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5 November 2003

MEMORANDUM FOR: Mark Bittinger

BY: JohnR. Brinkerhoff

SUBJECT: Civil Emergency Preparedness Before the 911 Attacks

The United States was ill prepared prior to 11 September 2001 for terrorist attacks.
Despite obvious prior indicators of terrorist activity and energetic action by a few
individuals and groups, the Nation was simply not as ready as it should have been. How
that situation came to be is an important factor in what we have done since the 911
attacks and how we are going to deal with the next attacks.

Fortunately, the attacks of 911 were not the worst that could have happened nor are they
the worst that is going to happen. The attacks took place in New York City and
Arlington Country—both jurisdictions had better than average plans and preparations.
More importantly, although the 911 attacks caused the deaths of 3,000 people, the
damage was limited in area and scope, and there were few long-lasting problems
stemming from the attacks themselves. More damage has been done by the response to
the attacks, including almost bankrupting the aviation industry and setting the precedent
of payments to victims that may be unaffordable after a larger attack. Nevertheless, it is
important to understand not only why we were surprised (which the Commission is
dealing with) but also why we were not well prepared to respond.

My views of this subject are influenced by may own experience and by extensive inquiry
into the subject of civil emergency preparedness. I was acting Associate Director for
National Preparedness Programs of The Federal Emergency Management Agency from
June 1981 until June 1983. As such, I was responsible for policy formulation, planning,
and program oversight of several national security related programs—civil defense,
national mobilization, continuity of government, the national Defense stockpile, and civil
preparedness for the full range of emergencies. During that period, I was also the
Deputy Executive Secretary of the Emergency Mobilization Preparedness Board (EMPB)
that was formed to coordinate civil preparedness activities of the Federal Departments
and Agencies and prepare and implement a national civil preparedness plan. Later, I was
from 1986 to 1992 a consultant to FEMA in various forms. So I was a witness to the
events that affected civil emergency preparedness prior to the 911 Attacks.

One of the general problems that existed prior to the 911 Attacks was the reluctance of
both FEMA appointees and employees to deal with terrorism. I believe that if FEMA had
done its job properly, we would have had a strong anti terrorism program in existence
prior to 911 that might not have prevented the attack but might well have diminished the
consequences of the attacks. I suggest that the Commission follow this line of inquiry in
its deliberations. What I believe happened is summarized below to provide a starting
point for such an inquiry.
FEMA was formed to integrate several different programs that addressed some part of the
overall problem of mitigating, preparing, responding, and recovering from consequences
of emergencies. Prior to FEMA, five different agencies were involved and various
aspects of emergency management. There was a great deal of overlap and waste. Then
it dawned on people that most of the consequences of emergencies were the same
regardless of the cause. So it made no sense to have at the planning level one set of
people deal with earthquakes, another with storms, and yet another deal with floods when
at the local level, the same people would be dealing with all emergencies. The genius of
FEMA was to include in these emergencies the consequences of both natural disasters
and intentional act, which included crime, terrorism, war, and nuclear attack. The idea
was that it was necessary to address then entire spectrum of emergencies with a single set
of resources that could expand and adapt to deal with whatever emergencies occurred.
This was the only way that the Nation could afford at the same time to deal with daily
small emergencies and remain ready to deal with the less frequent but more serious
emergencies.

When I was acting associate director of FEMA from 1981 to 1983, we addressed the
entire spectrum of emergencies. While the greatest threat was a massive nuclear attack,
this was a high consequence but low probability event, and it was not possible to devote
sufficient resources and particularly attention to it to be ready for it all the time. Instead,
we paid for key elements to be established that could be justified, funded, and used for
smaller emergencies while also contributed to nuclear attack preparedness. That is, the
concept was to design the national emergency management system in such a way that it
could deal with the routine emergencies and be able to surge to take care of extraordinary
emergencies.

