Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security for a New Era:
Focusing National Power

November 14-15, 2001
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Panel 3

Video: On September 11th for the second time in American history, an attack on our nation's capital pushed homeland security to the top of our domestic agenda. It cannot be stressed enough that this country for its entire existence has faced very, very few internal threats. The threats have always been behind our borders and beyond our waters. So, it — we have organized ourselves in a way over time to deal with the external threats. We are simply not organized when we face internal threats. The threat of terrorism is based not just on the external terrorists that we're facing today. Even if we solve the problem of al-Qaeda we still have to remember that Tim McVeigh was a home-grown terrorist. We are in great peril. It will take us a year to three years to effectively organize domestic defenses. A lot needs to be done from the easy straight-forward protect the aviation industry to harder things, like let's create a new National Guard capable of giving governors of states and territories effective tools for domestic defense. Things that we had in peace time regarded as strengths; open society, diffused political authority, market economy have all been used against us by these terrorists.

It's the ultimate asymmetric threat. It works very well. This is a 20 year campaign. We have to go through the very difficult task of rooting out these terrorists all along the route, and there are lots of them. To detect, deter and defeat these asymmetric threats requires a strategy, an organization and a measurable effort that defies traditional approaches to security. Are we capable of developing a comprehensive strategy for fighting global terrorism in all of its forms and defending America against all of the plausible assaults, including the ones that could be most catastrophic. How does Tom Ridge run homeland security when he's got 50 different agencies to coordinate and he has no budgetary responsibility over any of them and he has no hiring and firing authority? I think the key question, now, is will you invest this new office of homeland security with the kind of clout that it needs to be able to make sure that people return his calls. he national security structure's had a lot of practice in meeting together, working together, Pentagon, CIA, the State Department, others involved in the national security structure because of work we've done since the 1940's.

But, when you have something new like the Homeland Security effort, security with states, this campaign against terror is both domestic and international, it's very interesting to see how agencies that are not practiced in working together now need to work together much more effectively. Another difficult issue all Americans will face is the tradeoff between domestic security and civil liberties. We are going to face, as all free societies do, a balance between how do we gather the information that we need to protect ourselves by preserving a measure of privacy and a measure of freedom for our citizens? Do we become a country like Israel, for example, where even in the quietest, calmest, most beautiful day there is the sense of security crisis always around you? As we develop our plans and strategies for the coming decades, we will turn inward as well as outward, battling the most asymmetric threats we have ever known, both at home and abroad.

Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Jacquelyn Davis, Executive Vice President, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

Dr. Davis: Good afternoon. It goes without saying the unprovoked attacks against the Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon here in Washington brought home to most Americans the urgency of devising a strategy and for procuring capabilities for dealing with new and prospective threats to the U.S. homeland. Since September 11th, the President has directed the establishment of a Homeland Security Office in the White House. And, in the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld is considering the creation of a new organization to include perhaps an Undersecretary of Defense for Homeland security and Counter terrorism. However, as the events of September 11th and the anthrax dissemination have demonstrated, homeland security and counter terrorism efforts will and are requiring an interagency, a national and even an international response based upon a wide array of capabilities and approaches.

Today, we have assembled a panel of experts to discuss the conceptual, organizational and resource issues associated with homeland security and counter terrorism and, in particular, post September 11th planning. Obviously, the panel members here today are not new to these issues. For the most part, they have spent considerable time and applied their respective expertise to counter terrorism and defense of the United States and its overseas interests for quite some time. As the panel members now come in, I would like to briefly introduce them to you.

Our first panelist is former Senator from Colorado, Gary Hart. Senator Hart, as you may recall, was the Co-Chair of the highly regarded U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century. And, this Commission and the subsequent report spend considerable time debating unconventional warfare issues and recommendations for reorganizing the national security 5 apparatus of the United States. Just by way of a personal note, Senator Hart, I don't know if you recall, we first met 20 years ago, in 1981, in London when you graciously agreed to speak at one of the first conferences that IFPA organized. And you were accompanied by then Senator Bill Cohen and Senator Sam Nunn. So, welcome back, Senator Hart.

Our second panelist today will be Ms. Michelle Van Cleave. Many of you will recall that Michelle was nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict. However, in light of the reorganization that is ongoing now in the Pentagon, she is serving as Senior Advisor to Tommy White in his capacity as Executive Agent for Homeland Security. And, I think she's going to tell us in her remarks today something about this reorganization and perhaps she will allude to the office to which she may assume in coming days, weeks, months.

