[Keynote Address]
The Roles of University-Based Homeland Security
Programs in Critical Infrastructure Protection
MELVIN BERNSTEIN
U.S. DEPT. OF HOMELAND SECURITY, OFFICEOF RESEARCHAND DEVELOPMENT
I
t’s a pleasure to be here. I want to spend a little bit of time with you trying to put the programs related to food protection and defense in context relative to the broad and often changing or evolving mis-sion of the Dept. of Homeland Security and how that mismis-sion integrates itself and works effectively with a number of other institutions both within the federal government and outside.The Dept. was formed 3 years ago in March in response to the trag-ic and catastrophtrag-ic events of 9-11, recognizing the necessity to re-organize or redirect much of the energy within the federal government towards homeland security concerns. DHS is almost 200,000 people, with a primary as a security enforcement Agency. It has taken many of the assets of the country which have existed for decades in terms of protecting the borders, illegal trade, illegal immigration—activities related to protecting the homeland—and brought them together in response to a whole host of new threats.
The key is to be able to understand what threats this country is vulnerable to, how one then responds to those threats in terms of protection, how to then deal with possible acts and very importantly how to build national resiliency? How do you understand or how do you help people better understand the nature of the treats, the broad possibilities of these occurring or not and have people feel confident, both in the systems that are put in place and the ability of the coun-try to respond. Embedded in this concept of ‘Protecting the Nation’ is ‘deploying protective countermeasures’ and much of what I’m going to talk about today relates to that.
The major concern after 9-11 was the belief that biological threats will dominate any of the possible dangers to the country on a large scale. So bio-countermeasures have dominated for several years now the planning and subsequent resource allocations with the Dept.. While this area continues to be very important, one is now looking at a broad-er array of threats by chemical agents, by nuclear systems, dirty bombs and the like. I’m going to focus primarily on biological threats and illustrate the array of activities that the Dept. has been focusing on, internally, and in cooperation with national laboratories, universities and other agencies. And as we move through that list most of the terms will be familiar to you, as the focus is on a national agro-bioterrorism strategy. It was best articulated by the President’s Homeland
Secu-and others. You can think about it as part of the large-scale approach that the Dept. has taken to what is called “Critical Infrastructure Pro-tection”. There are a host of infrastructures including physical, cyber or food—these are broad areas that one can think about. Certainly, you see the words, “supply chain” through all of this; the vulnerability is so obvious because of the fact that food, whether it’s livestock or plant foods or the like, moves through large numbers of activities, is distrib-uted broadly, and with a very large fraction of food coming in from overseas. understand that has been something that people
Clearly, one of the questions we were faced with when we were putting these centers together was how best to sort out how would we differentiate between concerns about safety and concerns about security. The U.S. has had incredible experience and success in deal-ing with natural outbreaks; understanddeal-ing how to confront that problem, how to work within the distribution system, how to speak to the public about those issues, and how to ensure that this doesn’t have long-lasting affects. There’s clear evidence that when the public believes that their food supply has been attacked by an intelligent adversary, that the response of the public will be very different. So we need to talk about such differences in a variety of ways, to maintain public confi-dence in the food supply.
We’ve seen examples—when there’s an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease or other activities—how the entire world reacts to such sit-uations. So it’s critical to sustain the reputation of America as a safe, reliable supplier; this makes these areas very attractive to terrorists because if they can undermine our collective confidence they can have a serious impact on the economy of the country. I’m sure all of you have thought about the reality that this can be accomplished without anybody ever attacking the food supply. If a terrorist can have peo-ple believe that they are vulnerable or safely go into a grocery store or restaurant without concern that somebody had deliberately intro-duced contaminants to cause widespread illness and death, they have accomplished their goals. There is a real sense that this problem goes beyond just a general safety problem into the area of psychological terror and the reality of actual events themselves.
In response to such threats we need to be problem solvers bringing to bear a whole array of technology, whether it is the ability to have very
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the Dept., how do you organize to be able to deal with this rapidly and effectively?
