HSAJ Volume 5, Issue 2

Notes from the Editor
In this issue of Homeland Security Affairs we offer one essay that outlines some
of the important homeland security issues of 2008 and a set of essays that
describes a potentially significant change in the national homeland security
architecture. This edition also has two essays about homeland security
technology. One applies coevolutionary theory to the strategic question of how to
defend against an adaptive adversary; the other discusses policy and technology
changes that could improve aviation safety. We present an article that
demonstrates how to determine the benefits and costs of homeland security
spending and an article that discusses threats from China to American
corporations and to homeland security. The issue concludes with an analysis of
how Community Health Centers can be an integral part of the nation’s public
health preparedness.
In our second annual “Changing Homeland Security: Year in Review – 2008”
Christopher Bellavita reports on what a selected group of homeland security
professionals considered 2008’s top stories. Their survey responses included the
presidential election and its impact on homeland security, the terrorist attack in
Mumbai, the domestic and international economic meltdown, chaos on the
southern border, the continued quest to define homeland security, and an
expanding threat spectrum. Bellavita also includes three candidates for the
“Homeland Security Image of the Year.”
Should the Homeland Security Council (HSC) and the National Security
Council (NSC) merge? As we prepare to publish, most signs indicate the merger
will take place. Christine E. Wormuth and Jeremy White present the argument in
support of the merger. In “Merging the HSC and NSC: Stronger Together,” the
authors note that at the federal level homeland security is essentially an
interagency activity. White House leadership is the only practical way to ensure
unity of effort among federal agencies. Merging the NSC and the HSC into one
organization can end the bifurcation of national security and homeland security.
A single council will give the president a way to develop and implement
homeland security policy that is integrated with other national security
initiatives.
Paul N. Stockton, in “Beyond the HSC/NSC Merger: Integrating States and
Localities into Homeland Security Policymaking,” agrees that merging the NSC
and the HSC seems inevitable. But the change brings risk. Stockton argues that if
the councils are combined, administration officials will need to pay special
attention to a number of issues, including the danger that homeland security will
take a back seat to traditional national security priorities. The president and the
newly structured council will also need to address significant challenges of
horizontal integration (i.e., across federal agencies) and vertical integration – the
inclusion of state and local representatives in the work of the council. Stockton
reviews the possible problems with a merger and suggests solutions.
In “Technology Strategies for Homeland Security: Adaptation and Coevolution
of Offense and Defense,” Brian A. Jackson frames the dynamic between terrorist
groups and security forces as a coevolutionary process. Highlighting the use of
technology by both homeland security organizations and terrorists, Jackson
describes how terrorists adapt to defensive technologies and how homeland
security organizations must then develop measures to counter those adaptations.
He argues that trying to create impenetrable defenses for every target is futile.
Instead he suggests that defensive technology strategies should exploit
evolutionary dynamics by shaping adversary choices and by using defensive
approaches that are insensitive to terrorist adaptation strategies.
Anthony M. Fainberg’s essay, “The Terrorist Threat to Inbound U.S. Passenger
Flights: Inadequate Government Response,” illustrates the interface between
technology, politics, and security. He writes that the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) seems reluctant to focus on security for aircraft flying into
the United Sates from abroad. Reviewing the decades-long history of terrorist
attacks on commercial aviation, Fainberg notes how al Qaeda has tried more than
once to simultaneously destroy several U.S. aircraft, in flight, by using suicide
bombers ticketed as regular passengers. He argues that countries from which
inbound flights depart should agree to security standards that match those
applied to domestic flights, including using explosive trace detectors to inspect
passengers and their carry-on items.
In “Just How Much Does That Cost, Anyway? An Analysis of the Financial
Costs and Benefits of the ‘No Fly’ List,” Marcus Holmes offers a unique financial
cost and security benefit analysis of the United States government’s “no fly list.”
On September 11, 2001 the no fly list contained sixteen names of terrorists and
other individuals deemed threatening to the states. Since then, the list has had
more than 755,500 names. Holmes writes that while there has been considerable
interest in the social costs of the list, there has been little attention paid to the
financial costs relative to the benefits. He claims it is unclear how one can create a
strategy for how national security dollars should be spent without knowing how
many dollars are involved and where they are going. Holmes’ study is a path-
setting step in asking and answering an important question: what are the costs,
relative to the benefits, of anti-terrorism policies and security strategies?
Robert C. Slate is the author of “Innovating with Intelligence: New Directions
in China’s Quest for Intangible Property and Implications for Homeland
Security.” He argues Chinese corporations that use intellectual property theft and
infringement in their business model are significant threats to the intangible
property of the American corporate world and pose a serious threat to homeland
security. Slate describes how Chinese corporations, universities, and research
institutions use intelligence principles to help China become an economic
superpower. He calls for the U.S. intelligence community to rethink its traditional
approach to collecting and analyzing information about China.
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21 outlines a new approach to public
health and medical preparedness in the United States. In “Community Health
Centers: The Untapped Resource for Public Health and Medical Preparedness,”
Karen M. Wood writes that the more than 1,200 community health centers (CHC)
in the nation are well-positioned to play a significant role in that effort. Wood
describes how CHCs can improve biosurveillance, countermeasure distribution,
mass casualty care, and community resilience. She argues that aggressive
investment in the centers and their emergency management programs can make
public health emergency management more accessible to special-needs
populations and support many of the objectives identified in HSPD 21.
We hope you find the articles in this issue of Homeland Security Affairs
informative and thought provoking. As always, we invite you to contribute your
own research and ideas to the continuing conversation about homeland security.
The Editor
In Memoriam: Matthew Simeone
Legacy Beyond Nassau
Richard B. Cooper
One of the greatest rewards in life is the people you meet and the things they teach you
along the way. I have been more than fortunate throughout my career to work with
some amazing people. They have ranged from gifted engineers and scientists who have
built technologies and programs to improve life on earth to leaders and innovators who
have made tremendous differences (large and small) to the every day lives of people and
communities in which they live.
On March 27, 2009 one of those amazing people passed away. His name was Matt
Simeone.
I first met Matt in 2004 during a business trip to the greater New York City area
when I was working for DHS’ Private Sector Office. At the time, Matt and several of his
fellow officers in the Nassau County Police Department were building one of the
country’s first public-private sector information sharing networks. It was called the
Security/Police Information Network (SPIN) and it was Matt’s job to lead the team of
police officers to put the program in place.
While Matt may have spent his entire career as a police officer serving the people of
Long Island on patrol, combating gangs, serving as a police academy instructor, and
more, he understood that any effective information sharing network in a post 9/11 world
had to do more than just talk to cops. It had to talk to businesses, and community and
civic associations, as well as citizens in the community. Such a network also had to have
relevant and timely information being exchanged as expeditiously as possible.
Most importantly, Matt and his colleagues knew that their network had to be a two-
way street of give and take between its various users, while allowing for other outside
avenues (other law enforcement agencies; regional groups, etc.) to connect into it should
a need or emergency arise. To Matt and his SPIN team, everyone had to get the
information they needed to do their respective jobs.
In applying the principles of community policing to create this first-of-its-type tool
for Nassau County, Matt and his team did something very novel in building their
information sharing network. They actually went out and listened to the very
constituencies they wanted to engage.
Rather than simply create the requirements for SPIN on a white board at police
headquarters, build it and impose it upon others, Matt and his team engaged business
interests, civic groups, and community stakeholders throughout Nassau County and the
surrounding areas to forge their information sharing network. While building that
network, something else happened along the way. A newfound sense of trust, respect,
and relationships developed amongst the diverse stakeholders with the Nassau County
Police Department; that allowed the SPIN program to generate success almost from the
beginning of its operations.
Matt’s collaborative leadership style – always end-goal focused and believing in
person-to-person contact – was a perfect match for an inventive and dynamic
COOPER, MATTHEW SIMEONE 2
information system. He also understood that while the 9/11 attacks that claimed many
of his County’s residents occurred just west of Nassau in lower Manhattan, there was
still an inherent role and responsibility for his police department to be ready for that
scale of emergency, as well as the smaller scale ones that occur every day in the form of
violent crime, robberies and so forth.
He recognized that key to any successful homeland security operation was having
effective and informed relationships. Those were established by effective information
sharing where each user could take shared details and react and respond accordingly.
Matt wanted to be sure Nassau County was ready with such a resource.
He succeeded.
Two weeks ago in a congressional hearing, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) spoke about
the need for DHS’ Information and Analysis efforts to be led by someone with real state
and local law enforcement experience. Someone who (in her words) could directly speak
to the needs of “front-line first responders” when it came to information sharing and
more.
I couldn’t help but think of Matt when she made those remarks. For me, Matt
Simeone was the model of the leader she spoke of and all anyone had to do was look at
what’s in place and operating in Nassau County today to see the proof.
Matt’s passing as a result of cancer robs his family of a dear loved one, but further
robs the nation and his community of his continued leadership on information sharing
and other issues. His legacy of service, though, will continue to serve his community on
Long Island, his ‘own homeland,’ and more for years to come.
That’s a metric of which any person can be proud. To those of us who mourn his loss,
it is a metric that we should all continue to aspire to fulfill. That’s what Matt’s life of
service taught us and it is just one of the lessons he would want us to carry forward for
Nassau County and beyond.
Inspector Matthew Simeone graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School’s

Center for Homeland Defense and Security in the fall of 2007, where he served as
co-president of cohort 0601-0602. To learn more about Matt’s work with SPIN, see
the profile in the June 2006 issue of Security Management Magazine, available at
www.securitymanagement.com.
Richard “Rich” Cooper is a partner with Catalyst Partners, LLC (formerly known as Olive,
Edwards & Cooper, LLC), a government and public affairs practice in Washington, DC that
focuses on homeland and national security matters. He also serves as the vice chairman of the
Homeland Security Division of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA); as a
member of the American National Standards Institute’s Homeland Security Standards Panel
(ANSI-HSSP); and as an advisor to the Reform Institute and New York University’s
International Center for Enterprise Preparedness (InterCEP). He previously served as
business liaison director for science and technology and preparedness at the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security’s Private Sector Office. He can be reached at rcooper@catalystdc.com.
This tribute to Matt first appeared in Security Debrief on March 30, 2009 at
http://securitydebrief.adfero.com/legacy-beyond-nassau/
HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

A Social Infrastructure for Hometown Security: Advancing the
Homeland Security Paradigm
Robert Bach and David J. Kaufman
The United States, through a concerted national effort that galvanizes the strengths
and capabilities of Federal, State, local, and Tribal governments; the private and non-
profit sectors; and regions, communities, and individual citizens – along with our
partners in the international community – will work to achieve a secure Homeland
that sustains our way of life as a free, prosperous, and welcoming America.
-- Vision Statement, 2007 National Strategy for Homeland Security1
The nation’s homeland security strategy calls on federal, state, and local governments,
businesses, communities, and individuals across the country to work together to achieve
a shared vision of a secure way of life. Yet for over seven years, through attacks, threats,
and disasters, the core ingredient in efforts to achieve that goal remains elusive.2 The
American public has been left out and is largely missing in action.
This elusiveness persists because of a misdiagnosis of the way the American people
experience homeland security practices, inappropriate application of border screening
and verification techniques to domestic public life, and an incomplete strategic
preparedness framework that relies excessively on top-down federal management. This
article argues for a new approach that engages the American people in ways that invites
their participation in understanding, assessing, and mitigating risk. New community-
oriented techniques are needed that draw heavily on community policing models and
public health philosophies; the federal government needs to invert its strategic planning
and funding processes, seize the moment and leverage the restructuring of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other priorities as opportunities to put
communities first. The new administration has issued a national call to service. This call
offers an opportunity to invest in a social infrastructure for homeland security that will
bring the American people fully into strengthening their own preparedness.
ELUSIVE PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
The nation’s leaders often acknowledge a critical role for the American public in
homeland security, but how to achieve it has proven elusive. Just two months after the
9/11 attacks, for instance, President Bush called on Americans “to serve by bettering our
communities and, thereby, defy and defeat the terrorists.”3 A few years later, Homeland
Security Secretary Tom Ridge, reiterated the call: “President Bush has said, ‘The true
strength of the country lies in the hearts and souls of our citizens.’ He is absolutely right.
The federal government cannot micro-manage the protection of America. Instead,
homeland security must become a priority in every city, every neighborhood, every
home, and with every citizen.”4
BACH & K AUFMAN, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE 2
Yet after Hurricane Katrina it became clear that many Americans were unprepared
and uninvolved. The White House’s own after action report pointedly advised that “[w]e
as a Nation - Federal, State, and local governments; the private sector; as well as
communities and individual citizens – have not developed a shared vision of or
commitment to preparedness... Without a shared vision … we will not achieve a truly
transformational national state of preparedness.”5
The urgency to overcome this missing link is clear. Yet misdiagnosis of the problem
obstructs urgent action. The problem is not, as many emergency managers and security
officials lament, the emergence of a “nanny society” that thrives on a general
atmosphere of dependence on government aid that has eliminated individuals’ abilities
and willingness to seek opportunities and accept responsibilities. Forced into a nanny
role, the argument goes, federal and state officials must repeatedly remind local
residents that they are “on their own” for seventy-two to ninety-six hours before the
government can reach them and provide assistance.
Rather, government officials and the public fundamentally misunderstand and
mistrust each other. The American public, for instance, is much more interested in
preparing for emergencies than government officials believe. Recent polling shows that
a large majority of Americans nationwide have paid attention and gained information
about terrorist threats.6 The problem is that they do not fully trust the government to
inform them correctly or to deliver on its promises. They also do not know what to do to
prepare effectively, having been told simply to live their normal lives7 and prepare
individual ready kits;8 advice that provides little confidence of protection in the face of
large and uncertain risks. Most importantly, though, research suggests that the reasons
why people do not behave the way government plans expect them to is that local
residents and communities do not hold the views and expectations that government
planners believe they do. In short, government planners are out of touch with local
residents. They are ill-informed about the very public they lament does not care or listen
to their instructions.9
Lack of trust, perceived misplaced investments, repeated alerts to risks that are not
explained, and bungled emergency responses have created a deep division between
federal government strategies and the willingness of the American public to embrace
them. Even federal emergency officials accept this condition. Former FEMA
Administrator Paulison, for instance, blamed the agency’s response to Katrina for a
current lack of public confidence and admits that it will be difficult to earn the public’s
trust. “I don't know if people are going to believe what I tell them,” he says, “and maybe
they shouldn't."10
As candidate for president, then Senator Obama pushed hard for the need to
overcome this division, issuing a call for the American public “to step into the strong
current of history”11 He chastised previous efforts that failed to mobilize communities
across the land. Referring to Americans’ readiness to serve after the 9/11 attacks, he
said, “We were ready…to answer a new call for our country, but the call never came.”
“Instead of a call to service, we were asked to go shopping.”12
By most accounts, the likely security challenges in the next few years will demand
much greater involvement of the public, not only to sustain public support for large-
scale funding, but more importantly, because the public will be crucial to greater
effectiveness in preventing and responding to these threats. The treacherous currents

ahead include homegrown terrorism and domestic radicalization; and as a recent

bipartisan congressional report on future threats emphasized, pandemic illness,
whether natural or manmade, poses an almost certain threat in the next few years.13
Difficult crosscurrents ahead will also require emergency response and recovery
strategies that do not depend on large-scale federal deployments ahead of every
threatening storm. Effectiveness in each situation will fall as much (if not more) on the
capacities of local communities, neighbors, and families, than on federal response teams
and billions of dollars of new equipment. The challenge is to understand how to engage
the public collectively and on a large scale across the nation to build this capacity.
TRANSFORMING THE MISSION
A first step in transforming homeland security strategy is to recognize that current

efforts undermine preparedness every bit as much as they support it. Paradoxically, the
successes of government initiatives in the last few years – and there have been many –
have also made more evident and urgent the need to reach well beyond top-down
governmental approaches. Progress in developing a “national management system,”
emanating from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has also decreased the
participation of a broad range of joint decision-makers in communities across the
country. Community engagement has been left to become a ‘nice thing to do;’ rather
than to take its proper place as the cornerstone of effective security.14
After 9/11, the nation’s homeland security strategy focused heavily on governmental
initiatives, primarily at the federal level, to improve information and intelligence
sharing, screen persons and cargos entering the United States, harden critical assets,
and improve government response capabilities. As is often noted, these initiatives
launched the largest growth in the federal bureaucracy since World War II, founding
entirely new mammoth agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration,
DHS, U.S. Northern Command, and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence.
All were designed to ensure the internal security of the U.S. homeland and to prosecute
a “global war on terror” abroad. But they also involved top-down management systems
and military-style command and control strategies in planning and implementation,
often focusing on a doctrine of offense and preemption. As President Bush stated in his
September 20, 2001 address to a joint session of Congress, “We will take defensive
measures against terrorism to protect Americans....These measures are essential. But
the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it,
and destroy it where it grows.”15
Misapplied Border Security Strategies

These largely impressive efforts to stand-up a new federal bureaucracy, however, have
created a vast divide between a homeland security enterprise, with all the power and
wealth of large government and corporate engagement, and the experiences of the
American public. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way security measures have
been implemented at our nation’s borders and within the United States. The current
homeland security paradigm’s offensive and defensive strategies converge at the
nation’s borders in a layered system-of-systems approach to screening and verification
of all things deemed a potential risk. The strategy and its tools promote early detection

of potential threats, allowing time to analyze them and respond before reaching U.S.
shores, and providing repeated opportunities to catch threats that successfully avoid an
earlier screen. This strategy works well at the border where – starting with forward
deployment overseas – the layered system of surveillance, screening, and analysis
monitors and approves shipping, cargo, and people attempting to breach the nation’s
perimeter. Under the circumstances, the strategy also optimizes efficiencies; as former
Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Admiral James Loy has described it, the
approach does not “look for a needle in a haystack, but lifts the hay from the needle.”16
However, as it has been applied to the American public – individuals and
communities inside the United States – this screening, verification, and approval
approach is in conflict with a core value and faith of American democracy: the
presumption of innocence. Subjecting Americans to numerous screening activities, as
has become normal behavior at airports, is not necessarily the problem. Nor is increased
use of new intrusive technology, much of which could be made more compatible with
civil liberties and privacy protections. Rather, discarding the presumption of innocence,
even if unintentionally, is what does damage to public trust and engagement in
homeland security. Walking through a public airport, for instance, does not in itself
evoke particular privacy rights. But an individual does have a strong expectation that, in
behaving normally, he or she is not considered a risk and therefore presumed guilty
until screened.
Applying border strategies to the interior of the United States, as currently practiced,
undermines the willingness of Americans to work with a government that has de facto
raised questions about their trustworthiness. These strategies focus on passivity, not
engagement, on technical expertise rather than public understanding, and on classified
information rather than on transparency. This approach makes Americans more
dependent on governmental protection, ceding their own personal security to
bureaucratic skillfulness. In a real sense, the current homeland security strategy creates
the very dependence on government and the feelings of powerlessness that officials then
misdiagnose as complacency, apathy, and denial. Feeling at risk in everyday, normal
behavior runs counter to the commonsense vision of what Americans believe is a secure
homeland. And, as administration officials observed after Hurricane Katrina, without
such a vision the nation will not be prepared.
Engaging the Citizenry