There was a significant shift in emphasis from 1980 on. In 1980, our national security
policy was based on mutually assured destruction in which each side eschewed defenses
and depended on offensive systems to deter an attack. Civil emergency preparedness
against the nuclear attack was based on a massive "bolt-out-of-the-blue" missile attack.
We tried to do what we could to reduce deaths from radioactive fallout. The Reagan
Administration did not like this strategy and tried to add both active (SDI) and passive
defenses (civil defense). At the same time, the nuclear strategists were relying less on
massive attacks and more on counterforce targeting based on warning. By the end of the
Cold War in 1989, the civil defense program was targeted against smaller attacks that
gave a better chance for increasing the number of survivors.

Throughout this period, terrorism was a significant factor. We had been aware of
previous threats of sabotage and subversion, against which measures had been taken
during World War I and World War II. During the Cold War, we were trying to deal
with Soviet special forces units, possible subversion by communist sympathizers, and
terrorist activity by mostly internal threats from domestic groups. Programs for
infrastructure program and key asset protection were an integral pat of the overall civil
preparedness effort. Throughout all of this period, FEMA was the national level policy
and planning group for the President and the NSC with respect to what we now call
homeland security. FEMA formulated and coordinated policy and plans, funded grant
programs to get the states to do what we wanted them to do, and coordinated the actions
of the other Federal agencies through the EMPB. It was a good set up and it worked. A
national civil preparedness plan was approved, federal agency responsibilities were
assigned by executive order, and a series of training sessions and inter-agency exercises
were used to rehearse what was to be done in the event of various kinds of attacks.

In my view, the period from 1981 to 1985 was a high point in national preparedness.
Thereafter, internal politics, personal peccadilloes of high officials, and anti-war protests
acted to diminish the civil preparedness program. In the second Reagan Administration,
FEMA lost a lot of its clout and was stripped of it policy role. By the time that the Cold
War ended in 1989, the civil preparedness program was not well funded and not very
well organized. Emphasis under FEMA directors Becton and Stickney shifted from
mobilization and civil preparedness to natural disaster response—with the notable
exception of the continuity of government program. The Federal Response Plan was
formulated, but this did not stress nuclear attack preparedness and the national security
preparedness programs (including anti terrorism) were gradually weakened in favor of
emphasizing preparedness for natural disasters. This trend was heightened by the
occurrence of several greater than expected natural disasters that reveals weaknesses in
the FEMA response mechanism.

After the Cold War ended in 1989, the Congress and some elements of the Bush
Administration moved to do away with major elements of the civil preparedness
program. The Civil Defense Act was revoked. The Defense Production Act was ignored.
The entire apparatus of nuclear attack preparedness was dismantled, except for some
elements, such as state and local emergency operations centers, which were retained for
use in responding to natural disasters. When James Lee Witt became director of FEMA
for the Clinton Administration, he did away with the remnants of the national
preparedness program directorate and focused the entire attention of FEMA on natural
disasters. This redirection was supported by Congress. At the same time, the emergency
preparedness offices of the other federal agencies that had flourished earlier were allowed
to decay.

In the meantime, however, events in the mid-1990s provoked renewed interest in civil
emergency preparedness against attacks—including terrorism. This interest manifested
itself from three sources—cyber warfare, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.

In the 1990s, many people involved in information technology realized that the growing
dependence on computers made the United States more vulnerable to attack by hackers
and cyber-terrorists. They were particularly worried about the security of networks
linked by computers, most of which were involved in what they termed critical
infrastructures. So the first impetus for critical infrastructure protection was from the
cyber world, but these people soon realized that these networks could be disrupted not
only by hackers and viruses but also by a few terrorists using old-fashioned explosives.
This led to a flurry of activity to protect critical infrastructures against the full range of
threats that resulted in the formation of new group of agencies and groups. This was
good, but the people involved knew nothing about what had gone on before and built a
new civil preparedness structure that did not mesh well with the previous structure or the
systems in place at the sate and local level.