At Science and Technology, whether it is Agricultural Security, Cyber Security or other kinds of threats to critical infrastructure—we worry about vulnerability, testing and assessment and the ability to be able to anticipate. Shortly after 9-11, there was strong sense that additional attacks were only a matter of time, so much of the energy and much of the original thinking was focused on response and recovery. There’s now much stronger interest in how to anticipate. If you are going to anticipate—you can prevent and then you are not faced with this issue of having to respond.
There is a host of dangers and problems that can affect the food supply, but the focus of the Dept. is on the national scale impact and the complexity to execute the event. That is one of the reasons foot and mouth disease is of such great concern, because the general sense is that it is not a difficult thing to introduce it to this country and the national scale impact would be significant. It’s not that we shouldn’t worry about salmonella food poisoning, but that is really not a prime responsibility of DHS. Instead we think about areas like anthrax con-tamination and the capability to be able to engineer new kinds of or-ganism; with the latter very difficult to accomplish but if successful the impact would be dramatic. To summarize, the Dept. focuses on cat-astrophic, high consequence events, events where the probability of that event occurring is small, but the consequence is very large. You have this additional challenge of asking the community to be cognizant of and to prepare to invest in events that in all likelihood will never occur, but the consequences could be enormous.
The Dept. has organized in this particular area into a bio-defense complex, which includes food and other agricultural products. There is a national model which includes the 2 centers that have been men-tioned, the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD) and the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Diseases (FAZD). It also includes the National Laboratories, Lawrence Liver-more, for example. While it has been the tradition of the laboratories to focus on nuclear concern, I think you will find that people in the National Laboratories are busy learning about biology. Also, a new facility is being constructed at Fort Detrick called the National Biode-fense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC). And then there’s Plum Island, which has been in existence for a considerable amount of time—located on a beautiful little island in Long Island Sound-where they work with foot and mouth disease and the like, closely linked with APHIS, ARS and DHS headquarters.
The concept is to bring together these various capabilities and energies across the country in response to potential dangers to ag-riculture. Now where do the universities fit in? How did the idea of the Centers of Excellence develop? When the Dept. was set up, there were a lot of people providing information and input as to the kinds of things that needed to be done. There is a whole host of other inputs from professional societies, learned societies, from DHS itself recognizing that while universities are not the best choice for dealing with short-term response to major emergencies, they are ideally suited to close capability gaps, and perform fundamental research. This provides an opportunity for the university community which has enormous capa-bilities and strengths in these kinds of areas to be able to bring to bear multi-disciplines, a host of people, and considerable experience in interdisciplinary research. We determined that the best way to accom-plish this, in the spirit of the Congressional Act was through Centers of Excellence and equally through a longer-term investment in building the intellectual base of the country through education.
We have a series of goals to ensure that U.S. scientific leadership is organized and able to respond to these issues—we look at people, places and programs. In the people area, we have a considerable
scholarships; these are students across all disciplines from liberal arts to technology, so it’s quite unique in the federal government; many of the problems in Homeland Security are social science kinds of prob-lems. We offer scholarships and fellowships to students across those disciplines. They are portable, that is, the students can study at any institution. The one expectation is that they intern in the summer at a Homeland Security related venue which often is the National Labs, the federal system, or the Centers of Excellence. We bring all those stu-dents together in Washington; it’s now up to about 300 stustu-dents who are part of a growing network who will better understand some of the challenges in Homeland Security and will help us respond. We’ve now expanded this to post-doctoral programs and are investing in minority institutions and minority students. And then we have Centers of Ex-cellence. I’ll talk about two of them in a moment but we currently have four centers of excellence, so let me describe the other 2.
The very first (CREATE) is at the Univ. of Southern California and with its partners is looking at risk-based analysis of the economic consequences of terrorism. We need to make choices; we need to understand the consequences of a treat to make a decision about how we invest in it. So that center now works closely with the other centers in support of these areas.