The way around this conundrum is not to abandon all screening, but to have citizens
fully aware and engaged in why and how the screening and surveillance occurs. This
calls for new approaches – not borrowed from border screening and surveillance, but
ones that turn to community involvement and civic engagement for the skills needed to
secure the homeland. Unfortunately, all that Americans have been offered is generalized
information and abstract advice through web sites and marketing campaigns (e.g.,
www.Ready.gov) and an underfunded suite of programs aimed at increasing volunteer
action that have reached, at best, one percent of local residents. Americans have not
been engaged in the kind of joint decision-making and cooperative planning for
homeland security that fully engages local communities.
Top-down national management initiatives and frameworks weaken the nation’s
preparedness and communities’ safety because they do not generate action among those

who must perform well for the security effort to succeed. Fortunately, we can learn from
other experiences in the nation’s history. As a nation, for instance, we have rethought
our approach to public safety to meet similar challenges. Over a twenty year period,
community-oriented policing transformed a top-down enforcement strategy into an
engagement-based model for public safety. The field of public health offers similar
guidance. A vision of good health is not simply limited to highly skilled professionals
responding to disease and does not only depend on the capabilities of government
agencies employing the most advanced technology and techniques, although these are
advantageous; public health relies on the willingness and success of healthy Americans
to prevent illness through changed behaviors, greater knowledge, and acceptance of
what is required of them. The Institute of Medicine embodies this approach in its very
definition of public health: “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the
conditions for people to be healthy.”17
The homeland security challenge for the new administration is to find ways to
transform a government-defined mission into a societal norm. Achieving this norm, and
a greater level of resiliency as a nation, calls for more than recognition of the problem
and certainly more than rhetorical references to citizen and community preparedness.
Taking a cue from public health and other disciplines more engaged with the American
public, we must mobilize and focus on what we, as a society, can do collectively to
ensure our safety and security.
A NEW HOMELAND SECURITY PARADIGM
A new strategy for securing the nation begins with engaging the American people in
their local communities. Recent nationwide polling confirms that most Americans
continue to think poorly of their government overall: when asked to assess government
performance, only one in four rates the federal government positively.18 Yet when the
public comes into direct contact with federal employees doing their jobs, the approval
rate increases sharply.19
Homeland security planners, professionals, and officials need to get out of their
operations centers and office buildings and onto the street to work with Americans in
ensuring our collective security. Priority initiatives need to focus on collective and
connected activities in local communities. A new vision needs to be generated from and
shared among local residents, businesses, and the various levels of government. It needs
to be a vision that is defined by what we can do collectively to provide a desirable level of
well-being, including safety, security, and peace. The American public must have the
chance to ponder the tough choices, not just be the passive recipients of bad ones.
Such a community-oriented approach to public security will generate an array of new
initiatives and redirect and strengthen existing programs. The following examples offer
strategies to engage local communities fully in both planning and decision-making, and
to build institutional partnerships that embrace and promote those new relationships.
A New, Joint Decision-Making Process

Perhaps the most critical first step is to find ways to overcome Americans’ doubt and
suspicion about the nature of the security challenge, including a realistic assessment of
threats. Dependence and passivity result from continuously asking the American public

to have faith in institutions that they have learned to suspect and which they believe
have failed them.
• Dialog with the public about the risks we face and the actions we can
take. The National Strategy for Homeland Security calls for the application of a
risk-based framework across all homeland security efforts to identify and assess
potential hazards, determine levels of acceptable relative risk, and prioritize and
allocate resources among homeland security partners. Despite widespread
recognition of the value of such an effort, no inclusive, easily accessible, and
repeatable process exists for evaluating risks and for using that information to shape
decision-making. Communicating risk information also needs to encourage local
decision-making rather than merely shaping grant applications for federal funds.
Sharing national risk assessments in an appropriate form with businesses and the
public should encourage and enable organizations, individuals, and communities to
engage in providing for their own security.
The United Kingdom conducts and shares a risk assessment annually, combining
national, regional, and local results. It publishes a National Risk Register designed
to “encourage public debate on security and help organisations, individuals, families
and communities, who want to do so, to prepare for emergencies.”20 The conduct of
such assessments nationally and at state and local levels, and the sharing of
information on identified risks through public discourse and in town hall and
community meetings by public officials, is a critical first step to engaging the public
in the homeland security mission.
• Include local communities as joint decision-makers. Although the new
administration’s agenda clearly calls for renewed collaboration between the federal
government and state governors, even a reinvigorated liaison function will not
transform the nature of decision-making. Across a range of issues, from investments
to setting priorities, local communities should be real partners in making security-
related decisions. The Urban Areas Security Initiative and, in general, the federal
grants process, offers a framework for financial assistance to be reorganized to
include joint decision-making that involves local communities. For example, priority
could be given to local alliances (including government agencies) that establish
direct connections among various sectors and groups in local areas.
In other areas of social policy a variety of planning and funding mechanisms have
emerged that combine federal, state, and local needs and interests. In workforce
training, for instance, Workforce Investment Boards bring together private
employers, job training providers, and local governments to set priorities and
distribute funds. For certain needs, the federal government or state governments
could directly fund common-purpose projects, providing local communities with
resources through mechanisms similar to the long-standing Community
Development Block Grants.
Focusing on local involvement in joint decision-making could also mobilize and
leverage the resources of local residents who routinely contribute to projects through
community foundations. Few of these foundations currently focus on preparedness
projects, though some offer disaster relief assistance. Safety and security-oriented
projects that more closely connect with the involvement of local residents could

significantly enhance participation and spread it among all subgroups in the local
population.
• Seize on FEMA regionalization plans to recalibrate and reorganize the
relationship between DHS and local communities. Current efforts to bolster
FEMA regions as intermediaries between the federal, state, tribal, and local
governments respond in part to the need to engage in new forms of joint decision-
making. An opportunity exists to transform these regional activities from “federal
monitors” and hierarchical intermediaries to catalysts for a broad network of multi-
sector community partners. DHS should restart and invert its annual preparedness
strategic planning process. Federal initiatives need to seek out and understand local
and state risks and priorities, and clearly identify and distinguish truly national
needs that require federal action from the vast array of capacities and authorities
that rest in the hands of state and local governments and communities. Drawing on
new forms of inter-sector collaboration that emphasize horizontal, shared interests,
and authorities, FEMA regional efforts could lead this effort, becoming promoters of
community-oriented security initiatives rather than federal outreach managers who
enhance programs designed and controlled by the Department of Homeland
Security.21
• Establish a National Institute of Preparedness. The new administration’s
agenda promises to take a research-based approach to good public policymaking.
Although the DHS Science and Technology Directorate has led the way in testing
new technologies and techniques, a broader independent agency is needed to
promote a science of preparedness, especially in terms of the complexities of
community involvement. This initiative could resemble the National Institute of
Justice, housed within the Department of Justice, or could be established as a new
independent agency similar to the National Institute of Health. Each of these entities
is known for its independent research and evaluation of long-term issues of social
and health policy and for putting rigorous scientific debate and demonstration ahead
of short-term policy imperatives.
The goal would be to develop, test, and support initiatives among clusters of local
and regional public, private and non-governmental groups aimed at increasing the
effectiveness of preparedness activities. Establishing a National Institute of
Preparedness would create a vibrant national research program aimed at finding
good strategies and truly assessing the extent to which the nation’s residents are
prepared to prevent and protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist
attacks, natural disasters, and other emergencies.
Leading from the Front

A clear weakness resulting from the federal government-led homeland security strategy
has been its failure to appreciate and capitalize on local law enforcement agencies in
support of the homeland security mission. In its report, Leading from the Front, the
International Association of Chiefs of Police reminded the federal administration that
the foundation of policing in America, whether dealing with crime or terrorism, is
deeply rooted in local law enforcement agencies, where the trust of the American people
has had to be direct and sustained.22

Unfortunately, the nation currently faces a potential schism between federal

homeland security initiatives and local law enforcement communities over both funding
and purpose. As Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton has described,23 many local
communities perceive that terrorist threats may be overblown, creating more fear than
safety. Local police may also be using limited resources unnecessarily and
inappropriately to monitor law-abiding citizens. At the same time, traditional crime
continues to rise, transnational drug cartels and gangs are consolidating their presence
in both rural and urban communities, and, ironically, the potential for these criminal
activities and groups to help support terrorism is increasing.
The new administration needs to act aggressively and quickly to prevent a
counterproductive schism from further undermining public support for homeland
security initiatives. While senior police officials have expressed concerns about the
crime-fighting blind spots that domestic security efforts may have created, the nation’s
homeland security leaders have cautioned against using domestic security programs to
help pay for day-to-day policing needs. “I don't think we want to take a program
designed for one purpose and slowly massage it into another purpose,” former DHS
Secretary Chertoff has said. “If you are pursuing street crime, I don't think all the organs
of national security should be involved in that.”24
The problem is that this schism will weaken the nation’s capacity to identify and
prevent domestic terrorism and radicalization, two of the most important threats facing
the country in the next few years. Simultaneously, it will also weaken the advances that
local police departments have made in working with communities to counter other
public insecurities. A federal-local schism is unnecessary. As various observers have
argued, the purpose, advantages, and benefits of a community-policing approach to
local law enforcement are well suited to preventing and responding to terrorist
activity.25 Local law enforcement officers are far more likely to come into contact with
those who may be directly or indirectly involved in terrorist activities than any federal
official, and most certainly will be among the first responders to any future attack. For
example, in 2005, in Torrance, California, local police arrested two men for robbing a
gas station – and wound up uncovering a militant plot to attack Los Angeles-area
synagogues and military installations. Good police work is good counterterrorism.26
The community-policing approach employed by local law enforcement agencies offers
several specific advantages in overcoming the deep divide between the federal homeland
security strategy and public support and engagement.
• Improved information sharing. Community policing offers a different
approach to information sharing and surveillance than the top-down, federal-led
efforts to screen and monitor local activities and verify the innocence of everyday
American citizens. Although counterterrorism activities differ in some crucial ways
from crime prevention, the philosophy of community policing encourages innovation
in engaging local communities, defining problems, and sustaining connections
between police and local residents that may be helpful to homeland security
strategies. In particular, a community-led approach could provide a clear alternative
to a top-down, federal strategy that has created disturbing tensions between policing,
preparedness, and civil liberties. Community-policing officers could serve as trusted
intermediaries to encourage the necessary dialogue between security authorities and
local residents on the nature of the risks that a community faces.

• Preventing homegrown radicalization. Radicalization is a social process that

over time transforms otherwise well-established residents into disenfranchised
militants willing to lash out with violence against people and property. The New York
City Police Department, for instance, describes radicalized youths as otherwise
“unremarkable” local residents who conceptualize and plan attacks against their
country of residence inspired or ideologically driven by al Qaeda teachings.27
Preventing this transformation from unremarkable to threat-laden requires a level of
community engagement that is simply impossible to achieve through federal
initiatives. Most importantly, it requires awareness and willingness on the part of
local residents to cooperate with local police authorities. That awareness and
willingness comes from experience working with or at least knowing about successful
– and publicly accepted – police activities. The local officer who works in the same
geographical area for several years and has helped with traffic, school, and family
problems, or worked with community groups to shut down drug houses and other
safety risks, is far more likely to observe radicalizing behaviors before they reach the
point of violent action than any federal network of information-sharing agencies. He
or she is also a much better user of federally-produced intelligence information and
more likely to observe the initial, nuanced acts of a terrorist plot that are typically
obscured by links to other criminal threats such as a gangs, gun-running, drug
trafficking, and recently-released prisoners who may have been radicalized while
incarcerated.
• Reducing Americans’ fear of uncertainty and risk. If the goal of terrorism is
to create fear far beyond the immediate harm, community policing offers a model for
directly combating that objective through engagement and cooperation. Local law
enforcement agencies have a strong self-interest in understanding fear in their
communities if they hope to be effective. As recent debates over issues related to
racial profiling and hate crimes have shown, local police agencies’ abilities to prevent
terrorism may turn on how well they are able to understand their communities and
work to solve everyday crime in those same communities.28
Applying the lessons from a community-policing approach to community-oriented
terrorism prevention could open a new line of thinking about the role of DHS regional
offices and officers. As noted previously, FEMA regionalization offers an opportunity to
begin to change the relationship between federal, state, tribal, and local agencies.
Beyond becoming a catalyst for inter-sector coordination, however, a community
oriented philosophy will require FEMA and its sister DHS components and agencies to
reorient some of their operating approaches. Community-policing agencies are more
“flat” than most organizations – that is, they are decentralized, network-oriented
organizations in which officers working with neighborhood groups have more authority
than usual to make decisions. This structure allows and even encourages officers to work
as partners in joint decision-making, not having to always withhold judgment while they
check with geographically distant and organizationally remote authorities.
Community-oriented agencies are also more focused on smaller geographical areas
that have organic rather than jurisdictional connections. This focus and flexibility allows
more effective alignment of problem solving with the diverse partners needed to make
necessary changes in programs and funding. A major challenge for DHS and FEMA

regional efforts will be to create and maintain a cross-jurisdictional focus that is not so
broad that the relationships become merely consultative rather than oriented toward
joint problem-solving and decision-making.
A Call to Service
“Through service, I found a community that embraced me, citizenship
that was meaningful.”
—Barak Obama
Throughout the most recent presidential campaign, nearly all candidates embraced a
call to service, urging the American public to do more in their communities to improve
the quality of life. The new administration’s plan calls for a significant investment in
expanding the volunteer corps, including AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, Energy Corps, and
Environmental Corps. Joining others, the plan calls for tax breaks, summer jobs,
internships and college tuition in exchange for some form of public service.
Obviously, homeland security and emergency management should take their place in
this roll call of valued public services. The problem is that, under current strategies,
there is little room for this type of public service in homeland security. The current
citizen corps programs offer only limited opportunities for engagement. Community
Emergency Response Team (CERT) training, which has been useful, is limited to
specific training activities and, by itself, does not generate continuous activities in a
community;29 and Citizen Corps Councils have generated far less activity than expected
or needed.30
At a local and regional level, the mobilization of residents to become educated,
trained and involved in homeland security needs to take on a more sustainable effort.
For this to happen, it needs to be integrated into the community’s routine activities, its
local governance, work life, recreation, and shopping. The rich diversity of the nation’s
communities means that no one type of program or set of initiatives will work
everywhere. Yet every community could become involved. A national campaign is
needed that focuses on community preparedness, starting perhaps with public health.
Numerous creative ways to stimulate this community engagement exist. We need to
find and expand the moments in which Americans routinely defy the allegations of
complacency and denial and where they value the connectivity to their community
which homeland security and emergency management strategies have ignored. A block
grant challenge – a Community Preparedness Block Grant (CPBG), modeled perhaps
after the success of infrastructure repair and historical preservation funds – could be a
useful example. A preparedness corps of diverse local residents could organize
neighborhood campaigns to, among other activities, canvas and teach the elderly how to
turn off their natural gas in an emergency and link them to neighbors to whom they can
turn if an incident occurs. These and many other ideas already exist in local
communities across the country. They can be heard anecdotally at conferences, or read
in local newspapers and researchers’ stories, but they await more widespread
mobilization, support, and leadership.
The challenge is not simply to acknowledge the need for such community activities,
but to find a proper place for such activities within our homeland security strategy and
execute their role effectively.31 Currently, efforts to engage local communities are
primarily considered ways to get the government’s message across and perhaps add

helpers to the professional response cadre during an incident. A community-oriented

homeland security strategy, in contrast, would value the ideas and the people engaged in
the community because they are the fulcrum of effectiveness. In the same way that the
nation relies on the professional expertise of its intelligence officers, border screeners,
and critical infrastructure protectors, it must rely on the ability of local residents to be
effective public citizens.
TOWARD A SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HOMELAND SECURITY
From a shared vision of a way of life to everyday interactions with neighbors, an

effective homeland security strategy requires the full participation of the American
public. The full array of these social activities, programs, and relationships constitutes
an essential foundation, what can easily be called a “social infrastructure for homeland
security.” Like other infrastructures, it needs priority attention and support. And like
other infrastructures, it has fallen into disrepair.
During the Cold War, the American public had a social compact with the federal
government to lend its political and financial support for distant, not-well-understood
actions overseas against a communist threat. The public came to expect protection from
these overseas risks and, in exchange, wanted to go about its business of working hard,
raising families, and enjoying the prosperity that lasted nearly half a century.
Today’s asymmetric threats have changed the way we think about the world and the
compact between the federal government and the public. The initial round of homeland
security strategies has not yet caught up with this global and internal transformation.
While the nation fights overseas, a new social compact at home is needed that redefines
opportunities and responsibilities just as much as world events are changing the risks
and challenges to the American way of life.32
Ask any homeland security or emergency management professional what makes them
most successful in their activities and most will say that it is the trust that they
developed in their coworkers and colleagues well before an incident or operation. Trust
is also the glue that makes communities work. At a time when trust in government, trust
in public health institutions, and trust in the financial system are weakening, it is
unlikely that efforts to mobilize the public to be prepared for emergencies will work. The
first step in the long transition to a new social compact, then, may be the most direct –
to repair and build the trust that makes our most critical activities succeed. Social trust
may be the meaning we can all find in community service, and strengthening it may be
the way to navigate through the deep currents of our future.
Robert Bach is currently on the faculty at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the
Naval Postgraduate School and works with CNA’s Institute for Public Research. Dr. Bach has
served as a strategic consultant with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on border
and transportation security issues; his current research focuses on community participation in
homeland security and emergency preparedness, and strategic planning. He can be reached at
rbach20010@aol.com.
David J. Kaufman is CNA’s Director for Safety and Security and a member of the faculty at the
Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security. He is the former

director for preparedness policy, planning and analysis in the Department of Homeland
Security/FEMA’s National Preparedness Directorate. Mr. Kaufman has more than 10 years’
experience developing and implementing homeland security preparedness programs for states
and local jurisdictions. Mr. Kaufman can be reached at kaufmand@cna.org.
1Homeland Security Council, National Strategy for Homeland Security (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 2007), 13.
2Amanda J. Dory, “American Civil Security: The U.S. Public and Homeland Security,” The Washington
Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2003): 37–52.
3President George W. Bush, November 8, 2001. Quoted in NCPC, (Washington, DC: National Crime
Prevention Council, January 2002), 1.
4“Homeland Security Secretary Ridge Speaks About the Patriot Act,” Prepared Remarks of Homeland
Security Secretary Tom Ridge at the Allegheny County Emergency Operations Center, July 15, 2004.
5 The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, 66.
6Megumi Kano, Michele M. Wood, Dennis S. Mileti, and Linda B. Bourque, Public Response to
Terrorism. Findings from the National Survey of Disaster Experiences and Preparedness (Berkeley, Ca:
Regents of the University of California, November 12, 2008).
7 Anexample is President Bush’s statement: “...Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly
and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families
and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” Remarks by President Bush at O’Hare International
Airport, September 27, 2001.
8Department of Homeland Security Press Release launching a Citizen Preparedness Campaign urging all
Americans to “make a kit, make a plan, and be informed,” February 19, 2003.
9Roz D. Lasker, “Redefining Readiness: Terrorism Planning Through the Eyes of the Public” (New York:
Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health, New York Academy of Medicine,
September 14, 2004).
10Brad Heath, “Deeply set disturbance within American communities and the American faith in its
government and core institutions,” USA TODAY, May 9, 2007,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-09-emergencies_N.htm.
Jonathan Weisman, “Obama Calls for National Service Democrat Visiting GOP Strongholds,”
11
Washington Post, July 3, 2008.

12 Ibid.
13 Commission
on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, World at Risk: The Report of the
Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (New York: Random House,
December 2008).
14A study conducted after World War II shows that local organizational preparedness during peacetime
was the most effective strategy for saving lives from conventional attacks, Matthew Dallek, “Civic Security.
Why FDR’s bottom-up brand of civic defense should inspire progressive plans for homeland security
today,” Democracyjournal.org (Winter 2008): 16.
15 Address by President George W. Bush to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001.
16See Admiral Loy’s testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, January 27, 2004, Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC.
17Institute of Medicine, ed., The Future of Public Health (Washington, DC: National Academies Press,
1988), 19.

18 In
the Public We Trust. Renewing the Connection between the Federal Government and the Public
(Partnership for Public Service and Gallup Consulting, November 2008), 2.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Cabinet Office, National Risk Register (2008), 3.
21 See
for example, Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Multi-Jurisdictional, Network Alliances
and Emergency Preparedness (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, December 2008.
22International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Leading from the Front: Law Enforcement's Role in
Combating And Preparing for Domestic Terrorism.” The International Association of Chiefs of Police‘s
Response to the Attacks on the United States of America on September 11, 2001 (Alexandria, VA, n.d.)
23William Bratton, George Kelling, and R.P. Eddy, “The blue front line. For cops, fighting crime and
terror go hand in hand,”city-journal.org, September 20, 2007, www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-09-
20.html
24 David Johnston, “A City’s Police Force Now Doubts Terror Focus,” NYTIMES.COM, July 24, 2008.
25Matthew C. Scheider and Robert Chapman, “Community Policing and Terrorism,” April 2003,
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/Articles/Scheider-Chapman.html.
26 Bratton and others, “The blue front line.”
Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” (New York:
27
New York City Police Department, 2007).

