Homeland Security Watch

A resilient person, enterprise, or region anticipates failure – even fundamental failure.

This is not necessarily a fatalistic or cynical disposition (though it can be). At best it is a kind of proactive realism, even a healthy paranoia (ala Only the Paranoid Survive).

The resilience paradox involves enhanced influence through less control.  The tensions between orthodox and paradox can be very real. (Unpack those two sentences and you have a chapter, if not a book, on the future of homeland security.)

As a strategic priority resilience mitigates hubris and promotes humility. It is one way of recognizing and saying-aloud, “Ultimately I am not in control, but I can be prepared to respond and adapt.”

A science of resilience is coalescing around principles derived from physics, biology, and human behavior. These natural principles are increasingly being tested and amended to be purposefully grafted into social systems.

Last week Arnold Bogis pointed us to the Rockefeller Foundation’s new multimillion dollar effort to build urban resilience. A thoughtful, clearly experienced, and apparently innovative emergency manager responded with at least some annoyance.

A.J. Phelps commented (in part, please see full comment):

I see a lot of potential duplication of effort with a CRO (Chief Resilience Officer) position, as opposed to consolidation of effort. Concepts that I associate with resiliency (like recovery and mitigation) fit squarely on my plate as an emergency manager provided the focus is on the manager side of the title, are addressed through a collaborative planning process with SMEs, and should be included in existing planning programs.

I hope many top emergency managers have already begun bringing together the team that will enable their city, region or whatever to apply to the Rockefeller Foundation.  Especially if Mr. Phelps’ critique is correct, emergency managers should be in the vanguard of this effort.

Resilience is a buzzword which is a kind of meme which is a kind of emergence that may or may not find its own resilience.  Such beginnings are precisely when the opportunity for influence is most profound.  Do you want to kill the resilience movement? This is your best chance.  Do you want to refine and nourish the resilience movement?  Now is the right time.  In either case, this is the moment to reflect on your motivations and take action.

Great foundations — like great teachers, executives, and prophets — invite us to work with  them to create new realities.  This is what the Rockefeller Foundation is doing with their 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge.  They do not presume to have defined resilience as some sort of universal constant. They have observed that “vulnerability in one area shakes the stability of others, rippling across borders and continents.”  They are inviting creativity and commitment to ensure “cities are prepared for and can withstand the crises they are certain to face – mitigating local impact and minimizing worldwide reverberations.”

You can learn more and apply at: 100 Resilient Cities

What’s on your mind related to homeland security?

In the tradition of Navy recruitment at theaters showing “Top Gun,” and what I hoped would be a similar boost for public health from “Contagion,” the National Guard has hitched itself to the new Superman movie that will hit theaters on June 14.

I saw this video during the previews before a showing of “Iron Man 3″ (which itself is absolutely worth going to see…).

First off, just to be clear, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the men and women who serve in the National Guard.  And I think this recruitment video is well done, and the rest of their campaign found on http://www.soldierofsteel.com/ is innovative…for a government program anyway (play a game or watch some workout videos!).

What struck me in the theater is the juxtaposition of the scenes, all obviously showing the homeland rather than national security missions of the National Guard, with the title “citizen soldier.”  Everyday men and women (who looked incredibly fit and reminded me that I need to get back to the gym) morph into these citizen soldiers who arrive at the scene of disasters to rescue you or your neighbors.

That happens.  If you are reading this blog you are undoubtedly aware of the vital role National Guard units play in response to natural disasters or terrorist attacks while under the control of their respective governors.

However, as “citizen soldier” suggests, the National Guard is not strictly a homeland response force but also plays an enormously important role in national security planning. To be blunt, when push comes to shove, the Pentagon expects these forces to be deployed and aid in the projection of American power overseas.  In simpler terms, they are soldiers expected to perform military duties — such as killing our enemies — whether or not it’s hurricane season in their home states.

I am not arguing against this role.  In fact, along with the Reserves, the Guard plays an absolutely vital role in the defense of our nation.  With the withdrawal from Iraq and the slow extrication from Afghanistan, in the immediate future it is much less likely that National Guard units will be deployed in warzones (hoping that we don’t get drawn into foolish adventures in Syria or Iran…or forced to respond to North Korean or other provocations).