Another group of people approached the problem from the standpoint of the so-called
weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiation
weapons. These disparate lethal agents were initially bundled bureaucratically because
their use was to be deterred by a nuclear attack. In fact, they are quite different in their
effects and remedies. Strangely, in the enthusiasm to thwart WMD, the initial emphasis
was almost entirely and chemical and biological attacks. Later, the "radiation weapon"
was allowed into the fold, and finally the people involved remembered that the greatest
damage would be done by radioactive fallout form a nuclear explosion. These people
also tended to ignore the fact that guns and explosives were the munitions of choice by
terrorists.

The third group was energized by growing awareness that terrorism posed a grave threat
to the United States. This group focused initially on state-sponsored terrorism. Then the
focus was People's Wars of National Liberation. Currently, emphasis is on transnational
radical Islamic terrorism. From the viewpoint of the victims, the motives of the terrorists
are not very relevant, but the damage they do is the main thing. In their enthusiasm for
their topic, the terrorism specialists tended to want to create a separate system just for
terrorism.

So in the critical decade of the 1990s, the United States was starting to revive the
institutions it had done away with at the end of the Cold War. But there was no single
integrating mechanism available to the Federal Government to do this properly. One
group focused on a particular set of targets, another group on a particular set of
munitions, and a third group on a particular set of actors. Meanwhile, a fourth group
representing the emergency managers who would have to clean up after any of these
emergencies sat on the sideline preoccupied solely with natural disasters—of which there
were numerous in this decade. As a result, national programs to deal with the realities of
the post-Cold War Era were fragmented and in some case competitive.

The lack of a central focus for civil emergency preparedness was, I believe, the single
most important cause of a general lack of preparedness prior to 911. The proximate
cause of the lacuna was the abdication by FEMA of its statutory and regulatory role to be
the integrating mechanism for all kinds of emergencies.

Take the matter or training the first responders. These are the local fire fighters, police
officers, emergency medical technicians, and emergency management professionals who
deal with the consequences of emergencies of all sizes and scopes. As of a result of
FEMA's abdication of its responsibilities to prepare for and response to the full range of
potential emergencies, the job of training first responders was assigned by default to the
Department of Defense (DOD) and then the Department of Justice (DOJ). Neither of
these two agencies was appropriate for this task. Lacking knowledge of emergency
management but full of self-confidence, the Department of Defense assumed the first
responders were ignorant rubes who played checkers outside the firehouse. DOD's
training efforts were ill advised and not well received by the emergency management
community. When the task was assigned to the Department of Justice, things were better
but tended to bias toward law enforcement. In the meantime, the excellent training and
education system of FEMA ignored terrorism and continued to improve preparedness and
response for natural disasters. Any decent task analysis shows that most of the things that
have to be done in the aftermath of an emergency are the same regardless of cause, but
also that certain types of emergencies require special (often technical) actions as well.
The most effective and least costly approach to the training of first responders would
have been to expand their task list and mission essential tasks to accommodate the special
characteristics of terrorism and WMD. Instead, the new folks on the job tended to teach
terrorism as a separate topic. First responder trailing has, however, been a boon to the
contractors who daily promote ever more special courses and methods. The reality is, of
course, that the emergency management community is already well trained and has at its
disposal a highly effective system of local academies, two-year colleges, and now four-
year colleges to teach what has to be learned for this subject. All that had to be done was
to add to these existing curricula the additional topic of terrorism, and the job would have
been done. But FEMA did not see that this was done.

