What we really need the Department of Homeland Security to be
■"Homeland Security Seeks Chief, As Ridge Joins Cabinet Exit Line," by Robert Block, Wall Street Journal, 1 December 2004, p. A4.
It was interesting: I gave my brief this week to a professional meeting of military operations research analysts here at the college, and I made my usual disparaging remarks about the Department of Homeland Security being a strategic error, “TSA” referring to “thousands standing around,” and the department being the “Department of Agriculture for the 21st Century.”
Guess which analysts seemed most interested in my materials and expressed the most desire to bring the brief to their leadership? Yup. People in Northern Command, or the one part of the military that has been most pulled into the DHS orbit.
Here’s the best part (echoing observations made to me by a fellow Naval War College prof Bruce Elleman a while back): when they hear about the SysAdmin force, their first reaction is to note that many of the skill sets (especially medical) required for that force are being pulled back into the defensive, internally-oriented crouch that is “homeland security and defense.” While no one argues against maintaining certain capacities to protect ourselves and deal with dangers at home, the question becomes whether or not it makes sense to “keep all that powder dry” 365 a year or whether we treat it as a reserve asset that is deployable for both “home” and “away” games.
The logic of keeping assets “liquid” becomes readily apparent when you look at the money we’ve poured into hospitals around the country in the name of mitigation of possible terrorist attacks. You can spend that money like crazy “hardening” facilities, so to speak, all over America, or you can make those capabilities portable, keep them stored in centralized nodes spread across the country, and surge them to affected sites as required. In effect, we swarm our immune system response like a bunch of white blood cells from marrow storage/generation centers. In such a system, in order to rotate supplies and keep skill sets up, it would make some sense to let those assets be loaned—on a rotating basis—to the SysAdmin force for regular employment overseas, thus facilitating the operational integration our sys admin assets with those of the rest of the Core over time and helping to shrink the Gap in the meantime—thus reducing our collective exposure to such terrorist threats over time.
That’s the sort of Department of Homeland Security that wouldn’t be a waste of time and imagination and resources. We’ve survived the start-up and the aggregation phases of DHS’s birth, now we get to the point where we need to start rationalizing its operations, or aligning them strategically with everything else we’re trying to do in national security strategy.
And we need a truly visionary new secretary to move DHS in that direction.