Our next panelist is Admiral James Loy, Commandant of the United States Coast Guard who, by the way, was here and heard some of the remarks of the previous panel, and I think might be prepared to respond to some of the comments that were raised. But, during his impressive service to our country, Admiral Loy, among other things, has spent the last several years working on a reorganization of the Coast Guard to meet 21st Century challenges. I wanted to mention also that it is with Admiral Loy that IFPA will be organizing its next grand conference endeavor in March of the next year, 2002 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are going to organize with Coast Guard sponsorship and also the sponsorship of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a major conference on security, so we invite you all and hope to see you in Boston for that meeting.

Our final speaker today is Major General John Parker who is Commanding General of the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Dietrich. And, he is also Commanding General of Fort Dietrich, by the way. General Parker has served in numerous headquarters and combat service support assignments, and is very well positioned to discuss the challenges posed by bio-terrorism, including the recent challenges we have faced as a nation confronting the anthrax threat. With that, I would like to turn the panel to7 Senator Hart to begin the presentations. Senator Hart?

Senator Hart: Dr. Davis, the Fletcher School, General Shinseki and the Army and all the sponsors of this forum, let me express my thanks and appreciation for being invited to be with you and to be on such a distinguished panel. I would like to divide up my few minutes here in the following ways. One, give you about two minutes background on the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, summarize our conclusions and then give you, perhaps, some personal reactions to the experience of having served on the commission and, like all of us in this country experienced the September treachery.

The Commission was created in the fall of 1998 by Former President Clinton, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. There were 14 members of the Commission. We were given a mandate to report to the next, then unknown, President of the United States, no later than February 15th, 2001. Our membership consisted of seven Democrats, seven Republicans, four former members of the Congress - two from the Senate, two from the House, including my Co-Chair, Warren Rudman from New Hampshire - three former Flag Officers from three different services, including General Charles Boyd, Retired Air Force General who was our superior Staff Director. And, in the course of preparing our report, which was meant to be the most comprehensive review of U.S. national security looking forward, since the combination of committees and commissions that operated in his country in the period of 1946-47. And, we took our mandate and our responsibilities that seriously, that this was not just another federal commission, not just another commission on national security, but that we were given two and a half years to think about the next quarter century, which was the arbitrary limit we set on our perspective views.

What we tried to do was, first, describe the world that we thought we, in the United States, were going to be living in. And, we spent about a year thinking about that with the help of dozens and hundreds of experts across virtually every kind of field that you could imagine. That was our first report, "New World Coming", and I'll come back to that momentarily. That was September 15th, 1999. Second report was, "Seeking a National Strategy". This report came out in April of 2000. These, as you can see, are very small documents, but they were backed up with considerable supporting documentation. The third and final report, "Roadmap for National Security", was delivered to the President January 31st, 2001. For those of you concerned about these things, as we like to say, ahead of time and under budget. We turned money back to the Department of Defense.

This report contains 50 specific recommendations, which I will summarize momentarily. The remarkable thing about this Commission, whose ideology spanned Former Speaker Gingrich, perhaps, on one end and Former Ambassador Andrew Young on the other, all 50 of these recommendations in five separate categories were unanimously agreed to. There were no dissenting votes and no separate or dissenting opinions. Present company excepted, the 13 other members of this Commission are about as distinguished Americans as you will find in this country and they worked extremely hard. We estimated that among us we had 250 or 300 person years of public service, particularly if not in the uniform service then in service having to do with the national security of foreign policy.

Our first recommendation, or our first conclusion, if you will, or finding, that has since September drawn the most attention was our first conclusion in the first report. "America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." Now, it has been observed, and rightly so, that we had a horizon of 25 years. So, that was perhaps you can say not that extraordinary recommendation. But, it did occur two years before the September treachery and for some of us, it was sooner rather than later. We did not reach consensus that that this would happen within one or two years, but most of us felt it would happen soon. I gave a speech — for myself, I gave a speech in Montreal on September the 5th. The newspaper headlines the next day were, "Hart predicts terrorist attacks on America." That day, the 6th, I met with the National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice, and urged the Administration to move as quickly as it could on creating a homeland security capability. Beyond that, as I've said, we made 50 specific recommendations, much too detailed to go into here.

The reports, although our Commission went out of existence in July of this year, the report — we got our Website back up. And, by the way, all these reports were on the Website contemporaneously and virtually all of our deliberations were public. The Website is back up, in case you want to get these. It's www.NSSG.gov. The National Security Study Group is the NSSG. I would encourage you — as I say, these are a dozen to 16 pages and then this is 143 pages with a summary of about 25 pages. And, I would encourage all of you to read it, given particularly your official responsibilities. For virtually all of what we've recommended has not been done yet and should be the subject of a considerable national debate.