We named another (START) center just several months ago at the Univ. of Maryland and its partners on motivation and intent of the ter-rorists and the response of the public to the possibility of terrorism. I fully expect that such studies are going to be an integral part of the activities of all of our centers to help them better understand the kinds of things that terrorists are not only capable of, but are thinking about doing. When we were doing site visits we asked each 2 questions that percolate through Washington; why do they hate us and why haven’t there been suicide bombers in the United States? You could have asked a third one- why hasn’t there been an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United States? It clearly suggests that we need to move from simply believing that most of the threats from terrorists come from people who are poorly educated, live in remote areas and who are operating only out of religious rage. This is a very intelligent, patient adversary, planning major activities over long periods of time.
We are naming a fifth center to work on high consequence events, preparedness and response centered at Johns Hopkins Univ.. We not only need this capability for terrorist’s events, but it’s pretty clear after the events of Katrina and the like that we need that also for catastrophic, natural events. We just named our first cooperative center, a microbial risk assessment in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency at Michigan State Univ. and partners. And then we have a host of other kinds of programs that we do to help people better understand what our capabilities are, how we need to be able to work collectively across all aspects of both the government and the private sector.
So let me spend just a moment giving you snapshots of two of our favorite centers; one is NCFPD, with the objective through research and education to defend the safety of food system. Like all of our centers, they have multiple partners, but are unique in terms of their close collaboration with industry. It’s sort of a natural outgrowth of the nature of the food supply and distribution chain, so much of it rooted with the private sector. They are modeling supply chain and public health systems to be able to understand the threats of the distribution system, how to decontaminate and then how does one educate and communicate threats, real and potential. They are going to render targets unattractive to terrorists. We are confident that hey are going to be able to help us rapidly and accurately detect the events, to re-spond to minimize consequence and to be able to think about recov-ery—and through all of these issues, train the next generation of food defense workers.
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economic models? Again back to economics and having the kind of tools and understanding to realize where you make your investments. How do you then look at the agents, the potential agents that can be responsible for these kinds of problems? How do you detect them, how do you decontaminate, how do you dispose and how do you train? Again back to this fact that we are really in a very different kind of world now and do we need a new kind of talent to be able to respond to that? I think the answer is, yes.
I’m going to show you the things that they do and I want to focus on some aspects that perhaps people don’t typically think of as impor-tant, such as developing new antiviral agents or new detection tech-nology; risk communication is a theme that percolates through all of the centers; it percolates through the thinking of the Dept. This cen-ter in particular has taken some real leadership in this area to be able to develop best practices. I think we’ve all seen examples of the po-tential catastrophic consequences of poor communication. We talk about first responders—there is another group called, “First Commu-nicators.” These are the people who, after an event, are the first people that you turn to, to get what you believe to be reliable information on the radio, on television, or on the internet and you turn to them as supposed experts who are going to inform you in a thoughtful, accu-rate way about potential dangers. To make us all feel a little nervous about that, there was a study by the National Academy about a year ago where they brought in first communicators, people ranging from the nightly news people to the blog people, and ask them who here knows the difference between a nuclear device and a dirty bomb. No one did. Hopefully, they do now, but certainly the ability to talk about a threat to the food supply will be a similar kind of thing. So the impor-tance of risk communication is critical.
I think all of us recognize that the decision about investments to be able to protect the food supply against large-scale consequential deliberate events is something that has to be considered. What kind of investments is the private sector making, what are they prepared to do and what benefits will this mean to them; how does one balance that, how do you communicate the benefits, and how do you now in-volve the government in those decisions to be able to provide some sense of comfort amongst the private sector that they are support-ed in this large-scale activity? The underlying theme is giving people the necessary tools to help make those kinds of choices. What do you have to invest, what are the benefits, what are the other aspects? Certainly nobody is going to save money immediately by investing in the kind of security systems that may be needed for catastrophic attacks, unless there is a clear assurance that others understand the reasons for doing this and that the government will partner with them. One of the issues that legitimately comes up is how do these ac-tivities interrelate and with other acac-tivities that have been going on long before DHS was formed and certainly long before the centers were established. It’s absolutely critical that the centers become part of that network. The center in Minnesota is doing just that, collaborating and cooperating and sharing information with others within DHS, and also with the other federal governments and the key players—for example, various parts of FDA and USDA and state and local agencies.