28 Scheider and Chapman, “Community Policing and Terrorism.”
29CERT programs have, however, been used as the catalyst for community-wide initiatives in some
locations.
30David Heyman and James Jay Carafano, Homeland Security 3.0: Building a National Enterprise to
Keep America Safe, Free, and Prosperous (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, Heritage Special
Report, SR-23, September 18, 2008).
31 See Dory, “American Civil Security,” for an earlier attempt to define such a role.
32 Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, The Plan. Big Ideas for America (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

The Anthrax Vaccine: A Dilemma for Homeland Security
Thomas L. Rempfer
Past problems with the Department of Defense anthrax vaccine currently impact
national emergency response plans approved by the Department of Homeland Security
and Department of Health and Human Services. Following the 2001 anthrax letter
attacks, those departments diverged from long established protocols advocating limited
use of the old anthrax vaccine, also known as BioThrax®. The Executive departments
procured mass quantities of the product for the Strategic National Stockpile as a
prophylaxis for citizens under emergency contingencies. The departments share
oversight responsibilities for the emergency stockpile’s composition of vaccines and
drugs based on Presidential Directives.1 Yet a review of past oversight efforts reveals
regulatory problems, ethical controversies and dubious threat assessments underlying
use of the vaccine. Based on the historic controversy, and studies suggesting the
majority of U.S. service members continue to object to the vaccine’s use,2 the
government should resurvey the vaccine’s suitability for American citizens. A thorough
review may find that widespread use of a known antiquated product of disputed safety
and efficacy in treating a non-communicable threat provides an imprudent illusion of
protection for our citizens.
This article explores the Department of Defense’s experience with the anthrax
vaccine, and the troubling possibility that the 2001 anthrax letter attacks were a
deliberate and successful effort to sustain a program that federal investigators
determined was on the verge of failing. Reflection on why the mandatory military
program escaped review following the federal investigation warrants deliberation.
Enumerating the safety, efficacy, regulatory and legal problems encountered by the
military program provides a prism to analyze future hurdles in using the vaccine on
civilians. Finally, comparing past problems with current threat assessments offers an
opportunity to suggest potential alternative countermeasures which minimize the
negative externalities resulting from the old anthrax vaccine.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ANTHRAX VACCINE EXPERIENCE
Doctrinal debate over the current anthrax vaccine’s role in biodefense precipitated
initiation of the Defense Department’s mandatory anthrax vaccine immunization
program.3 A Washington Post article captured the controversy, stating that “Military
leaders were initially doubtful about the need for the anthrax vaccine.” The exposé
revealed an inverted policy process – “starting at the top instead of trying to staff an
issue from the bottom up” – adding to the program’s problematic origins.4
The only previous mass use of the 1950s-era vaccine occurred in the 1990s, when over
150,000 soldiers received inoculations during the first Gulf War, with many later
reporting illnesses of unknown origins.5 A decade later, the George W. Bush
administration recognized the problems associated with the anthrax vaccine and Gulf
War Syndrome. Officials directed a review of the program early in 2001. A memo from
Presidential Advisor Karl Rove to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz6 resulted
REMPFER, A NTHRAX VACCINE 2
in recommendations from Defense Undersecretaries Dr. David Chu and Edward

Aldridge to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.7 The defense officials advocated
halting the mass mandatory program and continuing use of the vaccine only at a
“minimum level.” They recommended purchasing biological detection devices and
antibiotics to protect the soldiers “in the absence of an anthrax vaccine.”
The undersecretaries suggested a comprehensive review of doctrinal positions and
development of a “coherent institutional process” for future prioritization of threats and
assessments of countermeasures. The leaders also echoed a longstanding call for
development of a “national long-range vaccine.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff subsequently challenged these recommendations, insisting the vaccine was “the
centerpiece of our defense against the most likely biological threat agent.”8 Newspaper
articles captured the debate over use of the vaccine,9 and recent Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Department of Justice revelations reignited the controversy. The
Justice Department alleged the anthrax vaccine program’s “failing” status served as the
stated motive in the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. By sending anthrax through the U.S.
mail system, the perpetrator was attempting to create a situation where the government
might recognize a renewed need for the vaccine.10
The government’s subsequent decision to continue to procure the vaccine after the
letter attacks appears to discount the prior problems encountered by the U.S. military.
The Department of Defense acknowledged those problems as early as 1985 in a proposal
request to solicit a new vaccine.11 The proposal emphasized the “requirement to develop
a safe and effective product which will protect U.S. troops” from anthrax spores.
Pentagon officials confirmed the military lacked a vaccine that safely and effectively
protected military personnel against exposure to anthrax. U.S. Army scientists also
acknowledged the product as an “experimental limited-use vaccine.”12 Two
congressional reports corroborated these findings. One report established that prior to
the first Gulf War the anthrax vaccine “was rarely used,” considered “investigational,”
and deemed it as “a potential cause for undiagnosed illnesses in Persian Gulf military
personnel.”13 The other report determined the current anthrax vaccine was
“experimental.”14
Safety and Efficacy Issues

Additional oversight reports cited Pentagon studies acknowledging that up to 35 percent
of soldiers had adverse reactions to the anthrax vaccine, and that 6 percent of recipients
reported serious complications after vaccination.15 The military studies caused
authorities to alter previously low adverse reaction rates, changing warnings listed on
the approved labeling.16 Despite the changes, the military continued to insist on the
safety of the vaccine, while the Government Accountability Office disclosed that “a
significantly large number of vaccine recipients reported experiencing adverse events.”17
Government oversight reports confirmed the long-term safety of the vaccine had not
been assessed, while raising questions about ingredient alterations and problems with
human efficacy testing of the vaccine.18
Recent Department of Veterans Affairs Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War
Veterans’ Illnesses Scientific Findings and Recommendations validated concerns that

“studies have indicated that the current anthrax vaccine is associated with high rates of
acute adverse reactions.”19 Though the report ostensibly dismissed the anthrax vaccine
as a possible cause of veteran illnesses, the study acknowledged the need for further
research to “analyze associations between Gulf War illness and individual vaccines,
combinations of vaccines” and to evaluate “diagnosed diseases in personnel known to
have received the anthrax vaccine.”20 An earlier Institute of Medicine report
corroborated the need for more data stating, “There is a paucity of published peer-
reviewed literature on the safety of the anthrax vaccine.”21 A later report included
additional findings that the “current anthrax vaccine is difficult to standardize, is
incompletely characterized, and is relatively reactogenic [reactive].” The institute
acknowledged the “long and challenging” dose regimen and determined a “new vaccine,
developed according to more modern principles of vaccinology, is urgently needed.”22
Accordingly, the government recently moved to reduce the vaccine’s cumbersome
eighteen-month, six-dose regimen to five shots, and altered the route of administration
in order to decrease “adverse events.” While the continued lengthy protocol seems
incompatible with emergency response, the efficacy of the reduced dosage remains
unproven due to pending submissions of immunogenicity response data. As a result,
health officials continue to confirm “routine immunization is not recommended.”23 The
conclusions comport with pre-2001 cautions from a former commander of the U.S.
Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick concerning
multiple doses and purification issues, which “argue strongly against procuring large
amounts for civilian use.”24
Regulatory issues
Regulatory lapses also marked troubles with past use of the vaccine, leading to a Food
and Drug Administration notice of intent to revoke the anthrax vaccine manufacturer’s
license based on quality control deviations.25 The Government Accountability Office, in
a report titled “Anthrax Vaccine Changes to the Manufacturing Process,” also revealed
pre-2001 unreported production alterations that violated Food and Drug
Administration rules.26 The report revealed that the vaccine maker failed to notify the
government about alterations to the manufacturing process in the early 1990s, and
reported the manufacturer did not perform the requisite studies to confirm vaccine
quality remained unaffected. The Government Accountability Office also discovered
potential potency problems resulting from the unreported alterations, and documented
violations of regulations in their inspection report. The analysts noted government rules
where “any changes to the manufacturing that have the potential to affect the safety,
purity, or potency of a biologic must be submitted and approved … prior to
implementation.” Despite this requirement, requests for approval of the alterations did
not occur for up to ten years after implementation.27 The problematic potency issues,
and a myriad of quality control problems, ultimately resulted in government regulators
deeming that the “manufacturing process for Anthrax Vaccine is not validated” as early
as 1998.28 Notwithstanding past problems, the government expedited manufacturing
process validation for the vaccine immediately following the anthrax letter attacks in
October 2001.29

The problems with vaccine potency testing appeared to weigh heavily on the mind of
the U.S Army scientist suspected of mailing the 2001 anthrax letters that killed five
Americans. Emails released by federal investigators revealed the scientist’s contention
that the vaccine “isn’t passing the potency test,” as well as the implications of these
failures. The scientist’s email stated, “If it doesn’t pass … the program will come to a
halt.” The government’s analysis of the anthrax letter attack crimes documented that the
implicated U.S. Army scientist held direct responsibility for the problematic potency
testing as a member of the army’s anthrax potency testing team.
Additional emails quoted the scientist’s concerns that “apparently Gore (and maybe
even Bush) is considering making the anthrax vaccine for the military voluntary, or even
stopping the program.” In addition to alleging the vaccine’s problems served as the 2001
anthrax letter-attack motive, the Federal Bureau of Investigation documented the
coincidence of anthrax vaccine program resumption following the crimes, and the army
scientist’s award of the highest military honors for “getting the anthrax vaccine back into
production.”30 The U.S. Army’s Medical Research and Material Command also
acknowledged the army scientist helped to get the “the anthrax vaccine back into
production…working directly with the manufacturer…to determine where the problems
were and resolve them so the vaccine would pass the potency test.”31 The scientist
himself acknowledged, “Awards are nice. But the real satisfaction is knowing the vaccine
is back on-line.”32
Despite the known and potentially unresolved pre-2001 problems, the letter attacks
succeeded in reversing the suspected cancellation of the Defense Department’s
mandatory program and directly resulted in significantly expanded procurement of the
old anthrax vaccine for America’s emergency stockpile in the years that followed.
Legal Issues
The anthrax vaccine also suffers from a troubled legal history. Federal courts affirmed
the vaccine “was an investigational drug being used for an unapproved purpose.”33
Other federal courts reaffirmed this ruling, declaring the Pentagon’s program as a
“violation of federal law” prior to a belated, court ordered licensure of the vaccine.34 The
vaccine received a final Food and Drug Administration license twenty years after a 1985
proposed rule, fifty years after the vaccine’s advent.35 The licensing occurred after the
courts ruled the mandatory military program illegal and “investigational” absent the
requisite finalized license in accordance with governmental rule-making procedures.36
Despite the critical judicial reviews, the government allocated over $1.2 billion for
the anthrax vaccine, adding to a long history of earlier extraordinary financial relief for
the embattled manufacturer.37 The latest appropriations occurred immediately after the
2008 Federal Bureau of Investigation findings, adding to more than $50 billion
allocated to bolster biological defenses in reaction to the letter attacks.38 Complicating
the controversy, the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged the Department of
Defense served as de facto manufacturer of the vaccine due to its “continuous
involvement with, and intimate knowledge of, the formulation and manufacturing
processes of all of these versions of the anthrax vaccine.”39 Military involvement in
manufacturing and altering of a vaccine, long sold to the troops and the American

people as fully approved despite the lack of required prior approvals for alterations,
presents distinct legal liabilities worthy of additional examination.
THREAT ASSESSMENTS
Official threat assessments also raise questions about the need for the old anthrax
vaccine in national stockpiles. The Government Accountability Office reported that the
Defense Department determined “the nature and magnitude of the anthrax threat has
been stable since 1990.”40 A United Nations report substantiated past conventional
wisdom about the potential threat of weaponized anthrax prior to the first Gulf War, but
confirmed that the Iraqi program suffered technological hurdles in fielding dry
weaponized anthrax.41 Government Accountability Office reports also noted that
terrorists would find it difficult to overcome the technological and operational
challenges on the road to employing a biological warfare agent.42 Nevertheless, in
congressional testimony Pentagon leaders previously insisted that they possessed
“absolutely unequivocal evidence” that Iraq had weaponized anthrax prior to the first
Gulf War. Though subsequent threat assessments turned out to be “dead wrong,”43 the
leaders added to the vaccine imperative by insisting, “An anthrax attack is fatal if you
are not inoculated.”44
Even after the 2001 letter attacks by the Army scientist demonstrated that antibiotics
successfully countered lethal exposures to highly virulent spores, military leaders
continued to maintain the anthrax attacks in October 2001 justified use of the vaccine.45
These assertions defy medical evidence and expert recommendations. According to the
Monterey WMD Terrorism Database, twelve anthrax “incidents” and 472 “hoaxes”
occurred in the United States since 1992.46 For all actual infections diagnosed promptly,
antibiotics successfully mitigated the resulting illnesses. As a result, government experts
recommend antibiotics to combat the most lethal inhalation form of the disease.
Ultimately, both the hyperbole of the threat and pronouncements of certain death
absent anthrax inoculation proved to be categorically false. Regardless, the vaccine
remains unapproved in “a post-exposure setting” and “not recommended for routine
pre-event anthrax vaccination.”47 As well, the Centers for Disease Control Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations maintain that “Occupational
groups engaged in response activities are not routinely recommended to receive anthrax
vaccine due to lack of a calculable risk assessment.”48
Threat assessments beyond the military require review as well. Shortly after the
anthrax letter attacks the Department of Homeland Security National Strategy for
Homeland Security emphasized the threat,49 as did the president’s State of the Union
Address.50 Later, references to anthrax vaccine waned entirely from the most recent
Homeland Security Strategy.51 As well, the homeland security secretary conceded “there
is not currently a domestic emergency involving anthrax.” The secretary confirmed
“There is not currently a heightened risk of an anthrax attack” and no credible
information was present to indicate an imminent threat of an attack involving bacillus
anthracis.52 Despite this statement, the Department of Health and Human Services
declared an “anthrax emergency” through 2015 based on the “significant potential for a
domestic emergency.”53 The emergency declaration purpose was intended to provide

product liability protection to manufacturers of stockpile countermeasures, including

anthrax vaccine.
Further academic and independent analysis also refutes the severity of the anthrax
threat. One example points to the Aum Shinrikyo group’s unsuccessful attempts to
produce and disperse anthrax. They also cited al Qaeda’s unsuccessful effort to obtain
anthrax and to create a microbiological research facility. They noted that the 2001
anthrax letter attacks remained the only successful “distribution of a high-quality dry-
powder preparation,”54 while the Federal Bureau of Investigation later determined that
this attack originated from inside the U.S. biodefense community. A more measured,
non-reactive approach also emerged from the National Academy of Sciences. Their
report cautioned that society is too complex and interconnected to defend against every
threat. The academy addressed the letter-attack threat as well stating “Reactions to
anthrax episodes were strongly conditioned – and exaggerated.”55 Additional evidence
of a growing scientific movement away from the old anthrax vaccine includes a recent
report by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction
Proliferation and Terrorism. That report recommended use of “oral antibiotics” for the
anthrax threat in lieu of vaccine. The congressionally sponsored report also advocated
development of new classes of antibiotics against genetically modified anthrax. The
commission called upon the next president to “enhance the nation’s capabilities for
rapid response to prevent biological attacks,” but omitted any reference or
recommendations to use the old anthrax vaccine.56
CONCLUSION
This less-than-reassuring review of the military experience with the old anthrax vaccine
represents an opportunity for a thorough review by the new leadership of the
Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. Questions about
the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine have been a constant theme since its
inception, while manufacturing irregularities and legal problems nearly ended the
program. The fact that the 2001 anthrax letter attacks were undertaken by the scientist
in charge of vaccine potency testing for a program on the verge of failure, and that the
attacks served to reinvigorate a troubled program in response to a “manufactured”
crisis, creates fundamental doubts about expanding use of the vaccine.
In light of uncertain threat assessments, relying on the letter attacks as
rationalization for continued use of a product with well-known problems fails the litmus
test of good government and sound public health policy. Those attacks, and Defense
Department “continuous involvement” with the anthrax vaccine, effectively adulterated
normal procurement processes involving the old anthrax vaccine, perpetuating the
troubled program beyond a normal shelf life. Documented violations of the law indelibly
stain the program from a historic perspective; while safety, efficacy, and necessity
questions provide pragmatic justification for pursuing alternative protections. Sound
alternatives include procurement of proven antibiotics and the development of next-
generation technologies to address legitimate threats.
Fortunately, current top health officials recognize the salient need for “new vaccines,
especially against anthrax,” and the “need to ensure that research institutions and

individual researchers keep track of the whereabouts of dangerous pathogens, handle

them safely, and store them securely.”57 Since federal investigators report “no other
anthrax attacks” have occurred since the 2001 crimes, the time is right to realign current
and future appropriations in the direction of modern, proven, and recommended
countermeasures versus the old anthrax vaccine. At a minimum, a thorough review of
the government’s use of the anthrax vaccine is in order to protect taxpayer resources in a
fiscally constrained environment.
Accordingly, President Barack Obama’s appointees in the Departments of Homeland
Security and Health and Human Services should commence a comprehensive review of
expanded use of the vaccine early in the new administration to protect the government
from adopting historically plagued policy.
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Rempfer is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force
Academy and currently serves as a graduate student with the Naval Postgraduate School’s
Center for Homeland Defense and Security. He is an Air Force Command pilot, experienced in
F-16s, F-117s, A-10s, and MQ-1s. His prior service included membership on the U.S. Air Force
Cyberspace Task Force, as well as flight safety and operational risk management duties. LtCol
Rempfer has testified twice before Congress and senior White House Office and DOD officials
have enlisted his expertise regarding the anthrax vaccine issue. He may be contacted at
tlrempfe@nps.edu.
The author thanks Dr. James J. Wirtz, Naval Postgraduate School professor and dean of the
School of International Graduate Studies, for his comments in the preparation of this paper.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s, and do not represent the official positions of
the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security.
1The White House, Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 18: Medical Countermeasures
Against Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: 2007)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070207-2.html; The White House, Homeland
Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 21: Public Health and Medical Preparedness (Washington, DC:
2007), http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/laws/gc_1219263961449.shtm#.
2D. Pica-Branco and R. P. Hudak, “U.S. Military Service Members' Perceptions of the Anthrax Vaccine
Immunization Program,” Military Medicine 173, no. 5 (May, 2008), 430,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18543562.
3SECDEF William Cohen, “Memorandum re Implementation of the Anthrax Vaccination Program for the
Total Force” (1998), http://www.anthrax.mil/documents/902implementationpolicy.pdf.
4B. Graham, “Military Chiefs Back Anthrax Inoculations; Initiative would Affect all of Nation's Forces,”
Washington Post, October 2, 1996,
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5Department of Veteran Affairs (DVA), Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses
(RAC-GWVI), Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans: Scientific Findings and
Recommendations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 2008), 8,
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GW%20Veterans_RAC-GWVI%20Report_2008.pdf.
6K. Rove, “Memorandum for Paul Wolfowitz, Subject: Gulf War Syndrome and Anthrax,” April 25, 2001,
http://www.mvrd.org/rovememo.pdf.
7D. Chu and P. Aldridge, “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Subject:
Technology Development for Force Health Protection Against Biological Threats, August 10, 2001,
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/80n0208/80N-0208_emc-000192-07.pdf.
8H. Shelton Gen CJCS, “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Subject:
Reaffirmation of Military Requirement for Anthrax Vaccination Program,” August 30, 2001.
9R. Weiss, “Demand Growing for Anthrax Vaccine; Fear of Bioterrorism Attack Spurs Requests for
Controversial Shot,” Washington Post, September 29, 2001,
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_pub_title2=&h_pub_title3=&h_pub_title4=&h_pub_title5=&h_pub_title6=(TRUNCATED).
10Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Amerithrax Court Documents, August 6, 2008, 12-16,
http://www.usdoj.gov/amerithrax/; http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/documents/opa-080806.html;
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2008/August/08-opa-697.html;
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DOD Request for Proposals for New Anthrax Vaccine by U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition
11
Activity, DAMD 17-85-R-0078, Fort Detrick, MD, May 16, 1985, 4.

12E. T. Takafuji and P. K. Russell, “Military Immunizations: Past, Present, and Future Prospects,”
Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 4, no. 1 (March 1990): 156,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2407777.
13 U.S. Congress, Is Military Research Hazardous to Veteran's Health? Lessons Spanning Half a
Century, SR 103-97, 103-2 (Washington, DC: GPO, December 8, 1994), 35.
https://www.hsdl.org/homesec/docs/dtic/ADA291587.pdf&code=0874dbb567dd88840b750443671788c
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14U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, 106-2, House Report no. 106-556, Unproven Force Protection
(Washington, DC, GPO, 2000), 4, 52, http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-
bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=106_cong_reports&docid=f:hr556.106 and
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=106_cong_reports&docid=f:hr556.pdf.
15Congressional Research Service, Project BioShield: Appropriations, Acquisitions, and Policy
Implementation Issues for Congress, CRS-RL33907 (Washington, DC: CRS, 2007, 12-14,
https://www.hsdl.org/homesec/docs/crs/nps32-031507-
04.pdf&code=0874dbb567dd88840b750443671788cd.
16FDA Package Insert for BioPort Corp., Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed, BioThrax, (January 31, 2002), 6,
http://www.fda.gov/Cber/label/biopava0131022lb.pdf.

