Homeland Security Watch

Comment by William R. Cumming

March 31, 2009 @ 7:34 am

Part of the problem is that the shared sovereignity designed into the Constitution and not resolved by that document (obviously partially resolved by the Civil War) was left to each generation to work out properly. The real question looming over American life and its governmental organizations is whether the threat and risk analysis of the GWOT and Long War domestic impact likely to be resolved into new governmental forms on preparedness and response. With going into detail I think given the revision of language on things like the Federal Response Plan becoming the National Response Framework it is clear that mutual benefits to each level of government would occur if all levels stop trying to lay off their costs on other levels and obtain most of the benefits. Instead, each level should be closely analyzed and documented as to what it can do best–including funding and staffing and over all preparing ( logistics, equipment, training etc). Without this documentation and analysis (hopefully thoughtful) the mish mash that occurs means that citizens will unnecessarily suffer. The key is determine from a variety of viewpoints (including legal, technical and scientific)in advance of incidents/events who actually has the capability NOW not at some future date and how can that be leveraged and improved? Dreaming of some different future arrangement being designed is just that a dream or nightmare. Instead let’s reinforce by proper administration what now actually works and enhance that by proper funding and staffing and preparedness. By the way the TOPOFF exerices now renamed to National Level Exercises (I guess this means top officials don’t have to play and learn their jobs) with what I will continue to call TOPOFF V coming up this summer should and in fact have allowed us to learn of past problems. The problem is that the lessons learned were not learned because fundamentally the play and deficiencies identified in those exercises were not really captured. Perhaps what has happened is the top officials are really just not disciplined and knowledgable enough to do their jobs in emergencies and large scale catastrophic events (we now know from testimony that it was Secretary Chertoff who had been on board for 8 months before Katrina, not Michael Brown who should have been relieved because he did NOT know key elements of the Stafford Act or of his own National Response Plan and had never seen himself as a key link in domestic crisis management and response so acted completely ad hoc throughout the event)and some may just be untrainable despite what is done to improve their capacity. The Senate certainly should be looking for evidence, if any, of domestic crisis management ability and competence and knowledge before confirming some of these wannabes. Again Congress should do its job.

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April 15, 2009 @ 6:48 am

[...] Another problem with this part of the report — and the whole report — is signaled by the use of (U), (LES) and (FOUO) or Unclassified, Law Enforcement Sensitive, and For Official Use Only.  These are the lowest levels of classification, but they represent an effort to veil the report from wide public distribution.   It didn’t work.  Often won’t work.  And we can be glad for it.  The single best way to ensure the strategic perspective of DHS is both accurate and constitutionally appropriate is for such strategic perspective to be made explicit and open to public discussion. (A prior post is potentially relevant.) [...]