Efficiency in Mobilizing, Coordinating, and Directing

(2) DHS Secretary

(3) FCO

(4) USNORTHCOM

(5) Status Quo

(6) PFO

(7) Lead Federal Agency

As discussed previously, five criteria have been identified for ranking the efficiency of mobilizing, coordinating, and directing the federal civilian operational response to an existential catastrophe. They are identifying federal response capabilities, organizing federal response capabilities, coordinating federal response capabilities, directing federal response capabilities, and engaging the Whole Community.

Identification during the mobilization or preparedness stage would likely include two major themes; the first would be cataloging federal resources for inclusion in the federal Response Inventory Capability and the Catastrophic Resource Report. The second theme would be the credentialing and typing of these resources. Organized along the lines of the core capabilities found in the National Preparedness Goal, these capabilities would each be the subject of a PSMA. The PSMAs would form the basis for the next step, that of the organization of federal response capabilities.

Considering the Comprehensive Preparedness System already dictates the FEMA Administrator to conduct this work, the Administrator should be well suited to execute these tasks. Building upon recent work in developing the National Preparedness Goal and other related documents and frameworks, the Administrator should be able to leverage existing resources and personnel within FEMA to do this work. The two largest drawbacks would be whether FEMA had enough resources on its own to manage such a task, and whether the Administrator could convince other federal agencies to commit the resources to catalog their capabilities and then continue to update them. It is likely presidential involvement, perhaps in the form of an EO, might be needed to get the necessary high-level attention of all federal agencies.

The DHS Secretary, through their Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OOCP),³¹¹ might also be situated to perform these tasks. However, OOCP has a much more narrow focus than FEMA, and mostly emphasizes intelligence and information sharing and defeating terrorist threats.

Relying on multiple federal agencies, each in their LFA role, might provide the greatest ability to discover non-traditional resources and could draw upon their own expertise in determining the most efficient use of resources. However, if the LFA route was chosen, it could lead to silos of resources without some overarching mechanism to coordinate the various capabilities being identified in each subject area and create redundant efforts. It would be difficult to mesh LFA resource identification efforts without eventually resorting to a single agency with responsibility to draw them all together or to supervise and apply pressure to those LFA efforts that fall short of expectations.

USNORTHCOM has the advantage of drawing upon an enormous planning capability in both personnel and experience that no other federal agency can match.

USNORTHCOM is also a professional heir to the efforts of the U.S. Army in Western Europe in 1945, which successfully managed the largest humanitarian effort in U.S.

history. However, many of the same arguments discussed before about the effect of the military supervising traditional civilian functions would apply. In addition, given the primary DoD focus on national security, DoD resources would be subject to being recommitted to national security threats and away from supporting the persistent effort to identify federal response resources.

The FCO and PFO positions both suffer from the fact that these positions are response oriented and have little authority during the mobilization stage. Neither position likely has the gravitas necessary to lead the identification of federal resources given the senior leadership buy in necessary across the federal government. However, it could be hoped that FCOs, or PFOs, should the position be functionally restored, be a part of the effort to identify and organize federal response resources to give them additional

311 Department of Homeland Security, “About the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning”

(n.d.), http://www.dhs.gov/about-office-operations-coordination-and-planning.

visibility and expertise in the capabilities they may eventually be expected to utilize when responding to a catastrophe.

Last is the status quo. Given that the federal government, DHS, and FEMA have so far yet to create a comprehensive government-wide process to identify federal response resources as evidenced by their failure to issue the Federal Preparedness Report and the buried Catastrophic Resource Report, it may be the least effective of any of the options. Put another way, it is likely none of the other options would be worse at identifying, preparing, and utilizing the full spectrum of federal capabilities, but all might have the potential to do so more efficiently than the status quo.

The key task to organizing these identified federal response capabilities is capturing them in appropriate plans. Imagine two primary sets of capabilities, the first would be a revival of the CIS,³¹² organized by NPG core capabilities, that forms a master list of all identified federal response capabilities. The second would be more specialized lists of capabilities, again organized along core capabilities, necessary to execute all federal operational plans. Each capability would be captured in a PSMA. Once a master list of capabilities had been established, likely in the CIS, planners could simply refer to this master list to draw the necessary capabilities needed to solve identified problems and to support federal planning efforts.