Yet I can’t help but be a little…something, since disturbed is too strong and piqued too weak…by this particular representation of the Guard’s duties.  Yes, it presents the opportunity to help your neighbors following disaster.  Yes, you put on the uniform and will be called upon to perform heroic duties.  But remember that you may not only end up digging children out of rubble but quite possible be responsible for inadvertently putting them, or at least foreign children, under it.

That is not an anti-war or anti-Guard or anti-military statement.  Just one that aims to point out that war is by necessity messy with boundaries often hard to define.  As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan showed far too many times, there are few defined “front lines” and innocent civilians are too easily thrust into the line of fire.

Joining the Nation Guard is to join a honored profession and to serve our country.  It is not, however, a job in a solely homeland security/disaster response force. And I wish that this recruitment campaign could make that point just a little more clear.

From a recent Baltimore Sun article on the last deployment of the Maryland National Guard to Afghanistan:

More than a decade of deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and other battlegrounds since Sept. 11, 2001, has produced a highly skilled and deeply experienced generation of warriors. But with the United States out of Iraq and planning to leave Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. James Adkins sees a new challenge.

“Many of the soldiers that are serving now have known only war,” he said Thursday from Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, where members of the 244^th Engineer Co. are training for a deployment starting later this year.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Maryland National Guard has deployed nearly 4,000 soldiers and airmen to Afghanistan. Members have had a broad range of duties such as mentoring the Afghan Army and police, serving as infantry, evacuating wounded soldiers and flying drones.

Twelve Maryland guard members have been killed in action.

Since arriving at Fort A.P. Hill, an Army base north of Richmond, members have trained on weapons and tactics. On Thursday, they used a new GPS system to find their way through a wooded area.

“Warrior-type tasks,” Pennington said. “Your basic battle skills.”

Here’s an interesting idea: “Does Every City Need a Chief Resilience Officer?” The Atlantic Cities staff writer Emily Badger explains the concept:

The Rockefeller Foundation, this year celebrating its 100th anniversary, is throwing its weight (and its money) behind this mandate. Today, it’s announcing a 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge, a three-year, $100 million prize with one particularly interesting component: The foundation plans to put up the money to hire a Chief Resilience Officer position in 100 cities around the world. Ultimately, though, these cities will have to scrounge up their own funds to keep the job alive.

Had anyone heard of this initiative? I hadn’t, and I’m impressed that a foundation as prestigious as Rockefeller is embracing the resilience concept.  Until recently, in my view at least, “resilience” was an idea more or less regulated to homeland security, health, and other related fields.  It would emerge immediately following a large event, whether natural or man-made, but just as quickly disappear from the public eye.

Rockefeller Foundation money does not equal widespread acceptance nor understanding, but I would argue that it is a sign that the concept is firmly entrenched in the public discourse and will not quietly pass into that good night if the next federal administration/round  of homeland security “experts” decides to go in another direction.

It appears that this came about partly because of the threat of climate change:

Rockefeller is inviting cities to apply to be one of these 100 resilient cities – to be named in three rounds over the next three years – by arguing for how they’re working to become “resilient.” Rockefeller wants to then help them create a resilience plan, preemptively sketching out how they would address any number of catastrophes including but beyond climate change.

“We see it as broader than that,” Coleman says. “It’s really about how cities are able to deal with shocks and stresses. Those could be climate-related, or more general weather-related. But they could be other natural disasters like earthquakes. They could also be things like financial shocks and stresses – something we’ve seen a lot of over the last few years. Or health crises. Really anything that is going to test the city and its response.”

The foundation is thinking about the long term:

“We feel that having someone specifically tasked with thinking about and acting on and planning for resilience will mean that other people within the city government will need to pay – and will be required to pay – attention to the issue,” he says. “They won’t be able to ignore it. Or, what tends to happen more often is not that it’s ignored, but it’s put on the back burner because it’s not seen as a priority until something happens.”

Maybe this will be one of those jobs that becomes obsolete through its own success: When “resiliency” is baked into everything a city does, we won’t need resilience officers any more.

I have to admit, I’d love one of these positions.  I also have to admit, that the best individuals for the job would be both well versed in the concept of resilience while also being among the movers and shakers in their local governments.  This will not be an easy position — inherently tough choices will be faced, no matter the local conditions.  It will, or at least should, require some level of political acumen that can best provide an opportunity for resilience-related initiatives to blossom.