We did call for the creation of a national homeland security agency, and I'll momentarily come back to that. We did recommend in the national security interest recapitalization of America's strengths in science and education, noting the decline of our scientific base systematically over the past two or three decades. Both our researchers in math and all the sciences - chemistry, physics - but also our teacher core in all of these areas, and of course the precedent for this was the National Defense Education Act of the 1950's. That remains to be done. We called for institutional redesign. We found the State Department to be a dysfunctional institution. And, we called for some specific steps for the State Department to reorganize itself to carry out, as General McCaffrey said a few minutes ago, the absolutely crucial mission of diplomacy. Obviously, the Defense Department also — gave some very specific recommendations for that, for the National Security Council, for space policy and the intelligence community. We called for, remarkable for a Commission with four former members of Congress, reform of the Congress. It wouldn't do any good for the Executive Branch to change itself if the Congress doesn't follow suit. And, as many of you know, national security responsibility is spread so widely across so many committees and both Houses of Congress, in the 24 or so subcommittees it's also dysfunctional

So, Congress cannot merely point its finger at the Executive Branch and say, "Move yourself into the 21st Century", because they're going to have to do the same thing. Fifth and finally, we called for massive improvements in the human requirements for national security. In a word we found the best people in America are not entering public service, and that's not a social ill, that's a national security ill. We must make government service, not career necessarily, not the military necessarily, but some forms of national service across the board honorable in our society once again. And, to do that we can't talk about the government as our problem or the government as our enemy. We're going to have to challenge young people to think about a few years of their lives, if not uniform then in some form of public service in the Diplomatic Corps, Peace Corps or whatever. It's absolutely critical to get talent in this country back into the public arena.

That's the Commission. And, I want to now, in two or three minutes, give my own personal views that I very clearly want to distinguish from the Commission so they are not responsible. I think we're living with at least five and probably 50 new realities, and let me tell you what I think those five are. We no longer live within secure borders. We were used to that since virtually 1812. Somebody did point out recently that Pancho Villa crossed over into New Mexico in the early part of this century, I think. Leave that aside. Americans have not lost their lives to foreign attacks since 1812 up until September. Civilians are now targets. Traditional rules of war no longer apply. The distinction between war and crime has disappeared. If six or 60 people had died in New York we would have considered it a crime. 6,000 is war. Where in between was the threshold crossed? And, finally, conflict in the 21st Century, or at least the early part of that century, is as much cultural, indeed more cultural, than it is ideological. And, that's important because we lived in the 20th Century in an age of ideology.

What are the implications of these realities? Convenience is going to have to be sacrificed in the national security interest, but not liberty. And, it's going to take an awful lot of hard thinking by people in this room and elsewhere to distinguish between our constitutional liberties and our conveniences. Bag searches in public places are one thing, and into sports events are another and are the same. But, we get into the area of wiretap surveillance and so on, we're getting very close to constitutional liberties. Civil defense, or however you want to describe it now, what used to be called civil defense, is central to national security. Rules of engagement and conduct must be reviewed within the context of American principles and values. And, clearly, what I'm — that's a euphemism for reconsideration of policies such as assassinations and so on. But, we're going to have to - if war and crime have merged, we're going to have to think about the ways we combat both. The distinction between law enforcement, domestic security, the police function and war fighting, the military function is fading and could well disappear. And finally, reducing cultural friction, as General McCaffrey and others have said, is going to be crucial to this security effort. That's the role of diplomacy.

Quickly, five or six new ways of thinking. We're going to have to adopt a doctrine of preemption based on superior intelligence. We can't simply sit back and wait to be attacked. President Clinton tried that with the missile attacks two or three years ago unsuccessfully, but that's why I say intelligence has to be superior. Make — we're going to have to make the roles and the missions of the Special Forces perhaps more central to doctrine and planning, instead of a collateral or peripheral mission. We're going to have to give human intelligence a special status, almost an elite. There's going to have to be a human intelligence capability in our intelligence structure and community that's roughly, if you will, a parallel for lack of a better more thought out thinking, something like the Delta of special forces. But, it's an intelligence capability.