17Government Accountability Office (GAO), Anthrax Vaccine [Electronic Resource]: GAO's Survey of
Guard and Reserve Pilots and Aircrew, GAO-02-445 (Washington, D.C: GAO, 2002), 23,
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02445.pdf.
18GAO, Medical Readiness [Electronic Resource]: Safety and Efficacy of the Anthrax Vaccine, T-NSIAD-
99-148 (Washington, D.C: GAO, 1999), 2-3, http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS17888.
DVA Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, Gulf War Illness and the Health of
19
Gulf War Veterans: Scientific Findings and Recommendations, RAC-GWVI (Washington, DC:
Department of Veteran Affairs, n.d.) 125.
20 Ibid., 127.
21Institute of Medicine (IOM), Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures during the Gulf
War, An Assessment of the Safety of the Anthrax Vaccine [Electronic Resource]: A Letter Report
(Washington D.C: Institute of Medicine, 2000), 259,
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9811&page=R1.
22IOM Committee to Assess the Safety and Efficacy of the Anthrax Vaccine, The Anthrax Vaccine: is it
Safe? Does it Work? (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2002), 200, 208,265,
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10310#toc.
23Food and Drug Administration (FDA), FDA/CBER - BioThrax Dose Change Product Approval
Information (n.d.), http://www.fda.gov/cber/approvltr/biothrax121108L.htm;
http://www.anthrax.mil/documents/1228AVA_Route_Change_Dose_Reduction.pdf; and
http://www.fda.gov/cber/label/biothraxLB.pdf.
24P. K. Russell, “Vaccines in Civilian Defense Against Bioterrorism,” CDC's Emerging and Infectious
Diseases 5, no. 4 (1999), http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol5no4/russell.htm.
25FDA, FDA NOIR: CBER Warns Michigan Biologic Products Institute of Intention to Revoke Licenses,
(2008), http://www.fda.gov/cber/infosheets/mich-inf.htm.
26Government Accountability Office, Anthrax Vaccine [Electronic Resource]: Changes to the
Manufacturing Process, GAO-02-181T (Washington, DC: GAO, 2001), 6-7, 10,
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02181t.pdf.
27 Ibid, 2, 4, fn 9.
28FDA, Observations for Inspection of Anthrax Vaccine Manufacturer from February 4-20, 1998, Form
483 (Washington, DC: FDA, February 20, 1998).
29 FDA Package Insert, Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed, BioThrax.
30 FBI, Amerithrax Court Documents, 12.
C. Vander Linden, “USAMRMC: Publications - Newsletters,” The Point (2003), 14, https://mrmc-
31
www.army.mil/docs/Library/Newsletters/Point/Point0703.pdf.
32C. Vander Linden, “USAMRIID Employees Earn Top Civilian Award,” (2009)
http://www.dcmilitary.com/dcmilitary_archives/stories/031903/22098-1.shtml.
33E. Sullivan, 501 F. Supp. 2d 186, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60943 (D.D.C. 2004/7), 40,
http://www.anthrax.mil/documents/library/AnthraxSJtOrder_Op.pdf.

34J. Robertson, 538 F. Supp. 2d 200, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19641 (D.D.C. 2008), 18,
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2005cv2350-31.
35FDA, Biological Products; Bacterial Vaccines and Toxoids; Implementation of Efficacy Review;
Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed; Final Rule and Order, Public Law 2008,December 19, 2005), 75180-75198,
http://www.fda.gov/Cber/rules/bvactoxanth.pdf. http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/05-
24223.pdf.
36 Sullivan, 501 F. Supp. 2d 186, 40.
37U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), “DHHS Allocates $447,650,001 for Anthrax
Vaccine for the SNS,” November 2008,
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=3ab64eb3651ba114d1bf1a776387f
8d5&cck=1&au=&ck; “DHHS, DHHS Allocates $404,685,512 for Anthrax Vaccine for the SNS,”
September 30, 2008, https://www.fbo.gov/spg/HHS/OOS/OASPHEP/RFP-DHHS-BARDA-08-
26/listing.html; Department of Defense, “DOD Allocates $245,539,956 for Anthrax Vaccine,” January 6,
2004, http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=2670; FBO-DOD, January 06,
2004, Vol. W9113M-04-D-0002, 2004, January 6, 2004,
http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=2670; Federal Budget Office (FBO),
Purchase of BioThrax(TM) - Federal Business Opportunities, May 5, 2005,
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=ac5637cd4fe712e14dd80c6069b628f8&tab=
core&_cview=1; FBO, AVA for the SNS - Federal Business Opportunities, Vol. HHSO100200700037C,
September 25, 2007,
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=3ab64eb3651ba114d1bf1a776387f
8d5&cck=1&au=&ck; FBO, Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), Vol.
HHSO100200800091C, September 30, 2008,
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=b2537d14797d4691a225426aa8e
df1e6&_cview=1; GAO, Contract Management [Electronic Resource]: DOD's Anthrax Vaccine
Manufacturer Will Continue to Need Financial Assistance, T-NSIAD-00-140 (Washington, D.C: GAO,
2000), http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS9752; GAO, Contract Management: Observations on DOD's
Financial Relationship with the Anthrax Vaccine Manufacturer, T-NSIAD-99-214 (Washington, DC:
GAO, 1999),3-4, http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS25410.00-140.
38B. Drogin, “Anthrax Hoaxes Pile Up, as does their Cost,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2009,
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax-threats8-
2009mar08,0,1706388.story.
39FDA Response to Citizen Petition, Docket #01p-0471, Docket #01p-0471, September 11, 2002, 8,
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dailys/02/Sep02/091102/80027a9f.pdf.
Anthrax Vaccine [Electronic Resource]: GAO's Survey of Guard and Reserve Pilots and Aircrew,
40
GAO-02-445 (Washington, DC: GAO, n.d.), 3, 9.

41United Nations, UNMOVIC - United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission,
(New York: United Nations, 2007), 788, 1153, 1156, http://www.unmovic.org/.
42GAO, Diffuse Security Threats: Information on U.S. Domestic Anthrax Attacks, GAO-03-323T
(Washington, DC: GAO, December 10, 2002), 3, https://www.hsdl.org/homesec/docs/gao/nps03-
102303-05.pdf&code=eee5bad393e0aec44c76e57653853ce1.
WMD Commission, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States regarding
43
Weapons of Mass Destruction (March 31, 2005), 2, http://www.wmd.gov/report/wmd_report.pdf.

44U.S. Congress, Hearing: Department of Defense Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program, Congress
HASC no. 106-22, 106-1 (1999), 43,
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has273020.000/has273020_0f.htm
45R. Keys and G. Taylor, “Letter from Lt Gen George Taylor, USAF Surgeon General and Lt Gen Ronald
Keys, USAF Deputy Chief of Staff,” March 25, 2005,
http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/dockets/80n0208/80n-0208-c000021-vol142.pdf.
46Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), WMD Terrorism Database Admin Search Results
for Anthrax Incidents and Hoaxes (Monterey, CA: MIIS, 2009), http://cns.miis.edu/db/wmdt/.
47D. A. Ashford, L.D. Rotz, and B.A. Perkins, Use of Anthrax Vaccine in the United States:
Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP), MMWR 2000; 49, no.
RR-15 (Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control (CDC), December 15, 2000),
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr4915a1.htm and
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of Anthrax Vaccine in Response to Terrorism: Supplemental Recommendations of the Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 288,
no. 21 (Dec 4, 2002), 2681,
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CDC, “CDC Anthrax Q & A: Vaccination,” http://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/anthrax/faq/vaccination.asp;
CIDRAP, “Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Opens Door to Anthrax Shots for First
Responders,” October 23, 2008,
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/bt/anthrax/news/oct2308anthrax-jw.html; JAMA,
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48CDC ACIP, DHHS & CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Summary Report,
(October 22-23, 2008), 97, http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/acip/downloads/min-oct08.pdf.
49DHS, 2002 National Strategy for Homeland Security, Vol. 2008 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2002), 1, 44,
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/nat_strat_hls.pdf.
50POTUS, 2002 State of the Union Address, January 2002,
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51DHS, 2007 National Strategy for Homeland Security, Vol. 2008 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2007),
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52DHS, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff Determination Pursuant to 5564 of the Federal Food, Drug,
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54M. Leitenberg, “Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” CISSM - Center for
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55NAS, Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism
(Washington, DC: National Academy Press, c2002), 415,
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57M. A. Hamburg, “Addressing Bioterrorist Threats: Where do we go from here?” CDC's Emerging and
Infectious Diseases 5, no. 4 (1999), http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol5no4/hamburg.htm.

Global Metropolitan Policing: An Emerging
Trend in Intelligence Sharing
John P. Sullivan and James J. Wirtz
The emergence of transnational criminal actors challenges national law enforcement

and intelligence agencies. Global criminals are involved in traditional organized crime
activities, e.g., theft, smuggling, and dealing in all types of contraband. These criminal
networks, however, also engage in activities that can fuel domestic and international
conflicts, potentially creating threats that can undermine state actors and existing
security regimes. The tensions created by what amounts to the “darker side” of
globalization challenge existing mechanisms of cooperation among various national
police organizations.
The purpose of this article is to explore how transnational criminal networks are
creating incentives to change traditional police operations and to describe how law
enforcement officers can better coordinate their activities as they adapt to contain and
eliminate global criminal threats. To accomplish this objective, the article first describes
the global, networked dimension of this threat. It then describes the differences between
current practice of “international policing” and an emerging approach to countering the
criminal threat, best described as “global metropolitan policing.” The article concludes
by offering several suggestions on how law enforcement agencies can acquire the skill
sets and practices needed to address the global criminal enterprise.
GLOBAL THREATS AND THE POLICE
Police, like the rest of society, face a changing political, technical, and economic setting.
Traditionally, urban police forces confined their activities to their immediate local area
for the simple reason that criminal activity was primarily a local phenomenon –
jurisdictions generally matched patterns of criminal activity. As globalization and
technology stimulated greater linkages among cities, widespread connections between
criminal and terrorist activity began to surface, culminating in a new range of threats
that local police had to address.
One component of this threat stream is the global Islamist jihad. Islamist movements
form a loose confederation of independent groups with varying roles and reach. They
often work in a cooperative manner among “theaters of operation.” Local groups gather
intelligence and targeting data and share it across the global jihadi network. David
Kilcullen believes that this movement is best viewed as a global insurgency. Countering
it, according to Kilcullen, “demands extremely close coordination and integration
between and within police, intelligence, military, development, aid, information, and
administrative agencies” – a difficult task when undertaken at the global level.1
Other observers believe that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda is a malignant and mutated
version of the market-state – an emerging state form. Al Qaeda and its kin are more
than state-less gangs.2 These networked adversaries possess standing armies, treasury
and revenue sources derived from criminal enterprises, a bureaucracy or “civil” service,
SULLIVAN & WIRTZ, GLOBAL METROPOLITAN POLICING 2
intelligence collection and analysis capabilities, welfare systems, and the ability to make
alliances with state and other non-state actors. They also promulgate law and policy for
their adherents and declare war. From this perspective, the al Qaeda network
constitutes a sort of virtual state that can control territory. Through insurgency and
terrorism it seeks to influence events and policies across the globe.
Criminal and terrorist networks thus constitute a departure from traditional criminal
activity because they are not concentrated in any one local jurisdiction. They create a
problem for everyone, but they belong to no one. Actions taken by a few local
jurisdictions or even states can deliver a setback to the criminal network, but they
cannot destroy the network because it exists outside of their jurisdictions. To contain
and eventually destroy these international criminal and terrorist enterprises, local and
national jurisdictions have to work together in real time. The traditional distinction
between domestic and foreign threats that is common in both the law enforcement and
security studies literature seems especially inappropriate because the external threat
posed by terrorists to one state actually represents an ongoing domestic threat to
another government. In effect, the nature of this threat creates a good deal of pressure
to increase the pace, scope, and intensity of global law enforcement activity. Without
global engagement, terrorists can always retreat to safe havens provided by
unchallenged portions of their networks.
FROM INTERNATIONAL TO GLOBAL METROPOLITAN POLICING
In the past, local police worked within their own geographically limited jurisdictions.
When international cooperation was needed in an ongoing investigation, “international
policing” provided the model for interstate relationships. In international policing,
national police organizations served as the conduit for sharing information among
foreign law enforcement agencies. To facilitate this exchange between states, bilateral
relationships – limited to specific investigations or cases – were developed. Over time,
international institutions, such as the 181-member International Criminal Police
Organization (ICPO-Interpol), founded in 1923, and the European Police Office
(Europol), founded in 1992, were created to help facilitate this “case-by-case”
collaboration. As Mathieu Deflem observes, “law enforcement institutions engage in a
variety of international activities and have forged international cooperative structures
and organizations that aim to foster collaboration in the fight against crimes that are of
an international nature.”3 International policing relies on international institutions, not
ad hoc collaboration among local agencies, to exchange information about individuals
and events of mutual interest.
In federal states, international relations are largely left to federal agencies. In the
United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carries out most international
liaison activity and the federally sponsored National Central Bureau largely deals with
Interpol. International police activities undertaken by the United States are primarily
planned and executed by a limited number of U.S. federal law enforcement agencies and
departments. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) are the most active
U.S. law enforcement agencies operating overseas. The FBI’s system of legats (legal
attachés) places representatives in fifty-two countries, while the DEA’s foreign liaison
system maintains seventy-eight offices in fifty-six countries.4 International policing can

thus be quite extensive, playing an important role in traditional international law

enforcement and diplomatic activity.
GLOBAL METROPOLITAN POLICING
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, police forces across the globe
have developed new domestic and international counter-terrorism strategies, while
international police agencies have likewise stepped up their efforts to combat terrorism.
Because of the nature of the threat, many of these activities require greater international
cooperation, leading police organizations to act more independently in relation to the
dictates of the national governments of their respective states.5 As a result of this
bureaucratic autonomy, local police forces are developing and sharing expert “systems
of knowledge” with fellow professionals across national boundaries.6 Deflem notes that
this activity is undertaken in response to the full range of international crime, is
oriented toward local and national enforcement tasks, and primarily involves bi-lateral
liaison activities focused on specific, short-term collaborative investigations.7 These
developments have not led to the formation of a supranational police force, but they
have led to the emergence of a global metropolitan network and global metropolitan
policing.8
Global metropolitan policing includes both national and metropolitan law
enforcement agencies as well as linkages with intelligence organizations, non-
governmental organizations, and private and corporate security entities. This
collaboration involves efforts to construct security-intelligence networks. The
globalization of this police activity involves the dispersal of security governance along
nodal (network-based) lines involving state, corporate, non-governmental, and informal
nodes rather than a network that is solely based on state-sponsored entities. These
networks involve informal relationships between social agents and agencies that treat
each other as equals. These informal links contribute to the evolution of formal
networks among security agencies that are often codified by treaties or other types of
legal agreements. 9
In Peter Gill’s formulation, the territory where police and security networks emerge is
both symbolic and physical. These networks provide information and intelligence to
support traditional policing of people and spaces. Global metropolitan policing thus
involves a “deepening” of the levels of government involved – local, regional, national,
and transnational. It also involves “broadening” of the sectors of society involved in
sharing information – state, corporate, and community. Gill also notes that it involves a
“stretching” of spatiality based on the idea that “developments in one part of the globe
can have immediate and world-wide impact.”10 These networks routinely cross agency
boundaries, mediating between, if not transcending, different local, state, and national
sovereignties.11 According to D. Bigo, the impact of this activity already is profound,
producing “networks of control agents who see as their primary task the maintenance of
public order, broadly conceived, and who distance themselves from all political
reasoning.” 12 Global metropolitan policing has created a network of thousands of
agents working together every day; in so doing, they are breaking down national
sovereignty and other kinds of jurisdictional boundaries.

NEW NETWORKS
New law enforcement networks are the foundation of global policing. Some networks
are created by linking national and local police forces. In response to transnational
gangs, for instance, a partnership was formed between U.S. and Salvadoran law
enforcement officials. The Transnational Anti-Gang (TAG) initiative (Centro
Antipandillas Transnacional) was intended to target the violent Mara Salvatrucha
(MS-13). This network emerged when two agents from the FBI were stationed in San
Salvador to work directly alongside investigators and analysts from El Salvador’s Policia
Nacional Civil. The collaboration was undertaken by the FBI to conduct joint
investigations, share information and intelligence, and provide technical assistance.13
Other initiatives link major municipalities directly with other jurisdictions. For
instance, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has developed its own global liaison
network. NYPD’s liaison program is based on the premise that the NYPD has to operate
globally because the war on terrorism has no national boundaries. New York’s Police
Foundation, which partially funds the program, refers to the initiative as “Global
Policing in the 21st Century.” NYPD has deployed detectives to Toronto, Montreal,
Santo Domingo, London, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Singapore.14 These
NYPD detectives are unarmed and are not directly involved in investigations and
enforcement actions. Instead, their primary responsibility is to foster the exchange of
information, warnings, and best practices among law enforcement professionals who
can put this information to immediate use.
Although detectives are engaged solely in liaison and information exchange, the
NYPD initiative is not without it critics. According to Judith Miller “[the presence of
NYPD detectives] overseas has strained the department’s often tense relations with the
F.B.I. In Israel, for instance, the bureau [FBI] opposed creating the post for the
department’s detective, according to American and Israeli officials.”15 The fact that
NYPD encounters bureaucratic resistance to its efforts to “go global” suggests that its
liaison initiatives have clearly encroached on the “domain” of other agencies.
Nevertheless, such initiatives are just the beginning of a new type of urban law
enforcement, a logical response to new threats and to new technological opportunities
that empower domestic organizations to take a more direct interest in international
events that impact local security.
NETWORKS AND POLICING
Although John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt note that “it takes networks to fight
networks,” the good news is that terrorists and criminals are not alone in their ability to
organize themselves as a network.16 Corporations, nongovernmental organizations,
government agencies and officials can work as decentralized, informal, and flexible
entities that rely on exchanges of data and ideas to achieve their objectives. National and
municipal governments can address networked threats by establishing their own global
or regional networks of financial regulators, prosecutors, criminal investigators,
immigration officials, transportation officials, and customs agents. 17
According to Ann-Marie Slaughter, changes in state forms are already occurring.
States are likely to become increasingly disaggregated as government networks populate

a new global landscape. In her view, horizontal and vertical government networks are
emerging. Horizontal networks, characterized by peer-to-peer links with professional
counterparts across borders, will be the most common form of cooperation. Vertical,
government networks, between national government officials and their supranational
counterparts (e.g., the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and the
Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights), will become lesser players. In
Slaughter’s typology, there are information, enforcement, and harmonization networks
that can be arranged as horizontal, vertical, or disaggregated international
organizations. Information networks are cooperative and frequently informal.
Enforcement networks result from the inability of individual agencies to enforce the law.
Harmonization networks are typically authorized by treaty or by executive agreement.
These networks can be codified in formal agreements, emerge as informal
arrangements, or emerge as a spontaneous response to an emerging threat or
opportunity.18
Law enforcement is already adopting many of these different types of organizing
principles. The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering (FATF), which seeks
to detect and prevent misuse of world financial systems by terrorists, is a noteworthy
example of a networked police organization.19 The FATF brings together state and sub-
state actors from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, the
European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Gulf Co-Operation
Council, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Holland, New
Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. Traditional organizations also have taken on attributes of networks. For instance,
Europol created a crisis center for coordination and information sharing and a task force
for broad analysis and threat assessments. In terms of fostering contacts among
individual professionals, Eurojust (the European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)
seeks to increase judicial cooperation and information exchange through direct contact
among judges, an implicit recognition of the need for cross-border judicial relations to
address transnational threats.20
CONCLUSION
The law enforcement response to terrorists and transnational threats posed by

organized crime and third-generation gangs must build on best practices related to
community interaction, investigation, intelligence and enforcement. At the local level,
police must work with the community to protect against crime and victimization. Police
must be visible. They must engage community partners to build trust within their
immediate jurisdictions. They must not be seen as serving as instruments of repression
and corruption. Law enforcement is first and foremost responsible for maintaining
situational awareness across local jurisdictions. This is the basis of global metropolitan
policing.
Linking professional, accountable, and democratic police and law enforcement
agencies in a distributed-network fashion can help stop the transnational criminal
enterprise. Because overseas criminal and terrorist networks are beyond the reach of
any one territorial jurisdiction or any one domestic law enforcement authority, they can
evade standard countermeasures pursued in any one country. Law enforcement is

constrained by a world with borders, while international criminals and terrorists move
in a borderless world and are free to seek the path of least resistance when it comes to
carrying out their schemes.21
Global metropolitan policing is beginning to compete with international policing as a
model of police co-operation. NYPD’s International Liaison Program is an example of
this trend. Personnel exchanges among police agencies for liaison and the deployment of
police officers to participate in task forces abroad are likely to increase as police battle
terrorism, transnational gangs, and global crime.
This trend challenges traditional police relationships. Intelligence and law
enforcement operations now intersect, eroding the distinction between domestic and
foreign police and intelligence activities. Metropolitan police join national police as
liaisons occur among and across all levels of governance. These new types of liaison will
require police to acquire new skills. Individual police officers as well as their home
organizations will need to understand the nature of diplomacy and international
relations, master multiple languages, understand multiple culture and legal systems,
and bridge police and intelligence operations. Police continue to conduct the majority of
their activities locally, but they have to think globally and bring that global knowledge
back home. International meetings, professional exchanges across disciplines, and
public diplomacy now join local crime fighting as essential police skills.
Police and law enforcement need to co-operate across national boundaries to better
preserve the rule of law in all nations and to foster global security. Building capabilities
that expand upon formal structures, such as Interpol and Europol, while stimulating
new multilateral connectivity and co-operation is essential to combating these global
criminal threats. These capabilities must serve as a bridge from local to global activities.
They must embrace civil societies across territorial divides and different cultural
contexts to create cooperative police and intelligence operations.
Lieutenant John P. Sullivan of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is a cofounder of the Los
Angeles Terrorism Early Warning (TEW) Group. He currently serves as a special projects
lieutenant for counterterrorism, intelligence, and emergency operations.
Dr. James J. Wirtz is dean of the School of International Graduate Studies at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the editor of the Palgrave Macmillan
series Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies and a past chairman of the
Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.
1David J. Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, No. 4 (August
2005): 607.
2Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (London: Allen Lane,
2008), 820-821.
3Mathieu Deflem, “Global Rule of Law or Global Rule of Law Enforcement? International Police
Cooperation and Counter-terrorism,” Annals, AAPSS 603 (January 2006): 241.

