Enabling Unity of Effort in Homeland Response Operations
Authored by Lieutenant General (Ret.) H Steven Blum, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Kerry McIntyre.
April 2012
61 Pages
Brief Synopsis
Any significant homeland response event requires Americans to work together. This is a complex challenge. The authors assert that the principal obstacle to effective homeland response is a recurring failure to achieve unity of effort across a diverse and often chaotic mix of participating federal, state, and local government and nongovernmental organizations. Despite a decade of planning since the terror attacks of September 2001, unity of effort still eludes us—particularly in the largest and most dangerous of crises. The authors examine how the military’s joint doctrine system affected joint military operational capabilities, concluding that a similar national homeland response doctrinal system is needed to create and sustain unity of effort. Doctrine performs a vital unifying function in complex operations, standardizing ways and means. A doctrinal system operates in a dynamic cycle, providing a process to identify capability gaps, develop and validate solutions, and incorporate new concepts into evolving plans and operational capabilities. To implement a dynamic national doctrine, the authors propose a new management concept modeled on the joint interagency task force. They also propose eliminating obstacles to unity of effort within the military, including the temporary employment of any relevant and available military capabilities under the direction of a governor.
Summary
Balancing authorities and responsibilities within our federal system has been a matter of continuous debate since the earliest days of the republic. Its continued relevance is exemplified in our current national conversation over how to most effectively organize and operate for homeland security and defense. Crises and catastrophic events in our homeland require Americans from different organizations, jurisdictions, and functions to work together. Yet despite considerable national effort and resources devoted to developing and improving our collective response capabilities, effectiveness in working together—unity of effort—still seems to elude us.
Achieving unity of effort is the central challenge to effective homeland response operations. No single organization, function, or stakeholder has all the necessary tools to respond completely to the wide range of crises that routinely occur, or could occur, in our homeland. Combining the assets, capabilities, expertise, and resources of multiple participants has proven to be exceedingly complex and difficult. Our homeland response capabilities are considerable, but they are dispersed across a patchwork of jurisdictions and functions. The challenge in homeland response operations is neither inadequate resources nor lack of capabilities, but rather in being able to bring them to bear at the right time and place, and in the right combination. Disasters in our homeland have enormous consequences. Regardless of cause or extent, they always hold the potential for significant loss of life, human suffering, economic dislocation, and erosion of public confidence in government. Given all that is at stake, we must do better. There are certainly a number of ways to improve our results; this monograph proposes three specific ways to do so.
First, enhancing our capacity for unity of effort requires more than simply devoting more resources and rhetoric to the problem. The challenge is more fundamental; it requires us to change the way we think about homeland response in order to establish the intellectual pre-conditions for unified effort. Creating this cultural shift requires a national homeland response doctrine, formulated in a dynamic and responsive doctrinal system. Doctrine performs a vital unifying function in complex operations. It delineates best practices, establishes standards, and clarifies terminology, responsibilities, and procedures. It creates common understandings, bridging organizational and jurisdictional divides.
A nascent federal homeland response doctrine currently exists, codified in the National Response Framework (NRF), National Incident Management System (NIMS), and Incident Command System (ICS). Yet, a doctrinal system is larger than the doctrine itself. It operates in a dynamic cycle, providing a process to identify capability gaps, develop new operating concepts, and validate them against rigorous standards. An effective doctrinal system also incorporates all relevant stakeholders in the full cycle of concept development, validation, and integration into plans and procedures. Current homeland response doctrine is a federal, not national doctrine. A unifying national doctrine, engendered in a dynamic and responsive system, would provide the basis for developing a national culture of communication and cooperation in homeland response operations.
A second way to enhance our capacity for unity of effort is to ensure that national doctrine can be broadly implemented. A truly national homeland response doctrine system will function in an interagency, intergovernmental, multi-jurisdictional environment. Implementing it requires a new management structure that can also operate in the spaces between agencies and governments. The example of the military’s Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) points the way toward this new structure. A permanent interagency coordination and action group, which integrates inputs, resources, and capabilities of all stakeholders, can synergize and coordinate the efforts of all. Such a structure clearly has an application at federal, state, and perhaps even local level, as each has a complex interagency framework to manage in order to fully integrate response capabilities. To be effective, this structure cannot be subordinate to any single agency or function; it must be responsive to all stakeholders and accountable to an elected leader with authority over the interagency effort.
A third way to enhance unity of effort is to remove barriers to employment of military capabilities for homeland response operations. There are clear legal restrictions on the roles and uses of our military at home, which exist for sound reasons. Yet much of our military can be characterized as “dual capable,” describing forces with inherent capabilities useful both for warfighting and for civil support tasks. It makes little difference to the injured, hungry, and dispossessed that the soldier who rescued them is a National Guardsman, a Title 10 reservist, or an active duty service member. Their reasonable expectation is that the forces raised and sustained with their tax dollars will provide for their safety when needed. For this reason, we should be removing impediments to utilizing our military forces—particularly our reserve components—for homeland response operations when they are not engaged in other federal missions. This is not a matter of apportioning different forces to the National Guard. Rather, it is one of determining when and how any relevant military capabilities should be placed under a governor’s authority for civil support roles. The recent development of the concept of dual status command is a step forward in this regard. Development of a predictable civil support force generation model, similar to the one employed by the services for federal missions overseas, will further enhance unity of effort by facilitating planning among the states for temporary use of dual status military capabilities.
Achieving unity of effort in homeland response is a complex challenge, among the greatest of our age. It is the single most important factor in our ability to plan for and respond effectively to disasters at home. We devote enormous resources to public safety and security at many levels. Our citizens surely have a right to expect that these resources will be well used by their leaders, elected and appointed. This means that we must find better ways to work together. It requires leaders and organizations at all levels to combine their efforts, resources, and capabilities to achieve complete and responsive solutions. It requires us to develop new ways of thinking about and managing homeland response capabilities, before disaster strikes.
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