We're going to have to restore the constitutional role of the militia. Could not agree more with General McCaffrey, the National Guard is the constitutional entity to protect the homeland. Doesn't mean DOD and the standing permanent professional military doesn't have a role. It just means that we have a constitutional army on our soil, may or may not be trained and equipped for this mission, but it ought to be. It must be. General McCaffrey gave some ideas for doing that. We must never sacrifice constitutional principles. I think we need to review all Cold War laws, structures and institutions for their applicability to the 21st Century, the same way we did when we passed the National Security Act of 1947. And, as you know, the centerpiece of making war combines the government, the Army and the people. And, unlike the Cold War where the people more and more were separated from policy making, we must engage the people of this country in the structuring of the new security order. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

Ms. Van Cleave: Well, as many people have noted throughout this conference, in the aftermath of September 11th there has been an enormous awakening to the need for homeland security throughout the country and certainly within the Department of Defense. With the Pentagon still on fire in the days after that attack, the people who work there, including I suspect many people here in this audience, stayed on the job. They were concerned less that the terrorists might return to finish the job that they had started, but more that their families might be at risk at home. And this, I think, is a fear and a concern that they shared with all Americans.

And, so the Generals and the clerks, the senior leadership and the staff sergeants turned to two fronts: Protecting America at home and planning a war against the terrorists abroad. Calls on military resources in the aftermath of that attack have been many and varied and they continue today. Many crisis management decisions had to be made in a short period of time and unprecedented in the scope and kinds of questions that were being asked, such as the need to fly combat air patrols throughout the — in various urban areas throughout the United States, to understand what might be the most vulnerable points that we would need to be concerned about protecting. Wondering about what information is available publicly about the critical nodes that might give rise to an interest from terrorists, and should this information be protected? What about airport security and border patrols and other requests for the use of National Guard resources in many and diverse ways stressing those resources in ways that they have not been configured to be used? These requests still come in where we are looking to having to provide extra protection of airports during the holidays or for special events, such as the upcoming Olympics, or in response to specific threat concerns.

Many demands on DOD resources that the Department has stepped up to try to answer many difficult questions calling groups of people together to think in ways they haven't thought before, such as the red teaming exercises to try to think creatively about what are the next set of risks that we might be facing. And, I also would note it seemed to me that the attack that was visited on Washington, D.C., that part of the attack, one might regard perhaps as a decapitation effort. If you looked at the possibility that the aircraft that was downed in Pennsylvania by the heroic acts of the passengers and they, in fact, have been intended to go after the Capitol or the White House or that even the aircraft that came into the Pentagon, if it had traveled just a little further, would have gone right through into the National Military Command Center and impacted where the senior leadership was meeting to deal with the crisis.

One could regard that aspect of the attack as a decapitation effort raising again questions about the need to have clear capabilities and plans for the endurance of the government in a trans-attack. So, for the future now, stepping back from the handling of this immediate crisis, we're left with many, many critically important questions for policy and strategy for the Department of Defense. And, I know that — I'm certain that many have cited the Quadrennial Defense Review language with respect to homeland defense being the highest priority of the U.S. military to defend the nation from all enemies. And, the QDR sets out very specific objectives to maintain sufficient military forces to protect the domestic population, its territory and its critical defense related infrastructure against attacks emanating from outside U.S. borders. And, in addition to have the abilities to support U.S. civil authorities as directed in managing the consequences of an attack and, finally, still quoting from the QDR, "The U.S. military will be prepared to respond in a decisive manner to acts of terrorism committed on U.S. territory or on the territory of an ally.

This is a very broad set of objectives, essential objectives, and within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, capabilities, missions, programs, activities that impact these mission objectives are disbursed across many organizations within the Secretary's office. Now, we recognized this before September 11th and have established within the Office of ASD SOLIC a division to support territorial security. The attempts have just begun to establish the resources and capabilities to support that entity when the attack occurred. And, post the attack it was very clear that homeland security required higher level attention within DOD. Accordingly, the Secretary of Defense created an Executive Agent, Secretary Tom White, to handle the immediate operational requirements, day to day taskings and interagency coordination for homeland security purposes. That executive agent was established as a bridge to a more permanent entity within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And, I have received the task from the Secretary of the Army in his capacity as Executive Agent to provide the conceptual foundations to consolidate different aspects, missions, programs within OSD under a new entity that would be responsible for homeland security. A final forum of that organization will be decided by the Secretary of Defense, and I suspect the Congress will have something to say about that, too.

Secretary White has said very clearly that, in his view, we need to have a new Undersecretary for homeland security, and that is certainly the leading option that we're looking at right now. But many offices, as I've mentioned, within OSD and the services as well have responsibilities impacting homeland security. For example, the Secretary of the Army is also executive agent for the direction of military support to civil authorities within the office of the Undersecretary for Policy. And, the ASD SOLIC responsibility is currently assigned there for territorial security and counter terrorism and counter drug activities. Policy also has responsibility for crisis management and continuity of operations, continuity of government. These responsibilities are outside of the policy realm as well. And, health affairs clearly lead responsibilities there. Guard and Reserve affairs in the personnel operation at ASDC3I. This is the Secretary of Defense for CQDI, has many responsibilities in critical infrastructure protection and information assurance and security and counter intelligence that one might find appropriate to bring under a new entity for homeland security, and even acquisition. And, ATNL also has responsibilities in the technology development for homeland security, including questions of how you marry up and rationalize those requirements with other battlefield requirements. So, the list goes on and on and on. And, indeed, at one level everything that we do to protect and defend the United States and our interests can be seen as contributing to the defense of the homeland, including going after the terrorists and their sponsors where we find them.

