One of the most important lessons learned from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is that having information is not enough. It must be communicated among governmental, public and private agencies.
In the days following 9/11, many politicians expressed their concerns and media outlets printed stories reporting that the federal government was handicapped by lack of coordination and communication between its agencies.
In an attempt to address this issue, Stevens Institute of Technology has received $150,000 in private funding for a research project that will develop a common framework for integrating public and private resources across the local, state, and federal levels to deal with crisis response, deterrence and prevention.
The researchers will use port security as the case study. They will draw on techniques of “network-centric” operations used by businesses, the U.S. Navy, and the New York Police Department. Network-centric thinking is when all agencies and organizations act as a part of a holistic network or system, and not merely as independent entities that are self-determining.
The principal investigator for the project is the dean of the Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management, Jerry MacArthur Hultin, who as Undersecretary on the Navy helped direct the transformation of the war fighting and management operations of the Navy using network-centric principles.
Working with Hultin on the project titled “Network-Centric Operations Applied to the Campaign against Terrorism” will be several Stevens scholars including Dr. Michael Pennotti, an industry professor; Dr. Harlan Ullman, national security expert and visiting scholar at Stevens; and project manager Leslie Stevens of the school’s Center for Global Technology Management. The timetable for the project is July 2003 though March 2004.
“The old method of keeping information quarantined and making decisions in hierarchical organizations puts our nation at risk,” said Dean Hultin last week. “If we are to have a chance of avoiding another attack like that of Sept. 11, we need new methods for anticipating threats and responding to attacks that speed the movement of information to those who need it, allowing the disparate pieces of data to be assembled into a coherent operational picture, and then increase the agility of ‘first responders’ as they help us recover from the attack.”
Studying port security
According to the project’s organizers, the issues of inter-agency commutation are magnified when examining the country’s ports and assessing their vulnerabilities.
U.S. ports are America’s key transportation link for global trade, with 11.6 million shipping containers, 11.5 million trucks, 2.2 million railcars, 211,000 vessels, and 489 million people passing through U.S. border inspection systems last year.
One possible target for a terrorist attack is the Port of New York and New Jersey, the largest U.S. port, the 10th largest port in the world.
According to Hultin, a weapon of mass destruction, concealed in a shipping container and detonated in the harbor, could threaten many millions of American citizens in the New York metropolitan area.
Currently, when a when a ship enters a U.S. port, more than four agencies have overlapping jurisdiction over the ship and its contents. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has jurisdiction over the people; the U.S. Coast Guard has jurisdiction over the ship; Customs has jurisdiction over the goods; and if produce is involved, then so is the Department of Agriculture.
Hypothetically, a ship with a shadowy record of ports of call, carrying cargo that doesn’t square with its home port, and manned by crew members on a watch list of people with suspected terrorist ties, might not necessarily raise any red flags. That’s because the Coast Guard could know about the ship, Customs could know about the cargo, and INS could know about the crew members, but no one would necessarily have all the information.
Another hypothetical is what happens if there is an attack. There would have to be coordination among police, county sheriffs, regional firefighters, area EMTs, the U.S. Coast Guard, in both its military and civilian components, and, perhaps state or regional National Guard troops.
These emergency responders might typically be communicating on several different radio frequencies. The responders must be aware of the specific frequencies to be used during the emergency, those to avoid, and the protocol for communication within and among the groups.
“Our goal is to provide new management techniques to help coordinate the inter-organizational process,” said Leslie Stevens, “so that information is moved quickly to people who need it and drives decisions and actions more quickly than with current methods of operation. We believe that these network-centric operations can greatly enhance port security.”
She added that because there are many possible attack scenarios, no single plan can be developed. So all basic plans must be capable of rapid modification to meet a specific attack. The key to this research, she said, will be the ability to learn and respond quickly, and not with some pre-arranged response.
According to Pennotti, the project will hopefully produce three major outcomes. It will create an organizational and operational template that will provide interoperability across key agencies charged with security at federal, state, and local levels of government. It will create a set of management models for network-based inter-agency responses as a part of homeland security. And finally, it will identify economic and business incentives that will facilitate participation by the private sector in activated to ensure homeland security.