U.S. Homeland Defense Policy Mired in Competing Interests.

Federal resources that were spent during the past five years on programs to defend the United States against potential weapons-of-mass-destruction attacks have not resulted in any substantial capabilities to cope with such threats, according to government, industry and independent experts.

These sources generally agreed that there currently is no coherent national strategy to deal with chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks; no comprehensive training or emergency response programs at all levels of government and no significant intelligence or foreign-policy effort to address these global threats. In short, experts believe that little has been done to make the American public feel any more confident than it was five years ago in the nation's ability to cope with a terrorist attack.

The push within Congress and the Clinton administration to invest more federal money on homeland defense began in earnest more than five years ago.

On March 20, 1995, members of an obscure cult named Aum Shinrikyo attacked hapless subway commuters in Tokyo with poison gas. According to Amy Smithson--senior associate of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., and author of "Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the U.S. Response"--the last time Americans were so thoroughly unhinged by events coming out of Tokyo was in 1954, when Japanese soldiers battled a giant celluloid lizard fictitiously born after a U.S. nuclear test.

Shortly after the 1995 incident, Smithson said in an interview, "I began to get a number of telephone calls from Capitol Hill, the media and defense contractors. ... When you see those groups begin to coalesce, you know we are about to have a feeding frenzy, ... and it has been one big, sloppy trough."

Since 1995, approximately $10 billion in federal funds have been spent on U.S. chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) domestic preparedness programs by at least 20 agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Justice, State and Agriculture. During the same timeframe, new legislation was enacted, such as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Act of 1996 to help the United Stares defend and respond to a CBRN attack whether from foreign or domestic sources. Legislativc modifications were made to the Stafford Act--which provides guidance for federal government assistance to states in times of emergency--and to the Posse Comitatus Act, which sets limits to military participation in domestic affairs.

Meanwhile, at the executive-branch level, former President Bill Clinton's 1998 homeland-defense speech at the U.S. Naval Academy was followed by Presidential Decision Directives 62 and 63, signaling executive-branch support for the notion of homeland defense.

Complex Issue

Homeland defense, explained Smithson, is a "complex issue that does not lend itself to PowerPoint presentations." The players involved, additionally, have vested interests that can conflict in the process of policy making. Some agencies, for example, plainly are looking for new missions, she said. Private firms are looking just to turn a profit. Elected officials tend to try to help favored constituents, said Smithson.

Some local first-responders, who are the first line of defense in cases of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, noted that federal efforts often don't address local needs.

"We spent $10 billion on terrorism," said the chief of the Arlington County, Va., Fire Department. Edward Plaugher, who coordinates the entire Washington, D.C., CBRN medical response team, said that Arlington County's was the first civilian fire-fighting organization in the nation to address CBRN issues thoroughly, and to train its firefighters to respond to a CBRN attack.

"But where did that $10 billion go?" Plaugher said in an interview. "We just spent $10 billion, and I keep telling folks that we don't have enough respirators. ... If we needed 50 respirators right now, we couldn't get them. And where am I going to find enough volunteers to operate those respirators?"

Plaugher recently had spoken with Gary Morris, the fire chief from Oldahoma City. "If there is any community that should be vastly different now, after the [April 1995] bombing, you'd think it would be Oklahoma City," Plaugher said. "But Chief Morris said that in his department, nothing has changed and that they are probably less prepared now, because they feel that they've already had their incident and are inoculated."

The homeland-defense effort, so far, has been a "jobs program for federal bureaucrats," said retired Army Col. Eric Taylor, who served with the Chemical Corps. He is an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "For all the billions of dollars passed our for all these programs, not one dollar has gone to educate the public. We educate them on now to respond to hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes," Taylor said. "Why don't we do the same for chemical and biological terrorism?"

Plaugher agreed: "We just don't have the resources to educate the community."

Who Gets Trained?

Taylor also questioned the Pentagon's rationale for selecting 120 metropolitan areas that, between 1995 and 2000, were designated to receive specialized CBRN training. "The Defense Department configured that program and selected major cities that might be subject to CBRN terrorist attacks, based mainly on [the events in] Oklahoma City, which, by the way, is a bad example for a CBRN attack.