For now, Rockefeller is unaware of any city already hosting a job quite like this one, so it’s hard to say exactly how the role will work (or what a qualified candidate might look like). Perhaps some mix of urban/transportation planner and sustainability officer and emergency manager? All of those jobs already exist, so it will be interesting to see how the people who hold them view the arrival of this new official tasked with reporting directly to the mayor.

(h/t to Dawn Scarola for sharing this concept and article.)

The website for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International is http://www.apcointl.org/.

A few weeks ago, they created a repository for public safety and emergency response smart phone applications. The site is called AppComm, and you can find it at http://appcomm.org/.

As of Monday, the site had links to 92 applications. Two thirds of the apps are free.

Here’s what APCO says about its AppComm site:

AppComm is APCO International’s online Application Community. Here, you will find a collection of applications related to public safety and emergency response for use by the general public and first responders.

AppComm is also a forum where public safety professionals, the general public, and app developers can discuss and rate apps, identify unmet needs, and submit ideas for apps they’d like to see built.

As you browse our growing list of apps, we encourage you to tell us which ones you’ve used, whether you liked it, and why. Additionally, if you are aware of an app that would be a good fit for our site, please use the “Submit App” tab located at the top of the page.

If you have a suggestion for an app you don’t see listed, be sure to submit your idea to AppComm by email to appcomm@apcointl.org.

We intend for this site to be your single, trusted source of public safety apps.

(h/t to GM for the lead)

What’s on your mind related to homeland security?

In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

T.S. Eliot, East Coker

I’m fortunate to work with very talented people. Last week, four of them (Kristin, Charles, Missy and James) put sound and images to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the Boston Marathon attack and West, Texas explosion.

They produced the video in three days.

I think they did a remarkable job.

Here it is:

On this day in 1999 three days of violent storms began plowing across the Great Plains States.  One hundred forty-one tornadoes were confirmed over the outbreak, including an F-5 tornado with winds exceeding 301 miles-per-hour.  Fifty people died. Damages exceeded $1.9 billion.

What’s on your mind regarding homeland security?

In the April 30 Washington Post, back in the Style section with the comics and gossip, is a remarkable piece of long-form journalism every homeland security professional should read and be ready to discuss.  The story’s substance is well within our domain.  It is also wonderfully written.  The writer has achieved a rhetoric that constantly reminds the reader, “this is one way of perceiving reality, there are others.”

Please access: The Prophets of Oak Ridge.  The twenty-second inescapable advertisement is annoying but worth waiting out.

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

I came across that quote from Haruki Murakami yesterday.

I don’t know what everyone else is reading, so I asked them.

OK, not everyone, but at least the people who were around me yesterday, either physically or virtually.

Since 99% of the people I know have something to do with homeland security (that’s another story), the resulting list is mostly about homeland security.

And I do work at a university; that probably influenced the list a bit.

Plus the university is on a military base, so there’s that.

I did ask one person who was fixing a video screen near my office what he was reading. I’d never met him before, but he had no trouble immediately replying.

Two other people who responded are parents of small children who, at least for today, were the focus of their homeland security attention.

Here’s the reading list. I learned about some books and other material I had not heard of.

If you’d like, try the same experiment wherever you are today. Ask people you work with what they are reading. Keep it to one book per person. If you have the chance, post the results in the comments section.

1. Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God. 1st ed. Ballantine Books, 2001.

2. “Articles that explore the use of Social Network Analysis to better understand: 1) cohesion factors in groups, 2) structure of message contributions, 3) pattern of exchange, 4) the role of the critical mass, 5) role and power network structures as they related to various type of on-line collaboration and knowledge creation.” (Right, not a book; the person who sent me this also included 15 pdf articles to illustrate the point he was making.)

3. Berggruen Institute on Governance. “Think Long Committee for California” a new governance tool to repair California’s government. (Not a book, but it’s what she was reading.)

4. Carafano, James Jay, and Paul Rosenzweig. Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom. Heritage Books, 2005.

5. “Cub Scout Committee Chair Training Manual” (That was her third choice.  Her first choice was somewhat more “shaded.”  She also said if I planned to use her name I had to say she was reading the Bible.).