4Mathieu Deflem, “International Policing: Role of the U.S,” in Richard A. Wright and J. Michell Miller
(Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Criminology (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 808-812.
5Mathieu Deflem, “Europol and the Policing of International Terrorism,” in The Encyclopedia of
Criminology, ed. Richard A. Wright and J. Michell Miller (New York: Routledge, 2005), 338.
6 Ibid., 339.
7 Ibid.
8Mathieu Deflem, “”International Police Cooperation against Terrorism: Interpol and Europol in
Comparison,” in Understanding and Responding to Terrorism, ed. H. Durmaz, B. Sevinc, A.S. Yayla, and
S. Ekici (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), 17-25.
9Peter Gill, “Not Just Joining the Dots But Crossing the Borders and Bridging the Voids: Constructing
Security Networks after 11 September 2002,” Policing and Society 16, no. 1 (2006): 27-49.
10 Ibid. p. 30.
11 Ibid. p. 39.
12D. Bigo, “Liaison officers in Europe: New officers in the European security field,” in Issues in
Transnational Policing, ed. J. Sheptycki (London: Routledge, 2000).
13Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), “Going Global on Gangs: New Partnership targets MS-13,” Press
Release, October 10, 2007. MS-13 is a transnational, third generation street gang that operates in forty
U.S. states and ten different nations across two continents.
14See New York City Police Foundation, International Liaison Program at
http://www.nycpolicefoundation.org/global.asp.
15Judith Miller, “A New York Detective’s Tricky Beat in Israel,” New York Times, May 15, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/nyregion/15nypd.html.
16John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002), 15.
17Anne-Marie Slaughter, “We Can Beat Terror at Its Own game: Networks are both the problem and the
solution,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2004, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-
op-slaughter25apr25,1,1645678.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions.
18 Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
19 Ibid., 54.
Nora Bensahel, The Counterterrorism Coalitions: Cooperation with Europe, NATO, and the European
20
Union (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 39-41.

21Rohan Gunaratna, “The Terror Market: Networks and Enforcement in the West,” Harvard
International Review XXVII, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 69.

Exploring the Relationship between Homeland Security
Information Sharing & Local Emergency Preparedness
Hamilton Bean
INTRODUCTION
Information sharing between federal, state, and local agencies is a key element of the
U.S. government’s homeland security strategy. For federal officials, the post-9/11 threat
environment requires a “trusted partnership” among federal, state, and local agencies to
“make information sharing integrated, interconnected, effective and as automatic as
possible in order to ensure our national security.”1 To support this vision, the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) administer
more than a dozen homeland security-related information-sharing systems.2
Additionally, numerous governmental, commercial, and non-governmental
organizations provide officials with homeland security alerts, updates, and databases to
support preparedness efforts.3 State-level “fusion centers” also integrate, analyze, and
disseminate “all-source” homeland security information.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks focused public attention on the need for better information
sharing among intelligence, law enforcement, and emergency management agencies.
For example, the report of the Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees, which investigated the circumstances surrounding 9/11, noted that “one of
the most significant problems examined during the open hearings was the lack of
information sharing between agencies.”4 Similarly, the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report
concluded: “The biggest impediment to all-source analysis – to a greater likelihood of
connecting the dots – is the human or systemic resistance to sharing information.”5 As a
result, the 9/11 Commission stated that agencies “should provide incentives for sharing,
to restore a better balance between security and shared knowledge.”6 Many of the
findings of the Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission were codified into law as part of
the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Additionally, former
President Bush issued several executive orders requiring federal agencies to develop and
implement policies and systems designed to enhance information sharing. These efforts
culminated in the 2007 National Strategy for Information Sharing.7
More than two decades of research has correlated information technology use with
organizational effectiveness.8 As a result, there has been little reason for officials to
doubt the premise that improving the country’s information-sharing systems will
enhance homeland security preparedness.9 Enormous financial, human, and
technological resources have thus been dedicated to information-sharing initiatives
across federal, state, and local levels.10 It is therefore striking that so few empirical
studies have sought to confirm the basic premises underlying information-sharing
discourse and organizational practice.11 One reason to reexamine these premises is that
results have been marginal or counterintuitive in studies that have attempted to
correlate information sharing with decision quality,12 emergency preparedness,13
response planning,14 and law enforcement productivity and effectiveness.15 These
studies generally affirm a 2005 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report which
found that “although important, the benefits of sharing information are often difficult to
BEAN, INFORMATION SHARING AND LOCAL PREPAREDNESS 2
discern, while the risks and costs of sharing are direct and foreseeable.”16 Additionally,
recent reports by both the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence and the Markel Foundation indicated that major challenges in
implementing information-sharing initiatives endure.17
Admittedly, the government’s information-sharing strategy will take many years to
implement, and some might argue that evaluating the strategy’s efficacy is premature.
The goal of this preliminary study is to explore how officials make sense of the
connection between homeland security information sharing and preparedness at the
local level. In the best case, information sharing evokes images of progress,
technological sophistication, security, collaboration, and reform. This study suggests,
however, that information sharing also evokes images of turf war, bureaucratic
ineptitude, irrelevance, and technological obsolescence. The perspective on information
sharing advanced herein is based on the principle that organizational discourse (e.g., the
speech and writing of organizational members) and symbolism help to generate
understandings of information sharing and preparedness in ways that influence
practice.18 Exploring this discourse and symbolism can, ideally, help stakeholders better
design, implement, conduct, and monitor information-sharing efforts that meet
preparedness objectives.
This study first reviews recent research concerning information sharing and
preparedness to suggest why the assumed definitions of these concepts, and the
relationship between them, requires a second look. The initial attempt to provide that
second look involved using the government’s premises and relevant scholarly literature
to generate hypotheses and a survey instrument. The survey results, however, mostly
reinforced the ambiguous findings of earlier empirical studies. A communication
perspective and respondent interviews attempted to account for this ambiguity. After
describing the theoretical perspectives and methodologies used herein, this study
provides an analysis of the survey and interview responses. It concludes with a
discussion of implications for both research and policy.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFORMATION SHARING AND

PREPAREDNESS
William V. Pelfey explained how information sharing ideally leads to improved

awareness and preparedness: “If … information sharing [is] effective, threats, risks, and
vulnerabilities can be effectively identified, targets can be appropriately hardened, and
suspects identified while an event is still in its inchoate stage.”19 Thus, officials who
access homeland security information-sharing systems on a routine basis should
generally be more aware of potential threats than those who seldom access such
systems.20 Frequency of information system use has also been found to correlate with
decision quality.21 Therefore, based on the posited relationships among frequency of
system use, awareness, and decision quality:
Hypothesis 1A: Frequency of homeland security information-sharing system use
will influence awareness of homeland security threats.

Hypothesis 1B: Frequency of homeland security information-sharing system use

will influence the perceived level of organizational preparedness.
The ISE [Information Sharing Environment] Implementation Plan notes that
information quality issues have hampered information-sharing efforts: “Most critical
infrastructure sectors … are still concerned with the limited quantity and quality of
information and the need for more specific, timely, and actionable information.”22 In
their updated review of the information systems success literature, William H. Delone
and Ephram R. McLean found a significant correlation between “information quality”
and “individual impacts.”23 Accuracy, timeliness, completeness, relevance, and
consistency defined information quality while decision-making performance, job
effectiveness, and quality of work defined individual impacts. It is thus reasonable to
assume that stakeholders who find the information available via information-sharing
systems of high quality will tend to use those systems more frequently and report higher
levels of job effectiveness than those who perceive the information quality to be low.
Therefore:
Hypothesis 2A: Level of perceived homeland security information quality will
influence frequency of information-sharing system use.
Hypothesis 2B: Level of perceived homeland security information quality will
influence perceived level of job effectiveness.
The concept of preparedness eludes agreed upon definitions and measures. Ronald D.
Fricker, Jerry O. Jacobson, and Lois M. Davis state:
Because of the lack of authoritative threat and outcome assessments,
preparedness or lack thereof in any particular jurisdiction is largely a matter of
subjective opinion. Without comprehensive threat assessments, it is exceptionally
difficult to define how much preparation is enough and hence specify what
‘appropriate’ preparedness is for any jurisdiction.24
Pelfrey attempted to establish a more concrete definition of preparedness by explaining
that preparedness can be seen as both a “cycle” and an “end-state.” As a cycle, the four
phases of preparedness are prevention, awareness, response, and recovery – success in
all four areas is required for preparedness efforts to be effective, according to Pelfrey.
Although emergency management officials may engage in various prevention activities –
protection, preemption, deterrence, and mitigation – these activities are more often the
responsibility of law enforcement. Awareness, response, and recovery, however, concern
emergency managers. For example, emergency managers are responsible for being
aware of the early signs of a chemical or biological attack, responding to an emergency
scene (i.e., containment, control, management of the incident, mitigation, and
treatment), and recovery (i.e., rehabilitation, restoration, and repair).25
Preparedness is also defined – and more commonly understood by the public – as an
end-state. The assertion that “our organization is prepared for homeland security
emergencies” connotes the end-state of meaning of preparedness. Pelfrey argues that
the cycle framework is more appropriate for homeland security practitioners than the
end-state framework because preparedness depends on “enactment” within an ever-
shifting social context. This study explores the government’s premise that homeland

security information sharing supports preparedness using both the end-state meaning
of preparedness (tested in Hypothesis 1B above), as well as the four-part cycle of
preparedness described by Pelfrey. The second phase of the preparedness cycle,
“awareness,” is accounted for in Hypothesis 1A above. For reasons discussed below,
information sharing is viewed here as contributing mainly to the first two phases of the
preparedness cycle (prevention and awareness), with response and recovery capabilities
being largely unrelated to the frequency of information-sharing system use. Therefore:
Hypothesis 3A: Frequency of homeland security information-sharing system use
will influence perceived ability to “prevent” homeland security emergencies.
Hypothesis 3B: Frequency of homeland security information-sharing system use
will have no significant influence on perceived ability to “respond” to homeland
security emergencies.
Hypothesis 3C: Frequency of homeland security information- sharing system use
will have no significant influence on perceived ability to “recover” from homeland
security emergencies.
Studies by Brian J. Gerber et al. and Martin J. Zaworski underscored the ambiguous
relationship between information sharing and preparedness.26 Gerber et al. tested the
hypothesis that state-level government communication of threat information to
municipal government agencies aids in preparedness action. This hypothesis was only
partially supported. In one model, increasing state government communication of threat
and other related information to municipal government actually decreased
preparedness action. To account for this unexpected finding, the authors stated: “These
… results can be viewed as coherent if one accepts this premise: Information sharing
from state to municipal officials should matter on an issue of coordination [i.e.,
adopting new mutual aid agreements] but should matter less on whether a city is able to
actually perform a [homeland security] plan test.”27 From this perspective, information
sharing contributes to awareness and prevention, but it may not necessarily help in
response and recovery efforts (Hypotheses 3B and 3C).
Finally, in a study of whether automated information sharing helped law enforcement
officers work better, Zaworksi found no significant difference in perceived effectiveness
or performance between the group of officers that used automated information-sharing
technology and the one that did not.28 Additionally, “There was no difference between
[the group that used automated information sharing technology and the one that did
not] in how they think [the technology] affects their productivity [and] essentially no
difference between the two groups in how they saw the role of information sharing in
making arrests.” 29 Zaworksi stated: “Because [test group] officers have access to
regional information and thus would seem to be better equipped to make arrests, this
result was unexpected.”30 Zaworksi speculated that differing management climates
within the control and test groups explained this result; but when combined with the
findings from the studies mentioned above, taking another look at how homeland
security information sharing relates to preparedness is warranted.

METHODS
This study involved two phases. In the first phase, a survey was administered to
information-sharing system users to test hypothesized relationships between
information sharing and preparedness. Support for the hypothesized relationships was
generally weak; therefore, in the second phase of the study, interviews were conducted
with homeland security, law enforcement, and emergency management officials to
better understand how these officials made sense of the meanings of and
interconnections between information sharing and preparedness.
In Phase 1, an online survey was administered to LLIS.gov (Lessons Learned
Information Sharing) members to understand their perceptions and practices
concerning information sharing and preparedness. LLIS.gov is a national network
linking emergency response providers and homeland security officials. LLIS.gov “seeks
to improve preparedness nationwide by allowing local, state, and federal homeland
security and response professionals to tap into a wealth of front-line expertise on the
most effective planning, training, equipping, and operational practices for preventing,
preparing for, responding to, and recovering from acts of terrorism.”31 To access
LLIS.gov, one must generally be an emergency response provider, law enforcement
official, or a homeland security official at the local, state, or federal level.
LLIS.gov administrators permitted the posting of a twenty-seven-item survey on the
homepage of the website, which was available to registered users from May 1, 2007 to
May 15, 2007; 101 responses, eighty-three of which were mostly complete, were
received. All responses were anonymous. The terms and conditions governing the use of
LLIS.gov precluded random or stratified sampling techniques. In this study, the
correlation coefficient and probability values for linear models containing two variables
are reported. Results from this sample are likely not representative of the LLIS.gov user
population. The sample may under-represent users who engage in information-sharing
and preparedness activities yet are too busy to participate in an online survey. Certainly,
such users might have answered survey questions differently than did the sample. As a
result, findings from this study are not generalizable to the LLIS.gov population.
Nevertheless, convenience sampling is often used in exploratory research, and the
results can still provide important insights.32
Because of the limitations of the survey, and the ambiguity surrounding conceptions
of information sharing and preparedness, a second research phase was necessary. Phase
2 involved interviews with information-sharing systems users from May 15 to August 3,
2007. Interviews were semi-structured, and each lasted an average of forty minutes.
Interview questions are provided in Appendix A. In general, interview themes were
related to respondents’ attitudes, perceptions, and practices concerning information
sharing and preparedness. A semi-structured approach permitted more detailed
questions based on the interviewees’ responses. In other words, respondent interview
techniques were used to: (1) elicit respondents’ understandings of “information
sharing,” “preparedness,” and associated concepts; (2) identify the decisive elements of
an expressed opinion concerning the relationship between these concepts; and (3) to
determine what influenced this opinion.33 One administrator for a federal-level
information-sharing system and nine LLIS.gov users scattered across the country were

interviewed, for a total of ten interviews. The nominal titles of the interview participants
are listed in Appendix A.
FINDINGS
PHASE 1: SURVEY
Appendix A lists several tables which provide descriptive information about the survey
respondents. Respondents’ use of and perceptions about homeland security information
sharing and associated systems, as well as an overview of the hypotheses and survey
results are provided in Table 1.
Table 1: Information Sharing and Preparedness Hypotheses and Results
Hypothesis Results
Hypothesis 1A. Frequency of homeland Respondents who use homeland security
security information-sharing system use will information-sharing system more frequently
influence “awareness” of homeland security are significantly more likely to report being
threats. aware of homeland security threats. (r = .25, p
= .022)
Hypothesis 1B. Frequency of homeland No significant association was found between
security information-sharing system use will participants’ frequency of information-sharing
influence the perceived level of organizational system use and perceived level of
preparedness (“end-state”). organizational preparedness (“end-state”).
Hypothesis 2A. Level of perceived homeland No significant association was found between
security information quality will influence perceived information quality and frequency of
frequency of information-sharing system use. information-sharing system use.
Hypothesis 2B. Level of perceived homeland There is a significant positive relationship
security information quality will influence between homeland security information
perceived level of job effectiveness. quality and perceived level of job
effectiveness. (r = .23, p = .046)
Hypothesis 3A. Frequency of homeland No significant association was found between
influence perceived ability to “prevent” system use and perceived ability to prevent
homeland security emergencies. homeland security emergencies.*
Hypothesis 3B. Frequency of homeland No significant association was found between
have no significant influence on perceived system use and perceived ability to respond
ability to “respond” to homeland security homeland security emergencies.
emergencies.
Hypothesis 3C. Frequency of homeland No significant association was found between
have no significant influence on perceived system use and perceived ability to recover
ability to “recover” from homeland security from homeland security emergencies.
emergencies.
* Result requires explanation provided below.