"When the explosion like what happened in Oklahoma City rakes place, it's done. ... You basically know, moments after the blast, the damage done and casualties involved. It's not the same with CBRN, where days, weeks, months and even years later, deaths occur," Taylor said. The Defense Department, he added, "took 1990 census data and chose cities with a population of 144,000 and above and decided that they wanted to train authorities in those areas. That's about 46 percent of the population served, leaving the rest of us--54 percent--out in the wind."

Large cities, such as Los Angeles and New York, "get all the training," said Taylor. "If I'm a terrorist, why would I want to go there? The first responders there know what to do. The planning is there."

A local sheriff in the Lafayette area, which is below the 144,000-population figure, said that, years ago, on a daily basis, 7,000 vehicles passed through his jurisdiction. Along the route was a rail junction, through which rail cars full of hazardous materials would pass. "What better place for a terrorist to attack than a busy junction point?" Taylor stressed.

Compounding the complexity of the program is the erosion of the nation's public-health infrastructure, experts said. Examples are decaying medical facilities, overworked trauma units, nurses and incident-management personnel, inadequate research and development on drugs to use if there are disease outbreaks, a lack of basic equipment such as decontamination gear and respirators, and the difficulties in handling the logistics of dispersing pharmaceuticals during an incident.

"We have made this whole issue so complicated," said Jim Schwartz, deputy fire chief in Arlington County. "Here in the Washington, D.C., area, we can have 50 tons of pharmaceuticals, from the national pharmaceutical stockpile, brought in on a 747. But once that plane lands, it's left to us to figure our how to get the pharmaceuticals to the people. ... We conducted a training exercise recently on this, and we had to figure out how many firefighters it would take to take apart the packaging and put the right pills in the right place. I'm surprised no one has figured out the delivery end yet."

According to Smithson, there are 60,500 hazardous material accidents per year in the United States, which result in about 2,550 casualties. She noted that, nevertheless, "hospitals are not required to have a standing capacity to decontaminate and handle a few, much less large numbers of patients.

"Hospitals plan to lock their doors after a chemical or biological attack, rather than risk compounding the problem. ... U.S. hospitals filled to near capacity on a daily basis often were compelled to refuse patients during the influenza seasons of the late 1990s, and the nation's disease-surveillance capability has deteriorated significantly," Smithson said.

Biological Weapons

The United States has failed in providing world leadership in this arena, said Barbara Rosenberg, chair of the Federation of American Scientists' (FAS) working group on biological weapons. Further, she said, this nation "has become the single greatest block to reaching an international agreement on a protocol for verifying compliance with biological-weapons international prohibitions."

She advocates strengthening existing international treaties that deal with chemical and biological proliferation, and believes that a sound domestic strategy demands bringing potential state sponsors of chemical biological terrorists groups to the negotiating table.

She pointed to the international Biological Weapons Convention as a tool to achieve just that. She believes that "our domestic push on this effort is misplaced" and that more federal funding should be available for improvements in the existing public health response system.

"It's important to realize that successful bio-terrorist activity of this type is extraordinarily difficult. It takes scientific talent, money, labs to get these weapons to work. Even those in high places in the military judge bio-terror to be a low probability here in the United States," she said. "We believe that a bio-terrorist would be funded by a state, so we should be doing all we can to develop strong international agreements in chemical and biological weapons."

A recent FAS report discussed the possibility of making acts involving chemical and biological weapons crimes under international law. Such laws would be based on existing international treaties that criminalize aircraft hijacking, theft of nuclear materials, torture and hostage raking. Proposed treaty language would make any person or group involved in the production, distribution, development, acquisition or use of chemical and biological weapons hostes humani generis, or enemies of all humanity.

Rosenberg noted that former President George Bush and his wife "exerted strong leadership in this area, and I'm hopeful that [their son] George W. Bush will be as committed to bringing much needed executive branch leadership to bear on this issue."

Fred Ikle, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was an undersecretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He wonders why the United States would bother negotiating with nations that do nor share U.S. interests in the CBRN arena.

"Why spend time dealing with scoundrels?" he asked. "We should negotiate with like-minded nations." Ikle believes that the United States must re-evaluate current laws and regulations dealing with how and when military forces should be involved in responding to domestic terrorist incidents.

"We have to be prepared to mobilize all our resources and manage the fallout of such an attack," he said.

In 1999, Ikle proposed the development of a research center for biotechnology and chemical defense, which would be responsible for the design and deployment of defensive systems for homeland defense. "We are talking about a 10-20 year effort here. Prevention and interdiction--which means placing obstacles, such as human intelligence and technical-detection devices, in the way of those who would use these weapons--should be an ongoing effort of national strategy."