6. Deardorff, Brad. The Roots of Our Children’s War: Identity and the War on Terrorism. AgilePress, 2013.

7. Desmond, Leslie, and Bill Dorrance. True Horsemanship Through Feel, Second Edition. 2nd ed. Lyons Press, 2007. (At first I thought this had nothing to do with homeland security, but on second thought….)

8. Dumas, Alexandre. The Three Musketeers. Simon & Brown, 2013.

9. Eco, Umberto. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. Mariner Books, 1999.

10. Gardner, Howard. Five Minds for the Future. Harvard Business Review Press, 2009.

11. Hirsch, James S. Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend. 1st ed. Scribner, 2010.

12. Lemov, Doug, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. 1st ed. Jossey-Bass, 2012.

13. Lewis, Ted. “The Book of Extremes: Why the 21st century Isn’t Like the 20th Century.” 2013. (This book is in a prepublication format, and won’t be published for a few more months; it’s a follow up to Lewis’ Bak’s Sand Pile: Strategies for a Catastrophic World.)

14. Mackey, Sandra. Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict. 1st ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

15. McCauley, Clark, and Sophia Moskalenko. Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

16. Moghaddam, Fathali M. The Psychology of Dictatorship. 1st ed. American Psychological Association (APA), 2013.

17. Mudd, Philip. Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

18. Owen, Mark, and Kevin Maurer. No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. First Edition. Dutton Adult, 2012.

19. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2009.

20. Sodium Polyacrylate: My life would be a mess without it. (Not actually a book. But it could be, should be, one.)

21. Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. Penguin Classics, 2000.

22. Williams, Gary. Seal of Honor: Operation Red Wings and the Life of Lt. Michael P. Murphy, USN. Naval Institute Press, 2011.

23. “What am I reading? I can’t think of anything in particular…. Wow. How sad is that,” said a person who works as hard as almost anyone I know.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The person who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the person who can’t read them.”

If you do ask people in your ecosystem what they’re reading, please post what you learn here.  And if you get to talk with each other about what you’re reading, that’s even better.

Son-of-Boston Rich Serino, currently Deputy Administrator of FEMA and formerly Chief of Boston EMS, penned a thank you op-ed last week to the first responders and citizens of Boston who participated in the response to the bombings.

While in one moment we saw terror and brutality, in the next we saw our community’s love and compassion. We saw our EMTs, paramedics, police officers, and firefighters spring into action and perform their jobs heroically.

He also saw how those non-professional responders helped save lives.

They weren’t the only first responders, though. Bystanders and marathon volunteers, regular people given the chance to run, decided instead to stay and help the professional responders do their jobs. Some comforted victims, urging them to hold on and that help was on the way. Some helped carry victims to the medical tent for triage. Some did more by helping to control bleeding, in some cases using their own clothes as tourniquets to stop life-threatening blood loss.

Years of planning across the spectrum of agencies in the area contributed to the incredibly high level of preparedness.

For years, responders in Boston, as in other cities, have utilized large public events as “planned disasters,” anticipating and preparing for mass casualties if something goes wrong. In Boston, First Night, Fourth of July on the Esplanade, and the 2004 Democratic National Convention, all offered the city’s medical community a chance to hone their plans and skills in managing high-profile, public events. In my current role at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, we work with communities big and small across the country to prepare for these worst-case scenarios.

And he was clear about the successes of that day.

It was no accident that not a single hospital in the city was overwhelmed with patients in the aftermath of the bombings. It was no accident that patients were appropriately triaged and transported in an orderly manner to the appropriate hospital based on their needs. And it was no accident that a Medical Intelligence Center was fully staffed and operating on race day to keep track of patients, coordinate resources and share information with the medical community throughout the region. All of these are tangible results of disaster planning that has gone on in Boston for more than 20 years.

A man of, by, and for that community for so long, Chief Serino is uniquely positioned to offer his thanks.

In a disaster, everyone has something to give and never was that more evident than on Marathon Monday. For the EMTs and paramedics of Boston EMS, a special “Thank you for a job well done!” To the citizens of our town, I’ve never been more proud.

The entire piece is worth your time: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/04/26/medical-response-marathon-bombings-was-community-wide-effort/VxBxwziGKrz532QbwPQlfP/story.html

Last week two different events reviewed various aspects of the terrorist attack in Boston.

