescue. All plans will need to include provisions for coordination of mutual assistance agreements with local authorities. This will be significant not just because the scale of the attack is likely to require diversion of all available assets to the incident site, but also because many service members' families live in the areas surrounding DoD installations and any viable plan must protect them as well.

* Build response and recovery plans that cover traditional physical items, such as emergency communications equipment, and establish predetermined rally points and evacuation routes. In the case of a weapon of mass destruction event, this should include developing logistics response alternatives for transporting personnel and equipment a substantial distance from the incident site. Consider reserving alternate workspace in one or more safe locations outside the primary work area, and even outside the installation itself. This will include provisions for high force protection measures and the unique structural and equipment needs of sensitive compartmented information facilities. These steps are necessary everywhere, but especially for critical bases such as Norfolk, where large numbers of commands could be affected by a single attack and would be competing for the available alternative sites.

* Develop a scalable medical response plan. This would include chemical, biological, and nuclear attack responses for both the base and the surrounding community. Develop standard operating procedure and a response playbook to ensure the command knows what to do first should an attack occur. This should include decision points and means of communicating issues, such as evacuation or "shelter in place" until local, federal, or other assets can respond.

* Modify existing contract requirements to ensure private companies take steps to protect the outsourced workforce that fulfills many critical DoD functions. Work with DoD contractors to develop comparable civilian response plans to ensure critical functions will be rapidly reconstituted following any event. Another related issue to address is DoD's authority to force (or forcibly prevent) the evacuation or quarantine of contractors.

* Disaggregate critical systems from back-up systems so no single act can destroy both primary and secondary systems. Similarly, spread emergency supplies into distributed caches to better ensure access. While efficiency calls for collocation of assets, the unpredictability of terrorism dictates a more prudent, if more costly, dispersal.

* Plan, practice, plan again, practice again. A critical aspect of developing a plan is to practice it so every player knows his or her role instinctively. This is how the U.S. military has long prepared for war, and it is how it must prepare for response and recovery operations.

Worldwide, U.S. military installations, diplomatic facilities, and other interests are lucrative targets for terrorists. However, the communities that sustain our facilities also are at risk. Enacting these steps could deter future attacks or, at the least, significantly lessen their impact.