The order of federal agencies and arguments for identifying federal response capabilities essentially mirrors the arguments for organizing them although DoD’s significant planning resources would be of particular use for organizing federal capabilities. In addition, only FEMA may mission assign other federal agencies and is specifically charged with creating PSMAs.³¹³

Unlike identification and organization, which are steady state, continuing actions, coordination, and direction, while practiced prior to an event, occur upon the threat or actual occurrence of a catastrophe. In other words, the FCO and PFO positions, which

312 See footnote 232 on the function of the CIS.

313 Even if the President redelegated FEMA’s Stafford Act responsibilities, the HSA provides that the President shall ensure through the FEMA Administrator the creation of PSMAs and in its definition of MAs, states only FEMA may issue MAs. See 6 U.S.C. § 741(5) and § 753(c).

have tenuous ties to the first two criteria, are in a much better position to do these activities. However, given the current status of the PFO, its ranking is based on its current neutered powers, which makes it a poor choice for both these activities. For instance, the statutory inability of the PFO to command the position of FCO makes it impossible to say the PFO could actually direct the action of all federal civilian response efforts.

The key distinction between coordination and direction could probably be stated that in the former, it is mainly a matter of deconfliction and situational awareness while the latter requires the more difficult step of prioritization of resources. Prioritization could occur in either external resources flowing to a federal agency, at the expense of them being withheld from other agencies that could also utilize those resources, or in the internal prioritization of an agency’s resources through ordering it to expend them on an activity that it would not necessarily have engaged in on its own accord.

The ranking of agencies under the two criteria do not necessarily mirror each other. For instance, while the FEMA Administrator might be better suited to coordinate federal agencies, it is essentially what the Administrator does right now, directing agencies to act, especially when they would not do so on their own, requires a significant expenditure of political capital. In this case, the DHS Secretary might have more success than the FEMA Administrator.

The last criteria, Engaging the Whole Community, is a reminder that the federal response does not occur in a vacuum, and in many cases, capabilities found outside the federal government will form the crux of the response to an existential catastrophe. These capabilities can be found amongst state, local and tribal governments, the private sector, non-governmental entities, voluntary organizations and individual citizens. The Whole Community must be engaged for two reasons to mobilize, coordinate, and direct the federal response effectively. The first may be one of law.

Federal disaster law, premised upon the Tenth Amendment and embodied by the Congressional findings and declarations in the beginning of the Stafford Act, places the

federal government in a supplemental role to state governments. An existential catastrophe may change this paradigm. For instance, if a state government is completely incapacitated, the federal government, under its Constitutional guarantee to provide a republican form of government to its citizens, might become the first responder to the existential catastrophe, which is even more likely if, as stated in the definition of an existential catastrophe, traditional first responders are all survivors and victims and unable to respond. However, it is not guaranteed that an existential catastrophe would destroy state governance, and to presume so is probably inconsistent with the basic division of powers between state and federal government.

The second reason is one of efficiency. The current FEMA Administrator, Craig Fugate, often invokes a story of once seeing FEMA set up a distribution center in the parking lot of a functioning Wal-Mart. Using a holistic approach that recognizes all the nation’s resources, wherever they may be found, is essential as in an existential catastrophe demand will likely outstrip available capabilities and resources, and redundancy must be minimized. This type of situation also recognizes that the federal government has few tools to direct or prioritize the deployment of non-federal capabilities and is best suited, and most cases limited by law, to playing the role of coordinator to provide national unity of effort. By not replicating the work of the Whole Community, federal resources and capabilities can flow to underserved areas and gaps resulting in a broader delivery of disaster relief services.

Considering FEMA’s visibility and engagement at all levels of government, non-governmental organizations, the private sector and citizens, the FEMA Administrator is uniquely placed to execute a concept he is credited with creating. In addition, since the Whole Community considers actors outside the government, the FCO position probably has a greater position of influence than it has within the federal government. FCOs have now been a public face for federal disaster response for over 43 years.

4. Public Acceptance