Harvard’s School of Public Health held a panel, “The Boston Marathon Bombings: Lessons Learned for Saving Lives:”

Following the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon and a dramatic search for the suspects, the city’s emergency preparedness and response systems have been credited with saving lives. This Forum event, focused primarily on the immediate aftermath of the bombings, revealed the sometimes surprising underpinnings of a successful emergency preparedness system and shared hard-won lessons applied and learned. Presented in collaboration with WBUR.

Speakers included:

• James Hooley – Chief, Boston EMS
• Judy Ann Bigby – Former Massachusetts Secretary of Health and Human Services
• Paul Biddinger – Director, Emergency Preparedness and Response Exercise Program, Harvard School of Public Health, and Chief, Division of Emergency Preparedness, Massachusetts General Hospital
• Leonard Marcus – Co-Director, National Preparedness Leadership Initiative
• Don Boyce – Director of the Office of Emergency Management, Department of Health and Human Services

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXaPMiEAMg

An event at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government looked at a wider range of issues related to the bombing:

“Boston Marathon Tragedy & Aftermath” featured Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis,  former Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs Department of Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem, Harvard Divinity School Dean David Hempton, Director of MEMA Kurt Schwartz, WBZ Anchor David Wade and Harvard Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood.  The extensive conversation touched on terrorism, coordinated city, state and federal responses, impact of the media, and the resilience of Boston.

On this day in 1986 reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant experienced a catastrophic event. On this day in 1989 a tornado hit Bangladesh, killing upwards of 1,300, injuring 12,000, and leaving as many as 80,000 homeless. Why do many of us remember one and not the other?

What’s on your mind related to homeland security?

The human mind is a story-engine. Our species survived by — strangely, weirdly, perhaps uniquely — perceiving the future as something that can be influenced, even created.

In many cultures there is a sense of past, present, and future. In other cultures it is more a matter of an unfolding toward completion…

But whatever the subtlety of time past or yet to arrive, we can feel compelled to anticipate, predict, and — forewarned and thereby forearmed — take action to shape our story’s outcome.

This cognitive adaptation was very helpful to a puny, hairless primate. We may not be able to see ultraviolet, but we can see — or think we see — the future. Over the generations we have sharpened the skill and applied it in wonderful ways.

But the skill emerged more as automatic reflex than mindful choice. Lions, tigers, and bears are unambiguous. The other tribe was immediately recognizable. When there is an unexpected rush of wind or water, my senses surge and cognition jumps into overdrive.

When I am in a strange place surrounded by a strange tribe — most cities, for example — my senses and story-engine are especially alive. The prospect of an immediate intentional threat provokes a particular kind of cognition. It’s similar to when a police car suddenly appears in the rear-view mirror.

This internal engine for imagining the future seems especially adept at short-stories and, actually, rather trashy repetitive short-stories. Stereotypes abound. Once I decide what a threat looks, sounds, smells, feels or tastes like everyone (thing) that shares those characteristics is a threat until proven otherwise — if I take a chance before running away or killing them. For most of the last 60,000 years this has probably been a mostly helpful predisposition.

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics, has written, “…people are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that comes to mind.”

I am. Most of the time.

So… I hear about an unexplained fire in a small town in Texas. There is considerable evidence of human neglect in terms of a fertilizer storage facility and what was allowed to be built near the storage facility. But neglect is not intention. Evidently without intention, my story-engine doesn’t feel much motivation. Accidents happen.

This week many of my friends and family are threatened by the flooding Mississippi and Illinois rivers. There is a part of my brain (mind?) that knows (perceives?) the threat has been amplified by a whole host of human choices. But once again neglect is not intention. Without intentionality, my story-engine is mostly bored. Other engines — sympathy, empathy, problem-solving — may start-up. But the story-engine is quiescent. Nature will have her way.

But when two kids not only intentionally kill and maim, but do so randomly and wantonly: while I am 550 miles away my story-engine roars into high speed.

Back in 2007 Kahneman reported on this research result:

Some ten or fifteen years ago when there were terrorism scares in Europe but not in the States, people who were about to travel to Europe were asked questions like, How much would you pay for insurance that would return a hundred thousand dollars if during your trip you died for any reason. Alternatively other people were asked, how much would you pay for insurance that could pay a hundred thousand dollars if you died in a terrorist incident during your trip. People pay a lot more for the second policy than for the first… basically what you’re doing there is substituting fear.