As predicted, respondents who more frequently used homeland security information-

sharing systems were significantly more likely to report being aware of homeland
security threats (r = .25, p = .022). However, frequency of use generally did not
significantly correlate with the remaining three phases of the preparedness cycle
described by Pelfrey (prevention, response, and recovery), nor did frequency of use
significantly correlate with preparedness as an end-state. Respondents saw the use of
LLIS.gov as overwhelmingly unhelpful in preventing homeland security emergencies
(this finding is unsurprising when considering that LLIS.gov does not claim to provide
“actionable” information); therefore, the use of LLIS.gov was disaggregated from “other
information sharing systems” in order to determine whether those other systems (e.g.,
COPLINK, LEO, RISS) were perceived as being more helpful. When this disaggregation
was performed, there was, in fact, a significant association between participants’
frequency of system use and perceived ability to prevent homeland security emergencies
(r = .25, p = .026). Thus, all measures of preparedness with both the combined and
disaggregated system-use variables were tested; prevention was the only measure where
the results changed significantly.34
Supporting studies within the information-systems success literature, there was a
significant positive relationship between homeland security information quality and
perceived level of job effectiveness (r = .23, p = .046). However, perceived information
quality was not significantly correlated with information-sharing-system frequency of
use. Frequency of use is a widely employed – but increasingly contested – variable in
information systems research;35 therefore, the survey results were also analyzed using
respondents’ overall opinion about the usefulness of information-sharing systems.
There was no change in the results when opinion was substituted for frequency of use as
an independent variable. In other words, those who held a more favorable opinion of
information-sharing systems did not perceive themselves or their organizations to be
significantly more (or less) prepared for homeland security emergencies than those who
held a less favorable opinion. However, emergency managers (M = 4.71, SD = 1.15) were
more likely than the other occupational subgroups (M = 3.98, SD = 1.46), such as law
enforcement or public health personnel, to believe themselves to be prepared for
homeland security threats when preparedness was defined as an end-state (t(81) = 2.08,
p = .041).
Overall, however, there is little evidence that increased information-sharing system
use significantly increases perceived level of preparedness when preparedness is defined
as an end-state. Nevertheless, there is some support for the premise that with more
frequent use of information-sharing systems, users will tend to perceive themselves to
be more aware of potential homeland security threats and perceive their organizations
to be more capable of preventing homeland security emergencies. This finding
reinforces Gerber et al.’s claim that information sharing contributes mainly to the first
two phases of the preparedness cycle (prevention and awareness), while perceived
improvements to response and recovery remain largely independent of information-
sharing efforts.36 Discussion with survey respondents would be needed, however, to
adequately explain the dynamics of this situation.
These results also suggest that one’s perceived level of job effectiveness tends to rise
as the perceived quality of homeland security information increases. This finding

reinforces and extends Zaworski’s conclusion that information “comprehensiveness”

assists law enforcement officers in doing their jobs.37 This study suggests that other
components of information quality (accuracy, timeliness, relevance, and consistency)
are important for increasing perceived job effectiveness in a homeland security context.
These results, however, say little about the meanings stakeholders give to the terms
information sharing and preparedness.
PHASE 2: INTERVIEWS
The section above outlined the theoretical case for predicting a significant, causal
relationship between information sharing and preparedness. While there were
important limitations to the survey, as well as some indications of support for a handful
of hypotheses, findings also affirmed the ambiguous and unexpected results of earlier
empirical studies. What then accounts for the ambiguous relationship between
information sharing and preparedness? A communication perspective helps to explain
this ambiguity. Specifically, a communication perspective emphasizes the active role
that audiences play in categorizing messages via pre-existing historical, cultural, and
political frameworks, and evaluating those messages in terms of source credibility,
intention, and trustworthiness.38 This perspective maintains that information sharing
and preparedness are not objective phenomena with concrete properties and causal,
law-like effects; rather they “are labels for the organized, institutional claim-making
process which constitutes these phenomena.”39 In other words, information sharing and
preparedness are the result of social processes through which groups assert and
negotiate which objects, concepts, and practices represent those activities.40 A
communication perspective makes sense for this study because it is important to
understand how stakeholders construct the meanings of homeland security information
sharing and preparedness and how they act in accordance with those meanings.
Interview responses from ten homeland security, law enforcement, and emergency
management officials suggest the following explanations: (1) definitions of information
sharing and preparedness are contextually based, multiple, and at times conflicting,
making the impact of information sharing difficult to ascertain;( 2) information received
via these systems is usually vague, which constrains preparedness action; (3)
information glut and associated responses dampen the influence of information sharing
on preparedness; and (4) both information sharing and preparedness occur in the
context of institutional norms that shape interpretations of message credibility,
intention, and trustworthiness.
The Problem of Definition

No consensus definition of information sharing arose from the interview respondents.
Instead, respondents offered an array of definitions for information sharing, many of
which expressed dissatisfaction with current processes:
Information sharing means a centralized area where you can grab stuff.

[Information sharing means] every little bit of information about everything that
has to do with day-to-day crises to doom-and-gloom…all day, everyday, without
filter.
There’s a very fine line between information and shit, and I think what we see a lot
of times is that everybody’s swapping shit.
I don’t know, and that’s one of the problems I think we have right now.
Several respondents also defined information sharing as a task that local officials are
expected to do without much reciprocity from the federal level.
Information sharing means a two-way street, but more often it’s a one-way street.
[Information sharing] means information going to the JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task
Force] and very little coming back.
One law enforcement official explained the roots of his frustration with the “one-way
street.” He stated that “the FBI has been horrible to work with. They’ve been a huge
stumbling block.” This official explained that his city’s police department had discovered
the name of a resident on a terrorist watch list. When he queried the FBI as to why this
might be the case, the response he received was, “I can’t tell you.” The response was all
the more frustrating because the FBI had earlier sponsored this official’s security
clearance in order to facilitate information sharing. This official stated: “They [the FBI]
have an elitist attitude. Of course, they’ll tell you differently. They come here and say
‘we’re here to help’ and ‘we’ll share our information,’ but it’s all just smoke and mirrors.
They want you to give them information so they can put it in a file somewhere.”
Vague Information
For the majority of respondents, vague information created significant obstacles to
improving preparedness. Respondents commented on the quality of the homeland
security information they received from federal-level systems.
It’s all after-the-fact. There’s little value added.
When it first came out, I was pretty active on LLIS, but then I thought: ‘Why am I
doing this?’
It’s mostly useless.
One respondent elaborated on how vague information constrains preparedness action:

We’ll get a vague warning about threats to water treatment facilities, and there are
several water treatment facilities in this area. The warning will be based on
‘unconfirmed information.’ So I’m left wondering whether I should I go speak with
the water treatment operators. I’ll call the FBI to get more information and they’ll
say, ‘we don’t have any more information.’ I can’t get any specifics. There is just not
enough detail for me to go to the city and request the money to harden those
facilities. If I go to my chief with that information, he’s going to laugh at me.

Respondents explained that the types of information that would be useful for them in
doing their jobs would include:
Geographically-specific information and intelligence would be helpful instead of
broad, general statements about threats.
Specific information about suspects and bad guys.
Actionable intelligence. This is something I need to know because it’s something I
could or should react to.41
Respondents universally valued interpersonal communication with their colleagues,

finding it the most useful source of relevant information. One respondent explained:
“The best source for information I get is from my contemporaries in other jurisdictions
close by that I work with on a regular basis. We meet frequently and email frequently,
[my colleagues provide] information that has been vetted and is of value.” The value
officials placed on interpersonal communication likely stems from the opportunity it
provides for officials to demonstrate their expertise, value, and influence, and to
“bespeak their past and future competence.”42 Nevertheless, the government’s
information-sharing strategy continues to emphasize impersonal electronic systems,
databases, and alerts.
Information Glut
Information glut is a perennial problem in intelligence and national security-related
organizations.43 The volume of information respondents typically receive has led some
to simply delete or ignore much of it.
If I didn’t have department to run it would be kind of fun to just sit at home and
look at all this stuff.
I can’t tell you how many passwords I have. They say, ‘Here’s the next thing. It’s a
special thing for senior government officials, just log on.’ I don’t even do it
anymore … I’ll look at them and there’s never been anything on there that’s of any
value…. To be honest, I do this, and my guess is other people do it as well in my
position, is that an awful lot of stuff gets deleted without ever being read…. If
everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.
Respondents emphasized the need for some sort of information “filter.” Whether state-
level fusion centers – the emerging linchpin in the government’s information-sharing
strategy – can successfully fulfill that role is an open question. Some respondents
recognized the value of the fusions centers, while others have not yet perceived any
benefit.
[Fusion centers] need to be staffed by more than just law enforcement … the all
hazards approach has not been embraced by a lot of areas.
We need people in leadership positions deciding what’s important.

What I’d prefer is a system where we recognize the sender as someone who has
credibility and the information is not just something somebody’s sending to kind of
cover their ass.
We’re looking at getting a watch officer to distill this information down into a daily
brief to help reduce some of the time spent reading stuff.
Institutional Norms
Institutional identities play a significant role in how information sharing is interpreted.
Several local officials indicated that longstanding distrust of the federal bureaucracy has
not waned in recent years.
You’ve got all these hyper [federal-level] people bouncing around on their cell
phones and Blackberries not paying attention to what’s going on because they’re all
trying to share some shit so that they’re not the one blamed for not passing
something on.
There are a lot of people in Washington with word processors and a great
imagination typing up more and more stuff that none of us have time to do
anyway.
Other officials, however, indicated a more positive relationship. “We’ve always had
excellent working relationships with [federal officials],” stated one official. Several
respondents also acknowledged that federal information sharing was hindered by
antiquated classification rules and procedures the government is currently trying to
address. As one official explained:
Our law enforcement officials learned about a chlorine truck that needed to be
tracked. Classification issues prevented the information from being shared with the
fire department and emergency management organizations – but those are the
agencies that have done the training and can best respond, so they need to know.
By federal rules, they can’t share the information about the truck beyond law
enforcement. It’s [still] an issue at this point.
These examples suggest that the meaning of information sharing is constructed in

reference to institutional identities and local organizational contexts. While many
respondents acknowledged that in principle information sharing is vital to
preparedness, several officials perceived current information-sharing initiatives as a way
for federal officials to bridge the government’s post-9/11 (and Katrina) credibility gap
with the public. The mocking tone of some of the responses highlighted above might,
ideally, spur stakeholders to more critically examine current policies and practices. The
issues identified by the respondents are certainly well known to many government
officials. The government has responded to these challenges, in part, by seeking to foster
“a culture of information sharing” within and among federal, state, and local agencies.
The comments presented above indicate enduring friction points as the government
attempts to change perceptions, align institutional subcultures, and alter information-
sharing practices.

CONCLUSION
An assumption circulating within information sharing discourse is that the effectiveness
of information sharing can be measured in terms of information flow, distribution,
timeliness, coordination, and related system performance measures.44 The Information
Sharing Environment’s [ISE] stated mission is to ensure the ability of agencies to share
information – but just who is responsible for ensuring that such abilities to share
information tangibly improve preparedness remains unclear. This study indicates that
using system performance measures and capabilities to assess the effectiveness of
information sharing is inadequate and potentially wasteful and misleading. As one local
official in this study explained, “We’re in uncharted territory, with a lack of legal
assistance, and a lack of leadership in some cases. [Information sharing is done] by a
bunch of local people who all of a sudden have got millions of dollars pouring at them,
and they’re trying to make the best use of it with limited guidelines. It’s been very
challenging.” In developing metrics to assess the benefits of information sharing,
officials must engage in the difficult task of relating system use to tangible
improvements in preparedness.
Information-sharing initiatives also unfold within varying budgetary constraints and
divergent funding priorities. As a result, future research needs to address how financial
and structural conditions influence information-sharing processes and practices. This
study also suggests the need for comparative and longitudinal research of information
sharing. However, future studies that attempt to construct concrete variables for
hypothesis testing may similarly confront the contingency of the meanings of
information sharing and preparedness. Although information sharing and preparedness
are socially-defined concepts, their meanings can be mapped within different
organizational contexts and across time using both qualitative and quantitative
methods. Doing so can potentially assist policy makers and practitioners assess the
utility of information-sharing strategies and the impact of associated organizational
change efforts. Assessing whether the users of a given information-sharing system find
the system valuable to preparedness efforts, as well as systematically explicating the
features of highly useful systems, can aid in the their development. Additionally, a
longitudinal approach would help assess how definitions of information sharing and
preparedness, their associated practices, and stakeholder perceptions are changing over
time.
Finally, attempting to create a “trusted partnership” and a “culture of information
sharing” in absence of clear, abundant evidence regarding how information sharing
tangibly improves preparedness may ultimately undermine the government’s
information-sharing strategy. This study highlighted local-level officials’ uncertainty
regarding the effectiveness of current information-sharing processes. As one respondent
concluded: “I hope somebody someplace has more information that they’re utilizing to
protect the country because I’m not seeing a lot of stuff that’s of great value.” Given
similar findings in recent reports, and the resources being dedicated to information
sharing at all levels of government, further scrutiny of how information sharing relates
to preparedness is warranted. This preliminary study has provided a modest step in that
direction.

APPENDIX A – SELECTED SURVEY DATA

Respondent Demographics (N=83)*
Age Gender Education

21-29 years 5% Male 71% Some college 11%
30-39 years 16% Female 23% 2 year degree 6%
1. 40-49 years 30% N/A 6% 4 year degree 17%
2. 50+ years 45% Some graduate 19%
credits
N/A 5% Master degree or 42%
higher
N/A 5%
Occupation Role FEMA Region

Emergency 25% Management 48% I 5%
Mgmt.
Law Enforcement 18% Operations 18% II 8%
Fire 5% Support 8% III 21%
Public Health 12% Other 19% IV 11%
Other 31% V 11%
N/A 8% VI 12%
VII 6%
VIII 4%
IX 12%
X 4%
* Some categories do not total 100% due to some respondents not providing an answer.
Source from Which Most Often Receive Homeland Security Information

(N=83)
Homeland security email / bulletins / alerts 34

Face-to-face meetings with colleagues 5
Email or telephone calls with colleagues 17
Newspapers / magazines 5
Radio 1
Television 2
Websites / Databases 18
Other 1

Most Frequently Used Homeland Security Information Sharing Systems
COPLINK, HSIN (Homeland Security Information Network), InfraGard, Intelink,

LEO (Law Enforcement Online), LLIS (Lessons Learned Information Sharing),
RISS (Regional Information Sharing Systems)
Frequency of Homeland Security Information Sharing Systems Use

(N=83)
LLIS Other Systems

Less than once per month 16% 35%
Monthly 48% 22%
Weekly 34% 31%
Daily 2% 12%
Survey Questions Related to Preparedness
In your opinion, how prepared is your organization for homeland security

threats in your region? (preparedness as an “end-state”)
In your opinion, how aware are you personally of homeland security threats
facing your region?
In your opinion, how aware is your organization of homeland security threats
facing your region?
In your opinion, how prepared is your organization to prevent a homeland
security emergency in your region?
In your opinion, how prepared is your organization to respond to a homeland
In your opinion, how prepared is your organization to recover from a homeland
Interview Participants (Nominal Titles)
Administrator, Federal-level Information Sharing System

Assistant Coordinator, County Office of Emergency Management
Assistant General Manager, City Emergency Preparedness Department
Coordinator, Regional Homeland Security
Detective
Director of Municipal Information Sharing System
Director of Public Safety, County-level
Director, City Office of Emergency Management
Director, County Department of Emergency Services
Intelligence Detective

Interview Questions
1. What does “homeland security information” mean to you?
2. How would you characterize the quality of the homeland security information you
receive?
3. What kind of information is most helpful to you in terms of doing your job?
4. What does “information sharing” mean to you?
5. What does “preparedness” mean to you?
6. What are the information-sharing activities you engage in? How often? Why
(forced/voluntary)? How have these changed over time?
7. In your opinion, how does information sharing relate to preparedness?
8. Please point to any examples of how information sharing has influenced your
work.
9. Describe your interactions with federal/state level agencies. Have information-
sharing initiatives changed your interactions with them? If so, how?
Hamilton Bean is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of

Colorado at Boulder. His research investigates the intersection of organizational
communication and public policy. His work appears in journals in the fields of intelligence,
national security, and homeland security. Since 2005, he has been affiliated with the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) – a DHS-funded
Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland. Mr. Bean can be contacted at
hamilton.bean@colorado.edu.
This research was supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security through
the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START),
grant number N00140510629. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect views
of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The author thanks Michaela Huber and Lisa
Keränen for their assistance in the development of this study.
1Program Manager, “Information Sharing Environment,” speech given before the DNI’s Information
Sharing Conference & Technology Exposition: “Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share,” Denver, CO (August
26, 2006), 8, http://www.ise.gov/docs/20060822_speech.pdf.
2United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Numerous Federal Networks Used to Support
Homeland Security Need to Be Better Coordinated with Key State and Local Information-Sharing
Initiatives” GAO-07-455 (Washington, DC: GAO, April 2007), http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-07-
455.
3Hamilton Bean and Lisa Keränen, “The Role of Homeland Security Information Bulletins within
Emergency Management Organizations: A Case Study of Enactment,” Journal of Homeland Security and
Emergency Management 4, no. 2 (2007), http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol4/iss2/6/.

4Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report
of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” (2003), 637,
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html.
59/11 Commission, “Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United
States” (2004), 416, http://www.9/11commission.gov/.
6 Ibid., 416.
7National Strategy for Information Sharing, (2007), http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/infosharing/index.html.
8William H. DeLone and Ephram R. McLean, “The DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems
Success: A Ten-Year Update,” Journal of Management Information Systems 19, no. 4 (2003): 9-30.
9For a valuable assessment and critique of this issue, see Calvert Jones, “Intelligence Reform: The Logic
of Information Sharing,” Intelligence & National Security 22, no. 3 (2007): 384-401.
10The program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, Ambassador Thomas E. McNamara,
commented to Washington Technology staff writer, Alice Lipowicz that federal-level investment in
information sharing will total hundreds of millions of dollars with additional hundreds of millions of
dollars invested at the state and local level. Alice Lipowicz, “Info-sharing is Work In Progress:
Negroponte’s Plan to Link Federal Agencies Could Run into Millions,” Washington Technology,
December 18, 2006, http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2006/12/18/Infosharing-is-work-in-
progress.aspx.
11Martin J. Zaworski states, “Unfortunately, empirical data establishing a link between information
sharing and performance in the law enforcement environment is either extremely difficult to find or non-
existent.” See Martin J. Zaworski, “Assessing an Automated, Information Sharing Technology in the Post
‘9-11’ Era: Do Local Law Enforcement Officers Think It Meets Their Needs?” doctoral dissertation, Florida
International University, Miami, 2004, 186. Excerpted in “Automated Information Sharing: Does It Help
Law Enforcement Officers Work Better? National Institute of Justice Journal, no. 253 (2006).
12Shaila M. Miranda and Carol S. Saunders, “The Social Construction of Meaning: An Alternative
Perspective on Information Sharing,” Information Systems Research 14, no. 1 (2003): 87-106.
13Brian J. Gerber and others, “On the Front Line: American Cities and the Challenge of Homeland
Security Preparedness,” Urban Affairs Review 41, no. 2 (2005): 182-210.
14Steven R. Haynes and others, “Leveraging and Limiting Practical Drift in Emergency Response
Planning,” 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 2007, HICSS
2007, 200-208.
15 Zaworski, “Assessing an Automated, Information Sharing Technology in the Post ‘9-11’ Era.”
Harold C. Relyea and Jeffrey W. Seifert, “Information Sharing for Homeland Security: A Brief
16
Overview,” RL32597 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 10, 2005), 33.
17Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Inspector General, “Critical Intelligence
Community Management Challenges” (November 12, 2008),
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2009/04/odni-ig-1108.pdf; Markle Foundation Task Force, “Nation At
Risk: Policy Makers Need Better Information to Protect the Country” (March 10, 2009),
http://www.markletaskforce.org/.
18 David Grant and others, The Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse (London: Sage, 2004).
19William V. Pelfrey, “The Cycle of Preparedness: Establishing a Framework to Prepare for Terrorist
Threats,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 2, no. 1 (2005): 9,
http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol2/iss1/5.

20James N. Danziger and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Computerized Data-Based Systems and Productivity
among Professional Workers: The Case of Detectives,” Public Administration Review 45, no. 1 (1985):
196-209.
21 DeLone and McLean, “The DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems Success.”
22 ISE Implementation Plan (2006), 6, www.ise.gov.
23 DeLone and McLean, “The DeLone and McLean Model of Information Systems Success.”
24Ronald D. Fricker, Jerry O. Jacobson, and Lois M. Davis, “Measuring and Evaluating Local
Preparedness for a Chemical or Biological Terrorist Attack,” IP-217-OSD (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
2002), 6.
25 Pelfrey, “The Cycle of Preparedness.”
26Brian J. Gerber and others, “On the Front Line;” Zaworski, “Assessing an Automated, Information
Sharing Technology in the Post ‘9-11’ Era”
27 Brian J. Gerber and others, “On the Front Line,” 202.
28 Zaworski, “Assessing an Automated, Information Sharing Technology in the Post ‘9-11’ Era”
29 Zaworski, “Automated Information Sharing: Does It Help Law Enforcement Officers Work Better?” 25.
30 Ibid.
31Lessons Learned Information Sharing, “Frequently Asked Questions,”
https://www.llis.dhs.gov/faq.cfm.
32 Earl Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992).
33Thomas Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor, Qualitative Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 2002), 178.
34In this study, participants’ frequency of use of LLIS.gov (the survey site) and other information sharing
systems besides LLIS.gov were positively correlated (r = .28, p = .010); therefore, these two frequency
variables were averaged.
35Michael J. Cuellar and others, “Forty Four Years of Computer Personnel Research: Achievements,
Challenges, & the Future,” Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference on Computer
Personnel Research (2006), 164-168, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1125214.
36 Brian J. Gerber and others, “On the Front Line.”
37 Zaworski, “Assessing an Automated, Information Sharing Technology in the Post ‘9-11’ Era.”
38H. L. Goodall and others, “Strategic Ambiguity, Communication, and Public Diplomacy in an Uncertain
World: Principles and Practices,” Report # 0604 (Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Strategic Communication,
Arizona State University, 2006), 5, http://comops.org/article/116.pdf.
Kathleen J. Tierney and others, Facing the Unexpected: Disaster Preparedness and Response in the
39
United States (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2001), 17.