Another agriculturally-based center is the National Center for For-eign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense (FAZD) centered at Texas A&M. Its charge is protecting against the introduction of high conse-quence foreign animal diseases. Interestingly, when we were putting together the broad agency announcements several years ago, there was actually serious questioning about whether we wanted to include
to respond about the other possibilities of diseases that can cross the human-animal interface.
The centers are all relatively new; the USC’s center is sort of the senior center, about 24 mo old, and all the others are now entering their second year. The impact and relevance of these centers concerned with new methods for rapid detection, vaccines and antivirals, in modeling—the epidemiological modeling, economic modeling, conse-quence modeling and the like are themes common to different parts of the nation’s food supply. Center does. The centers have to be very nimble because DHS itself is undergoing a lot of thoughtful consider-ation of its focus and where it’s going to focus its energy and attention. DHS is transitioning from a Dept. largely focused on threat agents; biological threats, chemical threats, radiological threats, nuclear threats, and high explosives to a situation ally-based approach, where the Dept. is looking to a more holistic methodology, organized around cross-cutting themes of preparedness, policy issues, risk assessment and analysis. As those changes occur, we work with the centers and others to be able to accommodate such shifts in focus.
I believe there are 2 things that universities do extremely well. One of them—and people will never argue about that—is educate the next generation. That’s how you prepare the new leadership, whether in research or policy; the U.S. education system is preeminent for that. The other thing it does well and it’s a bit amazing because it’s not optimally organized to do it very well, is that it can draw multidisciplinary interdisciplinary talent across not only its own university but across a network of universities. I have been a Provost and a Chancellor at a number of institutions and I would go into an institution and I would say, “this is a medieval structure. The world is interdisciplinary and universities are disciplinary and I’m going to change that”. Three years later I leave that university—the university 1, Bernstein 0—and move on. In a way you can understand it, because we all have a natural com-fort in the things that we know best and there is real need to ensure that people have core expertise. The universities have responded to this dichotomy by forming centers or interdisciplinary programs or link-ages and the students understand this by the kind of joint degrees that they take.
So, in spite of the fact that we’re not going to change the ivory tower structure, we do have the capability in universities to really attack prob-lems on a broad scale. Hence, all of the centers include social scien-tists, natural scienscien-tists, physical scienscien-tists, engineers, applied technol-ogists and the like working effectively together and drawing students from across the disciplines. Just a point, one of the interesting ways that the center at Texas A&M is organized is as an integrated model, which exemplifies what I’ve just said about the ability to reach across lines. You have the medical community, the science community, you have social scientists working in this interactive way to better understand the origins of diseases, while also thinking about the kinds of responses, recog-nizing the consequences of actions towards those responses, evalu-ating the economic consequences, the public attitudes and the like.
How can we think strategically, how can we now look at the kinds of talents and problems that we need and to be able to now strengthen the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. These are interesting, challenges and experiments. I am not naïve about some of the diffi-culties that occur when you bring institutions together. One of the things that we’re doing to support that is establishment of the centers and building an integrative supportive structure linking their research and educational goals. For example, the center at USC provides risk anal-ysis and economic capabilities to the other centers; those centers
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Dept. That’s very unusual, so it’s now part of the strategic thinking. The other is the sense of urgency. The Dept. was set up to confront the immediate threats, so the centers’ timeframes have been accelerated beyond what they thought that they were capable of doing. I try and remind myself and others is that this continues to be a bit of an exper-iment in which the academic community has been given the opportu-nity and the challenge to be part of a much larger, integrated activity in a way which is demonstrably different than the way academics are often most comfortable. We all think about research in the NSF mode,
which is academic, undirected research where the quality is measured by publications, Ph.D. students, the impact on the scientific method and the like. Those continue to be very important issues but here we are also asking the centers to be able to think strategically in terms of national goals and needs.
This will continue to evolve. Personally, it has been a great pleasure to be part of this bold experiment. I’m very pleased that we are able to attract people to think about this area of food protection and defense more broadly.