You are asked how much insurance you would pay, and you don’t know—it’s a very hard thing to do. You do know how afraid you are, and you’re more afraid of dying in a terrorist accident than you’re afraid of dying. So you end up paying more because you map your fear into dollars and that’s what you get.

Perceived intentionality amplifies the sense of fear which stimulates our story-engine. The story-engine looks for sources-of-intentionality that will explain — and allow us to quickly influence — how our story unfolds. Our story-engine is not very sophisticated: it’s principal plot device is avoidance or elimination of the threat.  Like the scriptwriter for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our story-engine prefers obvious threats, unambiguous good and bad, and is inclined to several sequels of essentially the same story.

Reality is not usually so obvious, unambiguous, and repetitive. We need to spawn more sophisticated stories, less pulp fiction, more great American novel, maybe some Russian tragedies or German existentialism.   Even some poetry.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land….”
T.S. Eliot wrote at the start of his Waste Land poem.

I’ve tried, but I never did understand that poem. Part of it, maybe. But not most of it.

I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the waste of last week either, of lives, and hopes and promises.

I’m not sure the majestic horror of West, Texas or Boston, Massachusetts is to be understood. Like the sudden explosion of the West Fertilizer Plant captured forever on an iPhone, some events transcend meaning. They simply are.

In years, the professional hive mind may come to a general but unspoken agreement about what those events mean, as it has done with September 11, 2001, and Katrina. But today — the next week in time — is too soon. At least for me.

Still, candidates of meaning emerge faintly through the numbness. I will write them as outlines, pretending there is more solidity to them than I know.

1. There is much more to homeland security than the Department of Homeland Security.

During last week’s cruelty and nobility, I did not hear much about the Department of Homeland Security. I do recall something about the Department of Homeland Security standing by, ready to provide whatever support was needed in Boston. But state and local responders proved themselves more than adequate to the job. That’s as it should be, at least according to homeland security doctrine.

Homeland security is not exclusively about what the federal government does.

They also serve who only stand and wait, said another poet.

2. Homeland security works.

Measuring preparedness before the fact is in the “too hard to do” box. Whatever homeland security is or is not, it involves collaborating and sharing information. Last week, public safety agencies demonstrated through a metric no one wants replicated they know how to do homeland security.

Atul Gawande wrote an essay in the New Yorker, Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready. The essay nominally is about medical care workers. I think it is also about most everyone within the homeland security community.

The bombs at the Boston Marathon were designed to maim and kill, and they did. Three people died within the first moments of the blast. More than a hundred and seventy people were injured. They had their limbs blown off, vital arteries severed, bones fractured, flesh torn open by shrapnel or scorched by the blasts’ heat. Yet it now appears that every one of the wounded alive when rescuers reached them will survive….

How did this happen? Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore….

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them. When ball bearings and nails were found in the wounds of the victims, everyone understood the bombs had been packed with them as projectiles. At every hospital, clinicians considered the possibility of chemical or radiation contamination, a second wave of attacks, or a direct attack on a hospital. Even nonmedical friends e-mailed and texted me to warn people about secondary and tertiary explosive devices aimed at responders. Everyone’s imaginations have come to encompass these once unimaginable events….

We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.

3. Homeland security doesn’t work, not all the time.

At least 50 terrorists plots against the US have been stopped since September 11, 2001. But not the Boston Marathon plot.

Suspect Number 1 was inside the FBI radar for awhile. Some political carrion eaters still hawk the perfection of dot connectivity. But I think the public too has lost its pre-9/11/01 naïveté.   A lot of people are sufficiently sophisticated to know you can’t stop them all. Maybe this is a manifestation of the resilience we’ve been aiming for. Even within a planned security event, you can’t prevent all bad from happening.

It’s not alright that homeland security does not work all the time. But it will not nor cannot ever be perfect. Last week I did not hear many people from Boston dispute that claim.

On the other hand, if it is true that “the last time regulators performed a full safety inspection of the [West Fertilizer Plant] facility was nearly 28 years ago,” or (according to Representative Bernie Thompson) “This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act, yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.”, then what else inside homeland security is this wrong? And why?