40 Ibid.
41These responses underscore that stakeholders face a dilemma in determining an “appropriate” level of
equivocality in preparedness messages. Sellnow et al. argue that “unequivocal statements during a crisis
might be less valuable than probabilistic statements, reflecting more realistically the lack of precise
predictability in many crisis situations and allowing stakeholders to make their own qualitative
assessments.” This study suggests, however, that an overabundance of equivocal information in pre-event
contexts can lead information sharing systems users to devalue those systems. This finding affirms
Sellnow et al.’s claim that “the question of appropriate levels of equivocality in crisis messages remains

largely unanswered.” Timothy L. Sellnow and others, “Chaos Theory, Informational Needs, and Natural
Disasters,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 30, no. 4 (2002): 269-292, quotes on 288-290.
42David Constant and others, “What’s Mine Is Ours, Or Is It? A Study of Attitudes About Information
Sharing,” Information Systems Research 5, no. 4 (1994): 400-421, 414.
43Rob Johnston, “Analytical Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study”
(Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005), https://www.cia.gov/library.
44See Wayne Parent, “Statement of Wayne Parent, Deputy Director of the Office of Operations
Coordination, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, before the Subcommittee on Intelligence,
Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, Committee on Homeland Security, United States
House of Representatives,” May 10, 2007, http://homeland.house.gov/SiteDocuments/20070510132347-
84079.pdf.

The Application of Cost Management and Life-Cycle Cost Theory
to Homeland Security National Priorities
Robert Hall and Erica Dusenberry Dimitrov
As the nation’s homeland security environment develops and evolves, federal, state,
tribal, and local partners must continually implement and adapt homeland security
programs that address both national and local homeland security priorities, while
simultaneously managing the costs and resources necessary to maintain an adequate
level of preparedness. Without a flexible, logical, and transparent method of managing
homeland security costs and programs, homeland security leaders are faced with a
daunting task. This article proposes life-cycle cost (LCC) theory as a method to identify
and quantify the costs of achieving and sustaining preparedness capabilities across the
nation.
The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it documents a methodology that uses
LCC theory to quantify the costs of achieving and sustaining target capabilities to
support the National Preparedness System. Second, as an example case, the article
applies the methodology to the Explosive Device Response Operations (EDRO) target
capability, which is the capability to coordinate, direct, and conduct improvised
explosive device (IED) response after initial alert and notification. We chose to
exemplify the application of LCC methodology using the EDRO capability because this
particular capability includes a complex structure with many cost components. As such
the example provides a robust overview of the methodology. Third, it articulates a
number of next steps needed to develop and apply LCC methods to national
preparedness.
INTRODUCTION
In March 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued the Interim
National Preparedness Goal. In September 2007, DHS published the National
Preparedness Guidelines, which finalized the development of the national goal. The goal
describes the following national preparedness system vision: A nation prepared with
coordinated capabilities to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from all
hazards in a way that balances risk with resources and need.1
To support the preparedness system vision, DHS created a conceptual framework to
build, sustain, and improve national preparedness for a broad range of natural, man-
made, and technological threats and hazards within the following four mission areas:
prevent, protect, respond, and recover.2 A collection of aggregate capabilities outlines
the homeland security tasks associated with each mission area. Each capability
integrates multiple disciplines, processes, and procedures through a method detailing
the conditions under which tasks take place and describing desired outcomes. The
collection of these capabilities comprises the Target Capabilities List (TCL).
The TCL is a generic model of operationally ready capabilities that define
preparedness for all types of hazards. Target Capabilities List 2.0 describes the amount
of capability a jurisdiction must achieve in (1) planning factors, which provide estimates
HALL & DUSENBERRY, APPLICATION OF COST MANAGEMENT THEORY 2
of the amount of a capability necessary to address a specific scenario and (2) national
target levels, which provide estimates of the amount of a capability needed across the
nation to achieve national preparedness.3 The next iteration of the TCL, 3.0, will
describe the level of capabilities a jurisdiction must achieve in terms of performance
class, performance objective, and capability element frameworks.4
As DHS policy has matured over the last several years, the importance of quantifying
levels and costs of capabilities has gained importance. Government Accountability
Office (GAO) reports have emphasized the need to determine capability costs, determine
what governments can afford, establish capability baselines, develop coordinated
funding plans and expenditures, and develop life-cycle cost practices.5 For the federal
government, this will require that homeland security program analysts quantify, in
some way, the costs associated with achieving and sustaining the target levels of
capability that make the nation fully prepared. For state, tribal, and local governments,
this will require that homeland security program managers determine the levels of
capability a jurisdiction needs and associated costs so that they can take full advantage
of grant programs and effectively manage homeland security programs within their
jurisdictions.
Furthermore, as mandates like the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (which requires
states to report an estimate of homeland-security related expenditures for each prior
and current fiscal year) and the 2006 Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act
(which requires states to report homeland security preparedness levels in annual State
Preparedness Reports) take hold, the calculation of capability cost will need to be more
than an opinion. Potentially, there may be many ways to calculate the cost of
preparedness. We propose a thorough and robust method of calculation that determines
the components of people, planning, organization, equipment, training, and exercise
that make up a capability; identifies, models, and annualizes component costs; and
calculates costs for accomplishing and sustaining national target-levels of capability.
COST MANAGEMENT
Developing and maintaining viable homeland security programs within states and
jurisdictions requires federal, state, tribal, and local officials to understand the costs
involved in acquiring and sustaining programs associated with national priorities. With
fifty-six states and territories and approximately sixty urban areas executing homeland
security programs under differing strategies with a multitude of goals and objectives, the
cost-management process is extremely complex.6 However, modern cost-management
methods used by industry and federal agencies such as the Department of Defense7 can
provide insight and permit the Department of Homeland Security to mature cost-
management practices while avoiding “unprofitable” pitfalls.8
Cost management helps managers plan and control expenditures by providing
managers and designers with better information on when and where costs occur and
what costs add to the value of a product.9 Further, the development of cost-analysis
techniques can provide insight on the return-on-investment of federal grant programs,
such as the Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP). Applying modern cost-
management methods to homeland security cost management requires homeland
security project managers to focus on four major concepts:

1. Expand existing views of capability cost beyond the purchase of new equipment to
achieving and sustaining an entire target capability through long-term programs in
states and urban areas.
2. Develop capability cost estimates by detailing capability components and their cost
variables and developing a model for each target capability element.
3. Determine the most expensive components (cost drivers) of a capability to balance
limited resources and needs.
4. Calculate the target capability-element level that must be achieved to comply with
capability planning factors and national target levels so that costs are quantified and
risk-benefit analysis is possible.
LCC AS A METHOD FOR COST MANAGEMENT
Life-cycle cost (LCC) is a methodology that can assist cost management efforts by
calculating the ‘total’ cost of owning an asset.10 Total cost includes the cost to not only
acquire the asset, but also to use, maintain, rehabilitate, and replace it. While the
uncertainty and dynamic nature of many sectors in our society introduce challenges to
identifying and maintaining accurate long-term cost projections,11 LCC methodology
continues to become an increasingly popular method of cost management and financial
planning as society more frequently demands greater accountability and cost
effectiveness, noticeable return-on-investment, and defendable justifications for asset
acquisition. For example, the public works,12 public and private contracting,13 and
construction14 industries have begun relying on LCC methodology to inform marketing,
acquisition, procurement, and project justification activities.
LCC methodology has proven to be useful in a wide range of environments, including
manufacturing and the management of government acquisition programs. For example,
by identifying and modeling the many costs incurred in the manufacturing industry
(e.g., equipment maintenance, production quality and rework, and de-manufacturing
and recycling costs), LCC theory allows engineers to optimize the production process,
reduce costs, and increase product quality.15 Likewise, LCC models that capture
operating and support costs, in addition to acquisition costs, allow the Department of
Defense to make sound and informed investments.16
The success that LCC methodology has brought to these environments also may be
recognized in the homeland security sector. Specifically, of the many cost-management
methods that may be used to calculate homeland security costs,17 LCC is promising in its
ability to model the costs that states, tribal entities, and urban areas incur to achieve a
particular level of capability and then sustain it. The ability of LCC methods to expand
project management beyond a focus on initial acquisition costs to operations and
support cost considerations can lead to more successful homeland security programs.
Specifically, the goal of using LCC methods is to help states, tribal entities, and urban
areas forecast target capability costs and make decisions on when investments are
needed and at what amount. When the resource needs of a jurisdiction align well to the
Target Capabilities List planning factors and target levels, the standardization offered by
LCC cost models can facilitate planning and serve as example investment strategies.
Standardization is certainly useful in aggregating cost at the state and federal level to

calculate preparedness cost estimates. When the resource needs of a jurisdiction do not
align well to the TCL, the models may be adapted to specific jurisdictional needs and
continue to provide insight into local costs.
At local, state, and federal levels LCC methods make it possible to forecast annual
support and replacement costs for homeland security programs, distribute investments
to cover these costs over their lifetime, and establish viable long-term procurement
strategies that acquire only the equipment and personnel supportable within a defined
budget. LCC estimates also determine which operational components cost the most and
help influence strategies to manage these cost drivers.
LCC METHODOLOGY
LCC methodology provides states, tribal entities, urban areas, and local jurisdictions
with estimates of the acquisition cost as well as the steady-state costs of maintaining a
specific target capability or national priority over time. We implement the methodology
using a flexible and transparent spreadsheet model consisting of the operational units
(elements) of a capability and the costs associated with their individual parts, or
components (e.g., people, equipment, and training). The model is flexible because cost
variables and capability components are easily modified based on stakeholder feedback
and data. The model is transparent because it is implemented in a way that permits
stakeholders to understand its presentation in a spreadsheet. Figure 1 includes the key
terminology of the methodology and an explanation of how different terms relate.
Figure 1: Key terminology of the LCC method
Capability A specific aptitude to protect against, prevent, respond to or recover

from an incident or hazard. A capability is comprised of elements.
Elements Groupings of people, planning, equipment, training, and exercise
resources into units that are employed in an operational fashion. An
element is comprised of components.
Components Individual people, planning, organization and leadership activities,
equipment, training, and exercises. Each component is associated with
a cost variable.
Cost Categories that capture the specific dollar amounts to procure and
Variables sustain individual components.
Cost model A spreadsheet that calculates the total cost to acquire and sustain a
capability. A cost model contains all of the cost variable, component,
and element data for a given capability.
Our implementation of the methodology follows the six steps listed here and explained
in the following paragraphs.
1. Determine the capability elements
2. Identify and characterize capability components
3. Develop LCC variables for each component

4. Develop a cost model

5. Annualize the cost model and identify cost drivers
6. Link the model to national targets and assigned levels
Step 1: Determine the Capability Elements

The first step requires the identification of capability elements. We use element to mean
a grouping of people, planning, organization and leadership, equipment, training, and
exercise resources into a unit that is employed in an operational fashion.
Every national priority and target capability integrates multiple elements, which
collectively represent the resources required to perform critical tasks associated with the
capability.18 For example, an element in the Explosive Device Response Operations
(EDRO) capability would be a bomb team (Type I, II, or III). The DHS Target
Capabilities List is a good reference for learning what elements are in a capability. The
TCL lists the capability elements for each of the thirty-seven target capabilities.
Step 2: Identify and Categorize Capability Components

Once capability elements are identified, we further categorize the components of each
element. Components include the people, planning, organization and leadership
activities, equipment, training, and exercises that make up a capability element. To
identify capability components, we use the TCL, advice from advisory groups and
subject matter experts, and existing standards (e.g., resource typing). While
consideration of component standards and requirements in national doctrine such as
the TCL is of obvious import, we recognize that certain on-site circumstances (e.g.
competing priorities, limited funding, or lack of political support) may alter component
configurations from those expected. As such, consultation with advisory groups and
subject matter experts allows us to validate the components included in our LCC
models. Federal, state, tribal, and local users of LCC methodology have similar flexibility
to create models that include only the components necessary for their jurisdiction’s
specific needs or requirements.
Step 3: Develop LCC Cost Variables

To accommodate the life-cycle of target capabilities, we use five LCC cost variables to
capture and categorize the individual acquisition and sustainment costs of capability
components. These cost variables and some example costs are shown in Figure 2. To
determine individual component costs, we use the Responder Knowledge Base, which is
a database that provides emergency responders, purchasers, and planners with a
trusted, integrated, online source of information on products, standards, certifications,
grants, and other equipment-related information.19 We also reference information
gathered from vendor data, published salaries and backfill costs, advisory groups,
training program guides, and subject matter experts. Depending on the user, these costs
may represent exact figures, such as when a program manager is using LCC
methodology to demonstrate current and future budget expenditures, or industry
averages, such as when a new program manager is attempting to identify the long-term
costs of potential investments.

Figure 2: The five LCC cost variables
Acquisition Sustainment Costs

Cost
Initial Cost Energy Cost Operating Repair Cost Upgrade Cost
Cost
Purchase Price Cost of Storage Costs Routine/Periodic Equipment/Software
Salary Resources Administration Maintenance Upgrade Costs
Backfill Cost Needed/Used to Costs and Calibration Update Costs
Operate Logistics Costs
Attendance Fee
Particular Types Support Costs
of Equipment
It is important to note that not all components have costs associated with all five LCC
cost variables. For example, a piece of equipment that cannot be upgraded does not have
an upgrade cost. Further, for assets that are shared between jurisdictions, users may
include only the costs that they actually contribute to the resource.
Step 4: Develop a Cost Model

All LCC cost variables must be analyzed collectively to see how they contribute to the
total cost of the capability element. A cost model, in the form of a spreadsheet, is an
effective way to display the cost composition of a capability element. Thus, we create a
spreadsheet that calculates the cost of individual capability elements and aggregates
these costs to provide the total cost associated with an entire capability. Figure 3
provides an example of a LCC model for a Type I bomb team.

Type I Bomb Team

Item Description Quantity Comp Cost 1 Initial 2 Energy 3 Operating 4 Repair 5 Upgrade Shelf Life
Equipment Components
EOD Response Vehicle 1 $225,000.00 $225,000.00 $4,320.00 $1,200.00 $1,800.00 $0.00 15
Binoculars 1 $2,500.00 $2,500.00 $60.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 15
Cost to Attend
Annual Salary
Backfill Cost
Optics, Thermal Imaging and/or Light Amplification (not required) 1 $8,890.00 $8,890.00 $162.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 10
Robot, Large 1 $173,000.00 $173,000.00 $100.00 $0.00 $1,300.00 $4,000.00 15
Robot, Small 0 $93,000.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 15
Chemical Agent Monitor 1 $8,670.00 $8,670.00 $71.00 $0.00 $100.00 $0.00 5
Personnel costs
Training costs
Personal Radiation Detector (Pager) 1 $465.00 $465.00 $10.00 $0.00 $50.00 $0.00 10
LC Cost1
LCCos1
LCCos2
Ballistic Helmets 2 $396.00 $792.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 15
Body Armor (TEV) 2 $885.00 $1,770.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
Clothing, Operational, and Specialized/Protective Gear IED/EOD (charcoal undergarment2) $720.00 $1,440.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 3
CBRNE Containment Vessel 1 $279,000.00 $279,000.00 $0.00 $0.00 $240.00 $0.00 15
Disruptor, Pan (with expendable rounds) 1 $4,690.00 $4,690.00 $200.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 15
Maintenance and repair costs: routine / periodic maintenance, calibration

Equipment, Hand Protection, IED/EOD 1 $300.00 $300.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
Equipment, Head and Face Protection, IED/EOD 1 $5,000.00 $5,000.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
EOD Bomb Suit 1 $15,000.00 $15,000.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
EOD Comm System 1 $2,600.00 $2,600.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
Operating costs: storage, administration, logistics support

EOD Tech Tool Kit 1 $1,340.00 $1,340.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 15
Kit, Fiber Optic (not required) 1 $8,130.00 $8,130.00 $0.00 $0.00 $500.00 $0.00 10
Team Supplies (per year) 1 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $5,000.00 $0.00 $0.00 1
Suit, "Search", Improvised Explosive Device/Explosive Ordnance Disposal (IED/EOD) Pr1otective$6,Ensembl
550.00 e
Technological Costs: upgrades, updates

$6,550.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5 Initial costs: purchase price of all units
X-Ray Unit, Portable or Transportable 1 $29,500.00 $29,500.00 $0.00 $0.00 $250.00 $0.00 10 Energy costs: gas, oil, electricity
Years of use before replacement

Hardware, Computer, Integrated 1 $14,100.00 $14,100.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 3
Cost to purchase a single unit
EOD Body Cooling System 2 $955.00 $1,910.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 5
SCBA 30, 45, 60 Min. & Rebreathers 2 $4,800.00 $9,600.00 $0.00 $0.00 $100.00 $0.00 5
Undergarment, Non-Flame-Resistant (cotton) 2 $35.00 $70.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 3
Personnel Components
Figure 3: Sample Cost Model
Bomb Technician 2 $87,500.00 $175,000.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

Tranining Components
Basic Hazardous Devices School (6-week) 2 $4,000.00 $8,000.00 $19,800.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Recertification (1-week) 2 $1,650.00 $0.00 $3,300.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
LE Response to WMD - Operations level (24 hrs) 2 $990.00 $0.00 $1,980.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Equipment costs
WMD HazMat Techician Training (24 hrs) 2 $990.00 $0.00 $1,980.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Service Life
3 Operating
Comp Cost
5 Upgrade
LC Cost #2
Post Blast Investigation Training (6-week) 2 $9,900.00 $0.00 $19,800.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
2 Energy
4 Repair
1 Initial
Robot Operator's Course 2 $1,650.00 $0.00 $3,300.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A

Step 5: Annualize the Cost Model and Identify Cost Drivers

We annualize the cost calculated in Step 4 to provide states, tribal entities, and urban
areas with cost estimates that can support the development of long-term program and
project plans. Not all costs, however, are incurred on an annual basis. For example, the
initial cost of a piece of equipment or the cost to attend a training session tend to be
one-time investments, only to be incurred again when equipment needs to be replaced
or there is personnel turnover. Energy, operating, and repair costs, however, are
traditionally presented in an annual format.
Thus, to allow an annualized assessment of capability costs, our methodology
requires the creation of an additional cost variable to represent the annual depreciation,
or replacement cost (R-Cost), of a component. The replacement-cost variable can be
thought of as a replacement-cost reserve that builds to permit the purchase of new
equipment as old equipment wears out. Our replacement cost assumes a zero percent
discount rate. The need for a discount rate depends on the use of the analysis. In
matters where cost comparisons are made on a year-by-year basis, a discount rate is of
limited use.
For equipment components, we obtain this replacement cost by dividing the initial
equipment cost by the equipment’s expected life span (service life). In the case of
personnel components, the replacement cost reserve may fund the hiring or training of
new personnel once existing personnel move on. To calculate the replacement cost of
training, we divide initial training cost by anticipated duration of employment. To
complete this calculation, we make the assumption that people do not stay at their jobs
indefinitely. Our past LCC analyses assume a nine-year service period for personnel. To
follow that methodology as closely as possible, we make the same assumption in this
article.
Annualized cost models offer an understanding of how multiple components of a
capability might fit into a budget and which components are most costly. The cost
information from this type of analysis can support the following activities:
1. Sequence and/or limit the purchase of the most costly equipment to ensure that
funds are available to maintain and upgrade existing equipment.
2. Stagger large purchases by making equally spaced investments determined by the
equipment service life, establish equipment rotations, and avoid periods when all
equipment becomes unserviceable at the same time.
3. Determine what capability level is affordable and what additional capability should
be acquired through mutual aid.
Step 6: Link the Model to National Targets

Finally, our methodology links element costs to national target and assigned capability
levels (provided by the Target Capabilities List or subject matter experts) to quantify the
cost of maintaining a jurisdictional preparedness level for an entire target capability.
National target levels are derived from the National Planning Scenarios and were
developed through stakeholder working groups. The national target level is the amount
of capability required throughout the country to accomplish mission area tasks during a
major event. It is anticipated that most jurisdictions will not locally sustain national

target levels of capability for a major event, but contribute some capability elements to
the national target levels and achieve the remainder of the capability through mutual aid
agreements.20
ANALYSIS OF THE EXPLOSIVE DEVICE RESPONSE OPERATIONS (EDRO) TARGET

CAPABILITY TO DEMONSTRATE LCC METHODS
To demonstrate the application of the LCC methodology to a capability, this section

discusses our LCC analysis of the Explosive Device Response Operations (EDRO) target
capability.21 According to the Target Capabilities List, EDRO is the capability to
coordinate, direct, and conduct an improvised explosive device (IED) response after
initial alert and notification. The critical tasks associated with the EDRO capability, such
as intelligence fusion and analysis, the implementation of render-safe procedures, and
the conduct of searches for additional explosive devices, are accomplished by a bomb
squad that is able to dispatch bomb teams to the incident site.22 A bomb squad is a
bomb response organization, consisting of at least one bomb team, accredited by the
Federal Bureau of Investigations Hazardous Devices School, and compliant with the
standards set by National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board (NBSCAB).
Dispatch of one or more bomb teams may be due to a wide range of incidents and
emergencies, and may involve chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive
(CBRNE) materials. A bomb team is a sub-unit within a bomb squad consisting of at
least two certified bomb technicians and a complete set of standardized equipment that
varies depending on the type of bomb team. The ‘type’ or capacity of a bomb team for a
specific incident is dependent on the response requirements of the incident and the
training and experience required of personnel. The FEMA Typed Resources Definitions
outline the characteristics of three bomb team types. This section highlights key points
in applying our LCC methodology to the EDRO target capability.
EDRO Step 1: Determine Explosive Device Response Operations Elements

The Explosive Device Response Operations capability is team-based, which means that
the tasks performed within the capability are conducted by members of an easily
identified team. All EDRO capability costs are incurred to support National Bomb Squad
Commanders Advisory Board accredited bomb squads, which are composed of one or
more bomb teams that vary in type and qualification. As a result, we identified the
EDRO capability elements as Type I, Type II, and Type III National Bomb Squad
Commanders Advisory Board-accredited bomb teams. Figure 4 displays some of the
qualifications of the three bomb team types.