According to Kevin Fannon, Arlington County Fire Department HAZMAT (hazardous materials) coordinator, intelligence plays a vital role in the process, and, until recently, the federal government was placing a "close-hold" on too many things that civilian defenders need to know in order to do their jobs. "We were recently doing a threat assessment with the Virginia State Police, and it was the first time that I, as an emergency manager, saw a list of potential terrorists given to me by the FBI.

"Some of these terrorists live in our community," Fannon said, "and one of the disconnects that we have had in the past was: How could we plan for these things, if we didn't know what the threats were? I think that, at the federal level, they are beginning to realize that we are key to the whole issue, and they can't come in, two or three hours after the attack, and expect to take control. If there isn't a planned cohesive effort, we will all fail."

Military Solutions

There is a general sense in the public and among some in the government and defense communities that the military has the solutions for all the CBRN problems at hand. But that is not necessarily the case, said Smithson. The Pentagon's most capable chemical and biological-incident group, she said, is the U.S. Army's Technical Escort Unit (TEU), which was created in 1943, originally to escort chemical weapons transports. The unit marries chemical and biological weapons expertise with explosive ordnance-disposal capabilities, she said. The TEU can deploy a 12-person response team within four hours.

Smithson pointed out that it wasn't until 1995, with the creation of the Marine Corps Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force, that another military unit was organized that possessed similar capabilities to the TEU.

Although Plaugher, the Arlington County fire chief, indicated that he has an excellent working relationship with the military services, he does not believe that they can deal with the problem without help. "We simply can't rely on the military element. ... A team of eight to 10 people with an incident in the hundreds and thousands will not help much."

Schwartz agreed. "The Defense Department will have to recognize that whatever role that its personnel have will be limited, particularly if they are deployed elsewhere. And the fact is that the interfaces of our systems are different and don't quite link up. They use the command and control techniques that they use on the battlefield. Our fire department has a very strong incident-command system.

"There is the potential for different tactical decisions, based on an incident and how we each make decisions and what priorities we use," he said. "Here in Arlington, we've talked things our with the Pentagon [25,000 in-building employees]. If they want to have an emergency operations center with a 'three star' checking that things are OK in the Pentagon, that's fine. But if he's calling down to me in the command post, telling me what to do with my fire trucks and ambulances, that's not going to happen, because that's nor how we operate."

An effective homeland defense, said Schwartz, will require "a good civilian defender and military relationship, so that we know what each other is doing."

In December 2000, Ikle's colleagues at CSIS weighed in with a series of reports and recommendations, clearly geared to influence the Bush administration. In a report called "Homeland Defense: A Strategic Approach," CSIS noted that to many observers, homeland defense appears to be a new requirement. But the perception of homeland defense as a new mission strips it of an important part of its context. Homeland defense, said the report, "is, and will always be the most essential function of our government. ... The United States must view homeland defense as a partnership among federal, state, local and private sector organizations ... and it must fit into the U.S. systems of laws and concept of federalism."

CSIS recommended that the president make the vice president the equivalent of a "homeland defense czar." He would be advised and assisted by an emergency planning staff directed by the National Coordinator for Security, Critical Infrastructure and Counter-terrorism. The vice president would chair a National Emergency Planning Council, with representatives from all departments, agencies, states and territories.

The National Guard currently has plans to create 32 weapons-of-mass-destruction civil support teams to respond to domestic terrorist attacks involving chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Each team will include 22 full time Army and Air National Guard members, a mobile command center and a laboratory for analyzing toxic agents. The teams would be available to local police and fire departments.

To local officials such as Schwartz, the creation of new layers of bureaucracy is a mistake. "[Homeland defense] can be done with the current infrastructure," he said. "Your domestic defenders are the fire fighters, the police, the HAZMAT people, the physicians, the nurses, the paramedics, they are the front line, they will be there first. Why create more civilian support teams when they are there? What are we gaining from people in the National Guard, who are 150 miles away and don't know the community?"

Added Plaugher: "Everyone is frustrated with a splintered and no-direction approach with no one in charge. It's going to get worse until we have another incident. There's a consensus on that point among civilian defenders. It's the mentality that says we are not going to install that traffic light until you get one more fatality."

John J. Stanton is a member of the professional staff of the National Defense Industrial Association.