4. Don’t bother trying to plot dead and injured against attention

a. 4 dead, 176 wounded
b. 26 killed, 2 wounded
c. 12 killed, 58 wounded
d. 13 killed, 30 wounded
e. 33 killed, 23 wounded
f. 15 killed, 24 wounded
g. 14 killed (including 11 first responders), 200 injured
h. 30 dead, 162 wounded
i. 75 dead; 350 injured
j. 190 dead, 11,000 injured
—
a. April 15, 2013, Bombings at the Boston Marathon
b. December 2012, shooting at a school in Newton, Connecticut
c. July 2012, shooting at movie theater in Aurora, Colorado
d. November 2009, shooting at Ft. Hood, Texas
e. April 2007, shooting at Virginia Tech
f. April 1999, shooting at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado
g. April 2013, West, Texas plant explosion
h. Average daily homicides and wounded due to gun violence (successful and attempted suicides excluded)
i. April 15, 2013 bombings in Iraq
j. April 2013 Sichuan province earthquake

(thanks, JFM)

5. Technology and amateurs on social networks don’t automatically trump the grinding work of trained professionals.

Facial recognition systems were unable to identify Boston suspects Number 1 and 2, “even though both [suspects’] images exist in official databases: [Suspect Number 2] had a Massachusetts driver’s license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and [Suspect Number 1] had been the subject of some FBI investigation….”

Video did help, but “The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times,” …. “The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras. It took a couple of days, but analysts began to focus on two men in baseball caps who had brought heavy black bags into the crowd near the marathon’s finish line but left without those bags.”

Twitter, Reddit, homeland security experts who should have known better, the main stream and tributary media were largely outclassed by public safety professionals. Social media in particular stumbled badly on its heretofore unchallenged climb to information superiority:

“In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials,” the Post reported. “Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.”

6. It just got more difficult to cut homeland security spending.

I can hear the testimony being written now: “If you cut our request for [fill in the blank], you’re going to make it really difficult for us to [fill in the blank with something about sustainment, resilience, terrorism, or some other hazard]. We’ve come so far since [insert September 11, 2001 , or Katrina, or other locally appropriate reference], you can’t abandon us now, just when the threat of [insert relevant threat] is growing. [Insert subtle metaphor about blood on someone's hands.]“

In completely unrelated news, TSA Administrator John Pistole announced on Monday that TSA was postponing plans to allow passengers to carry small knives on planes.

7. Small towns need homeland security training just as much as the big cities.

Watertown, Massachusetts — where Suspect Number 2 was captured — has a population of around 32,000 people.

The population of West, Texas — site of the West Fertilizer Plant — is about 2,600 people.

Terrorists and disasters do not restrict themselves to UASI regions.

8. During chaos, public emotion is more powerful than public rationality, and the consequences of emotion persist.

Accounting logics seek to shape homeland security conversations around norms of economic rationality. But when the dramatically ugly happens, homeland security has very little to do with efficiency, cost benefit analysis, risk management, or any of the other magic words used by those who count things.

Listen to 17,000 Bruins fans sing the National Anthem.

Look at the signs all around Yankee Stadium about the love Yankee fans have for Boston.

Listen to Big Papi tell a packed Fenway Park and a national TV audience that “This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”

And lest you think those kinds of emotions pass quickly, recall George Bush’s September 14, 2001 bullhorn speech to the Ground Zero workers: “I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

And recall the consequences of that spontaneous prediction.

9. During chaos, the Constitution can be placed off to the side, without too many objections.

First comes action, then objections.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” argues those who believe sometimes the perceived urgent supersedes pedantic attention to the rule of law.

Action first. Then talk.

A major American city was “locked down.” Whatever than means.

Let’s talk about what that means, and by what authority the action was taken.

Police searching for Suspect Number 2 entered homes, searched the residents, ordered them to leave the house with their hands clasped behind their heads.

Can the cops do that? What about the Bill of Rights?

Act first. Then talk about those kinds of concerns.

During chaos, not too many people seem to mind being told what to do by uniformed men and women with guns.

“I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.”
warned T.S. Eliot

In addition to the April 19 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building and all the gruesome anniversaries noted in my Thursday post, April 15 also marks the sinking of the Titanic and the beginning of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the worst experience of flooding, so far, in American history. Natural, accidental, or intentional risks abound. What is the role of homeland security? What’s on your mind?