Civil emergency preparedness is a lonely and boring business most of the time. It takes
narrow focus and great dedication to prepare for dealing with improbable events that one
does not want to happen and often does not believe will happen. A few of us prepared
for a nuclear war that was unlikely, and it was difficult to keep our eyes on the mission
all the time. Even people who prepare for terrorist attacks—which we all believe are
likely—have to fight boredom and apathy among those it counts on to be ready. Most
people are disinclined to remain on edge for infrequent and unpopular events. Everyone,
including even proponents of preparedness, has other things to do that are on tight
deadlines and provide immediate gratification. Thus, it is unrealistic to expect that all or
even many people in large organizations will devote their efforts to civil emergency
preparedness, for their day-to-day work will drive out thoughts of something that might
happen sometime in the future. It is possible, however, to have a small group of people
dedicated to civil emergency preparedness all of the time. These people can formulate the
policies, prepare the plans, preside over budgets, and push the programs that will be
activated and expanded when the time comes to deal with the consequences of rate but
deadly events. They can advocate and integrate so that some degree of readiness to deal
with unlikely events exists.

In the decade leading up to the 911 Attacks, there was no high-level anti-terrorism
integrating group of dedicated civil preparedness people in the Federal Government with
enough influence to establish a viable program. A few lone voices warning of the danger
of terrorism could not overcome the complacency of the rest. It would have taken a
person with strong ties to the President, a small but dedicated staff, and an effective inter-
agency coordination system to have been fully prepared for the 911 Attacks. We had no
such capability then, and despite heroic efforts we have no such capability now.
ine Keiauonsmp or warning ana response in nomeiana secuniy rage i 01

The Relationship of Warning and Response in

Homeland Security
John R. Brinkerhoff
Senior Contributing Editor to the Journal of Homeland Security
December 2001

As acting associate director for national preparedness of the Federal

I Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 1981 to 1983, Colonel John R.
Brinkerhoff, US Army Retired, was responsible for policy formulation and
program oversight of the Civil Defense Program, National Mobilization
Preparedness Program, Continuity of Government, and the National Defense
Stockpile. During that time the United States had a program to Defend America
'against a massive nuclear attack as well as attacks by communist agents and
special forces troops. Colonel Brinkerhoff was also deputy executive secretary of the
Emergency Mobilization Preparedness Board (EMPB), the senior level inter-agency forum to
coordinate all aspects of national, preparedness. The EMPB was chaired by the National
Security Advisor and consisted of the deputy secretaries of the departments and the heads of
several independent agencies. During the EMPB era, a national plan was prepared and
approved by President Reagan, and actions were taken to implement it.

Prior to joining FEMA, Colonel Brinkerhoff was a career senior executive in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. His last position before leaving OSD to joint FEMA was as acting deputy
assistant secretary for reserve affairs. He was also director of manpower programming,
director of intergovernmental affairs, and special assistant to the deputy assistant secretary of
defense for reserve affairs. Before joining the civil service, Mr. Brinkerhoff was an Army officer
for 24 years. He retired in 1974 after 24 years of active commissioned service in a variety of
troop assignments in Korea, Germany, Vietnam, and the United States. While on active duty
he served two tours on the Army Staff and two tours in OSD. For the past seven years he has
been an adjunct research staff member of the Institute for Defense Analyses working on a
variety of issues including Homeland Defense.

The coordinated attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center towers and the
Pentagon caught Americans by surprise. The terrorists had strategic surprise because the nation
was not expecting an attack, and they had tactical surprise because the timing, targets, and
method of attack were unanticipated. Fortunately, we were not entirely unprepared, and local
emergency management systems designed to respond to natural disasters, accidents, fires, and
crime responded promptly and well to the attacks. However, our efforts to prevent or defend
against the 11 September attacks were either nonexistent or ineffective. We were too late because
we ignored warning.

Because of the nature of the attacks, the loss of life was limited to those killed by the direct
effects of the attacks, and there was no expansion of the affected areas. The secondary effects of
the attacks-economic recession, disruption of travel and tourism, and loss of innocence-have been
more widespread than the direct effects. However, the operations of the critical infrastructure
networks were not seriously disrupted. As bad as they were, the 11 September attacks are not the
worst we can expect.

http://www.homelandsecurity.org^ournal/articles/BrinkerhoffJan02.htm 6/4/02