Figure 4: Qualifications of National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory

Board accredited bomb teams
Type I Bomb Team Type II Bomb Team Type III Bomb Team
Handles multiple Handles multiple incidents Handles single incidents
simultaneous incidents
Possesses large robotic Possesses small robotic Does not possess a robotic
vehicle vehicle vehicle
Able to work in a CBRNE Trained and equipped to work Trained, but not equipped to
environment in a CBRNE environment work in a CBRNE
environment
EDRO Step 2: Identify and Categorize Explosive Device Response

Operations Components
Bomb team composition is modeled based on the FEMA Typed Resource Definitions.
While these resource definitions were helpful in providing general information on the
composition of teams, we required more detailed information on each equipment,
personnel, and training component of the teams. Therefore, we worked with the
National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board Equipment Subcommittee to obtain
greater specificity in bomb squad and ultimately bomb team composition. Additionally,
we identified each equipment component location in the FEMA National Preparedness
Directorate, Department of Homeland Security, Responder Knowledge Base, Authorized
Equipment List (AEL), which is a generic list of equipment items that may be purchased
using federal grant funds.23
Our research resulted in the identification of twenty-four equipment, one personnel,
and six training components for a bomb team. We also recognized that equipment
configuration may vary depending on the bomb team type. For instance, a Type I bomb
team possesses a large robot, a Type II bomb team possesses a small robot, and a Type
III bomb team does not possess a robot. As such, we created a separate cost model for
each bomb team type, which is discussed in the Explosive Devise Response Operations
Step 4 below. Figure 5 details the equipment, personnel, and training components for a
Type I bomb team.

Figure 5: Type I bomb team components
Equipment Components
EOD Response Vehicle EOD Bomb Suit
Optics, Thermal imaging and/or Light EOC Communications System
Amplification
Robot, Large EOD Tech Tool Kit
Robot, Small Kit, Fiber optic
Chemical Agent Monitor Team supplies, per year
Personal Radiation Detector Suit, “search”, IED/EOD
Ballistic Helmets X-ray Unit, portable or transportable
Body Armor (TEV) Hardware, computer integrated
Clothing, Operational, and EOD Body Cooling System
Specialized/Protective Gear IED
CBRNE Containment Vessel SCBA 30, 45, 60 min. & rebreathers
Disruptor, Pan (with expendable rounds) Undergarment, non-flame-resistant (cotton)
Equipment, Hand protection, IED/EOD Equipment, Head and Face Protection,
IED/EOD
Personnel Component
Bomb Technician
Training Components
Basic Hazardous Devices School (6-week) WMD HazMat Technician Training (24
hours)
Recertification (1-week) Post Blast Investigation Training (6-week)
LE Response to WMD – Operations level (24 Robot Operator’s Course
hours)
EDRO Step 3: Develop LCC Cost Variables

We identified the following cost variables for each bomb team component (see Figure
6).
Figure 6: LCC cost variables by bomb team component
Equipment Personnel Training

Acquisition Costs Acquisition Costs Acquisition Costs
Initial Salary Backfill Costs
Sustaining Costs Costs to Attend Training
Energy
Operating
Repair
Upgrade

EDRO Step 4: Develop a Cost Model

We utilized the Explosive Device Response Operations components and the LCC cost
variables identified in the previous steps to form the framework of the cost models for
the three bomb team types. Figure 7 provides an example of the information included in
the cost models.
Figure 7: Sample LCC model information: Type I bomb team
Acquisition
Equipment Costs Sustainment Costs
Item Description Quantity Initial Energy Operating Repair Upgrade
EOD Response Vehicle 1 $225,000 $4,320 $1,200 $1,800 $0
Binoculars 1 $2,500 $60 $0 $0 $0
Optics, Thermal imaging 1 $8,890 $162 $0, $$0 $0
Robot, Large 1 $173,000 $100 $0 $1,300 $4,000
Acquisition Sustainment Costs
Personnel Costs
Item Description Quantity Salary
Bomb Technician 2 $175, 000 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Training Acquisition Costs Sustainment Costs
Item Description Quantity Cost attend Backfill
Basic Hazardous Devices School 2 $8,000 $19,800 N/A N/A N/A
Recertification 2 $0 $3,300 N/A N/A N/A
LE Response to WMD – Ops Level 1 2 $0 $1,980 N/A N/A N/A
Costs rounded to the nearest tens digit.
EDRO Step 5: Annualize the Cost Model

We annualized the bomb team costs to provide jurisdictions with an understanding of
annual costs to sustain a bomb team. Figure 8 provides an example of the information
included in the annualized cost models.

Figure 8: Sample annualized LCC model information: Type I bomb team, equipment
Service
Item Description Initial R-Cost Energy Operating Repair Upgrade Annual Life
EOD Response Vehicle $225,000 $15,000 $4,320 $1,200 $1,800 $0 $22,300 15
Binoculars $2,500 $170 $60 $0 $0 $0 $230 15
Optics, Thermal Imaging $8,890 $890 $160 $0, $$0 $0 $1,050 10
Robot, Large $173,000 $11,530 $100 $0 $1,300 $4,000 $16,930 15
Robot, Small $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 15
Chemical Agent Monitor $8,670 $1,730 $70 $0 $100 $0 $1,900 5
Personal Radiation Detector $465 $50 $10 $0 $50 $0 $110 15
Ballistic Helmets $792 $50 $0 $0 $0 $0 $50 10
Body Armor (TEV) $1,770 $350 $0 $0 $0 $0 $350 5
Operational/Protective Gear $1,440 $480 $0 $0 $0 $0 $480 3
CBRNE Containment Vessel $279,000 $18,600 $0 $0 $240 $0 $18,840 15
Disruptor, Pan $4,690 $310 $200 $0 $0 $0 $510 15
Hand Protection $300 $60 $0 $0 $0 $0 $60 5
Head and Face Protection $5,000 $1,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $1,000 5
EOD Bomb Suit $15,000 $3,000 $0 $0 $0 $0 $3,000 5
EOC Communications System $2,600 $520 $0 $0 $0 $0 $520 5
EOD Tech Tool Kit $1,340 $90 $0 $0 $0 $0 $90 15
Kit, Fiber Optic $8,130 $810 $0 $0 $500 $0 $1,350 10
Team Supplies, per Year $0 $0 $0 $5,000 $0 $0 $5,000 1
Suit, “Search,” IED/EOD $6,550 $1,310 $0 $0 $0 $0 $1,310 5
X-Ray Unit $29,500 $2,950 $0 $0 $250 $0 $3,200 10
Hardware, Computer Integrated $14,100 $4,700 $0 $0 $0 $0 $4,700 3
EOD Body Cooling System $1,910 $380 $0 $0 $0 $0 $380 5
SCBA 30, 45, 60 m. Rebreathers $9,600 $1,920 $0 $0 $100 $0 $2,020 5
Undergarment (Cotton) $70 $20 $0 $0 $0 $0 $20 3
In the case of equipment, the component annual cost represents the sum of the
annualized replacement cost, and all other costs incurred annually (energy, operating,
repair, and upgrade costs). The annual equipment cost for the Type I bomb team shown
in Figure 5 is $85,400. Equipment cost drivers are those components that annually cost
the most. In the Type I bomb team the obvious components are the response vehicle,
containment vessel, and bomb robot ($22,300, $18,840, and $16,930 respectively).
Less obvious components are the team supplies and integrated computer with lower
initial costs, but more frequent replacement costs ($5,000 and $4,700 respectively).
Personnel costs are annual costs that vary widely throughout the country. However, a
reasonable cost estimate based on a median patrol officer salary ($50,000) and a
business cost ratio of 1.75 (to account for overhead) resulted in an annual cost of
$87,500 per person. The $50,000 median patrol officer salary is based on an average of

median salaries reported by several web-based salary resources,24 and we assume the
1.75 business cost ratio is a reasonable estimate for the security industry.
We based our annual training calculation on the assumption that a bomb team
member receives all necessary training and stays on the bomb squad for nine years.
Training costs include the cost of attending the Basic Hazardous Devices School and
backfill costs for the Basic Hazardous Devices School and all other training courses,
which are provided at no cost. Assuming the $41.25 average backfill cost for a law
enforcement official reported in the DHS 2003 and 2004 State Homeland Security
Assessment and Strategy Program and the average bomb technician remaining in the
position for nine years, we estimated the annualized cost of training to be $3,600 per
person.
Multiplying the personnel ($87,500) and training ($3,600) costs by two, to account
for the two bomb technicians on a Type I bomb team, and adding all component annual
costs ($85,400) reveals that the total annual cost to maintain the Type I bomb team is
$267,600.
EDRO Step 6: Link the Model to National Targets

The final step of our LCC methodology is to calculate the target capability element level
that must be achieved nationally to comply with capability planning factors and national
target levels. According to the Target Capabilities List, national target levels call for 458
accredited bomb squads in the U.S.
Interestingly, the FEMA Typed Resources Definitions that we used when developing
our models specifies equipment, personnel, and training components for a bomb team,
not a bomb squad. Thus, we had a disconnect between the resource typing standard we
used as the foundation for our cost models and the national target level as described by
the Target Capabilities List. Therefore, we needed to create a bomb-teams-to-squad
relationship for the EDRO capability.
To develop this relationship, we used population tiers to describe the number and
type of bomb teams needed by a bomb squad for a certain jurisdictional population size.
We developed this relationship first by using a capabilities-based threat assessment
method described by Thomas Goss25 and then validating that relationship through
analysis of interview data on twenty-three bomb squads of various-sized jurisdictions.
Figure 9 shows our results in the number and type of bomb teams possessed by bomb
squads in jurisdictions of various sizes.
Figure 9: Number and type of bomb teams required of jurisdictions of various sizes
Jurisdiction size Type I Type II Type III

Total population under 117,000 0 0 1
Total population from 117,000 to 300,000 1 0 0
Total population from 300,000 to 1,000,000 2 1 0
Total population greater than 1,000,000 3 0 2
Based on these criteria, a jurisdiction with a total population of 500,000 would, on

average, achieve and sustain an EDRO capability consisting of two Type I bomb teams,

at a cost of $267,600 per team per year and one Type II bomb team, at a cost of
$249,900 for a total cost of $785,100 per year.
CONCLUSION
In applying LCC methods to the Explosive Device Response Operations capability, we

built models that used a lot of detailed information to capture capability components,
their costs, and target levels. This level of detail is precisely what is needed by local,
tribal, state, and federal officials to accurately determine how resources contribute
toward achieving and sustaining local and national preparedness.
In managing the cost of homeland security grant programs, we believe it is important
to know whether funding is used by a state or local jurisdiction to hire people or to
purchase planning, organization and leadership, equipment, training, or exercise
resources. But, we assume it is equally important to know how target levels of capability
are achieved and how much it will cost to sustain target levels of capability in the future.
Life -cycle cost methods and capability modeling can be used to provide this necessary
information.
To further the development and application of the LCC methodology, we recommend
the following:
1. Focusing on capabilities aligned to the national priorities in the National
Preparedness Guidelines.
2. Conducting a national-level LCC analysis for each national priority capability.
3. Creating and sharing prototype tools with jurisdictions to facilitate use of this
methodology.
4. Creating a central Web-enabled database to share cost models among jurisdictions.
5. Incorporating LCC tools into future grant management systems for use by state and
local jurisdictions.
Cost analysis will be vital to achieving and sustaining target levels of capability,
particularly in helping make difficult resource allocation decisions across coordinated
capability needs. As risk-assessment efforts identify those risks posing the greatest
danger to homeland security, it will be necessary to ensure we can achieve, sustain, and
afford the capabilities that target the right risks.
Robert Hall is an associate director at CNA, a non-profit research and analysis organization
that leads the nation in supporting preparedness and response activities at the federal, state,
and local levels. He manages projects at DHS and for the state and local community. His
work includes support for the FEMA Joint Project Team, target capability life-cycle cost
analysis, and a Capability Assessment Framework for South Carolina. Prior to working for
CNA, Mr. Hall was a technical advisor for Homeland Security at the Delaware Emergency
Management Agency and prior to that enjoyed a twenty-five-year career in the U.S. Air Force.
Mr. Hall may be contacted at hallr@cna.org.

Erica Dusenberry Dimitrov is a research analyst at CNA. Her work primarily focuses on
risk management, local-level emergency preparedness planning, homeland security exercise
support and evaluation, and life-cycle cost analysis. Prior to joining CNA, she worked for the
National Sheriffs’ Association where she advocated local law enforcement issues on Capitol
Hill. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the
University of Iowa. Ms. Dusenberry Dimitrov may be contacted at: dusenbe@cna.org.
1U.S. Department of Homeland Security, National Preparedness Guidelines (Washington, DC: DHS,
September 2007).
2U.S. Department of Homeland Security, National Response Framework (Washington, DC: DHS,
January 2008).
3U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Target Capabilities List, A Companion to the National
Preparedness Guidelines, Version 2.0 (Washington, DC: DHS, September 2007).
4DHS/FEMA Target Capabilities List Implementation Project Fact Sheet. For more information about
the TCL Implementation Project, contact TCL@DHS.gov.
5Government Accountability Office (GAO), DHS’ Efforts to Enhance First Responders’ All-Hazards
Capabilities Continue to Evolve, GAO-05-652 (Washington, DC: GAO, July 2005); GAO, Billions Invested
in Major Programs Lack Appropriate Oversight, GAO-09-29 (Washington, DC: GAO, November 2008).
6U.S. Department of Homeland Security, State and Urban Area Homeland Security Strategy: Guidance
on Aligning Strategies with the National Preparedness Goal (Washington, DC: DHS, July 2005).
7 Department of Defense, Department of Defense Directive 5000-4 (Washington, DC: DOD, November
24, 1992), http://www.ncca.navy.mil/resources/dod5000-4.pdf); see also GAO reports at
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-07-1029R and conference briefings at http://www.value-
eng.org/pdf_docs/ 2006GMConference/SAVE2006_Danny_ver7_%20Final.ppt. For decades, the
Department of Defense has successfully used cost management in both weapons system development and
logistics management. Initiatives to reduce total ownership costs are currently in place for the Army
Bradley, UH-60, Stryker, UAV, and Guardrail programs; Air Force Global Hawk, aircraft engine, and F-16
programs; Navy H-1, V-22, F/A-18, H-60, ASE, and Common Ship programs; and the Joint F-35 program.
8Office of the Secretary of Defense Cost Analysis Improvement Group, Operating and Support Cost-
Estimating Guide (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, May 1, 1992).
9Yair Babad and Bala Balachandran, “Cost Driver Optimization in Activity-based Costing,” The
Accounting Review 68, no. 3 (July 1993): 563-575.
10Bruce Hutton and William Wilkie, “Life-cycle Cost: A New Form of Consumer Information,” The
Journal of Consumer Research 6, no. 4 (March 1980): 349-360.
Anni Lindholm and Petri Suomala, “Learning by Costing: Sharpening Cost Image through Life Cycle
11
Costing,” International Journal of Productivity & Performance Management 56, no. 8 (November
2007): 651-672.
12C. Vipulanandan, “Lifecycle Cost Model for Water, Wastewater Systems,” Underground Construction
63, no.10 (October 2008): 80-85
Heather Pedersen, “Delivering Value through Cost Analysis,” Air Conditioning Heating & Refrigeration
13
News 235, no. 3 (September 15, 2008): 55.

14Arthur Chan, Gregory Keoleian, and Eric Gabler, “Evaluation of Life Cycle Cost Analysis Practices used
by the Michigan DOT,” Journal of Transportation Engineering 134, no. 6 (June 2008): 236-245.
Jan Emblemsvag, Life-cycle Costing: Using Activity-based Costing and Monte Carlo Methods to
15
Manage Future Costs and Risks (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 24-25.

16Office of the Secretary of Defense Cost Analysis Improvement Group, Operating and Support Cost-
Estimating Guide (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, May 1, 1992), 2-5 to 2-9.
17Modern cost management methods include activity-based costing, which focuses on the activities that
transform raw materials into finished products (Babad and Balachandran, “Cost Driver Optimization in
Activity-based Costing”); strategic cost management, which focuses on the value that product features
present to customers through value chain and value activity (J.M. Freeman, “Estimating Quality Costs,”
The Journal of the Operational Research Society 46, no. 6, June 1995, 675- 686); life cycle cost
management, which focuses on the acquisition and long term sustainment requirements of a product
(Hutton and Wilkie, “Life-cycle Cost: A New Form of Consumer Information”), and environmental
management which goes beyond LCC by accounting for the environmental issues and impacts resulting
from business activities (Michael Berry and Dennis Rondinelli, “Proactive Corporate Environmental
Management: A New Industrial Revolution” The Academy of Management Executive 12, no. 2, May 1998:
38-50).
18 DHS, Target Capabilities List, Version 2.0.
19 The Responder Knowledge database: www.rkb.us/.
21The full report of this analysis is available upon request.
23 https://www.rkb.us/mel.cfm?subtypeid=549.
24Some web-based salary resources are:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Law_Enforcement/Salary,
http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresult_national_LG12000003.html, and
http://www.policejobsinfo.com/salaries/
Thomas Goss, “Building a Contingency Menu: Using Capabilities-Based Planning for Homeland
25
Defense and Homeland Security,” Homeland Security Affairs 1, no. 1 (Summer 2005), www.hsaj.org.

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Notes from the Editor

Inspector Matthew Simeone graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School’s

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

ELUSIVE PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

ahead include homegrown terrorism and domestic radicalization; and as a recent

TRANSFORMING THE MISSION

A first step in transforming homeland security strategy is to recognize that current

Misapplied Border Security Strategies

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Engaging the Citizenry

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

A NEW HOMELAND SECURITY PARADIGM

A New, Joint Decision-Making Process

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Leading from the Front

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Unfortunately, the nation currently faces a potential schism between federal

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

• Preventing homegrown radicalization. Radicalization is a social process that

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

helpers to the professional response cadre during an incident. A community-oriented

TOWARD A SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HOMELAND SECURITY

From a shared vision of a way of life to everyday interactions with neighbors, an

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Washington Post, July 3, 2008.

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New York City Police Department, 2007).

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ANTHRAX VACCINE EXPERIENCE

in recommendations from Defense Undersecretaries Dr. David Chu and Edward

Safety and Efficacy Issues

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HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

product liability protection to manufacturers of stockpile countermeasures, including

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

individual researchers keep track of the whereabouts of dangerous pathogens, handle

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Activity, DAMD 17-85-R-0078, Fort Detrick, MD, May 16, 1985, 4.

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HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

GAO-02-445 (Washington, DC: GAO, n.d.), 3, 9.

Weapons of Mass Destruction (March 31, 2005), 2, http://www.wmd.gov/report/wmd_report.pdf.

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

The emergence of transnational criminal actors challenges national law enforcement

GLOBAL THREATS AND THE POLICE

FROM INTERNATIONAL TO GLOBAL METROPOLITAN POLICING

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thus be quite extensive, playing an important role in traditional international law

GLOBAL METROPOLITAN POLICING

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NETWORKS AND POLICING

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

The law enforcement response to terrorists and transnational threats posed by

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

HOMELAND SECURITY A FFAIRS, VOLUME V, NO. 2 (MAY 2009) WWW.HSAJ.ORG

Union (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003), 39-41.

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