Consequently, what we mean by homeland defense and homeland security needs to be bounded so that these responsibilities and assignments are clear. And, there are obviously many ways of approaching doing this, so I would like to at this point interject a commercial break and say to those of you who have ideas and recommendations and insights in some different aspects of this, that I am in the market for such good ideas and I hope that you will bring them to my attention as we proceed with this project. But, one way of looking at homeland security is to look at the included missions within that subject heading. And, I would suggest that there are at least three broad areas that one could consider to be within homeland security. The areas of active defense; one of the things that the Department of Defense can be directly responsible for in terms of air defense or defending the borders or missile defense, or perhaps computer network defense. These things may well fit into a homeland security definition. Then there are the support responsibilities that DOD has to support civilian agencies such as support for consequence management in the event of a WMD incident. And, finally, there are all the things that we do in the category of national security and emergency preparedness, continuity of government, continuity of operations activities. In each of these areas the drawing board is certainly not blank, but we can and will do better for the future.

For example, in the area of active defense, while parts of active defense are currently assigned, there — such as computer network defense, some of these things may be imperfectly developed. But, what is really new is the need for conventional homeland defense and thinking about particularly the questions about how much is enough against the terrorist threats that we will face. This may also require some kind of a theater engagement plan that arrays defense resources within the United States and an ops plan that integrates homeland defense operations with theater operations to ensure that homeland defense is not purchased at the expense of winning the war.

There are major questions involving the Guard and the Reserve, to be sure, and some have suggested that here may be a need for a new warfighting CINC to take on some or all of these active defense missions. And, therefore, the reorganization within the Office of the Secretary of Defense is proceeding hand in glove with the review of the Uniform Command Plan. Within the area of military support to civil authorities and the supporting role of the Department of Defense, these questions are many and they are deep and they will - we will be looking largely to the lead coming out of Governor Ridge's office and the need throughout the government to pull all our resources together to have a strategy for homeland security that everyone can support. But, for the future, whatever organization may be chosen the important starting point is to think clearly about what needs to be accomplished to lay out a path to accomplish these things and to get the work done.

And, yet as we all know, it is not possible to add enough layers of security to protect against all threats. The real protection against terrorists is to go on the offensive. Our strategic purpose must be to create conditions that make it impossible for terrorists to succeed. That will require a full range of tools to include military capabilities, aimed at disrupting the terrorists cells, support, communications, logistics and safe harbor. The terrorists rely upon, as their strength, their amorphous nature, their diverse cell populations, their reliance on Internet communications for continuity and connectivity, their lack of a fixed location, their mobility across international borders. These things can be turned into vulnerabilities. But, as Senator Hart has observed, as a first order priority we need to develop the intelligence capabilities vital to support military operations against the terrorists.

Many people have observed that U.S. special operations capabilities will prove central to this war effort. The strategic use of soft assets is a policy decision that must be predicated on sound intelligence. And, the quality of our intelligence is equally important to the quality of the forces, the men and equipment that are employed working hand in glove. Both are essential to our success. So, we have a voracious need for high quality intelligence in this endeavor. I remember reading or hearing that not long after September 11th - I think it was CNN. Maybe someone here can remind me - receiving an invitation to posit some questions to Osama bin Laden for him to answer. And, I believe they had come up with a list of questions that were very thoughtful, designed to provide some insight into his strategic purpose and to elicit an admission of culpability. But, I recall hearing a commentator on the radio list the questions that he would ask if given a chance. They included — his questions to bin Laden included, "Where are you exactly? And, how long will you be there? And, how many of your guys are with you?" Now, all that would be useful information, so it's very particularized kinds of intelligence that we're after.

I know that everybody has personal stories coming out of September 11th and I would like to close by sharing one of mine. And, it is that like many people I was on the phone with mom back home in California. She was checking to make sure that I was all right. I was a little close to the action for her comfort level. And, my sister is a flight attendant with American Airlines. She, in September, was flying to Los Angeles, Boston route. She had been flying the day before, but she wasn't flying on Tuesday of that week. And so, both of her daughters were safe and sound, but my mother was on the phone and she was very upset and she was close to tears. And, I kept reassuring her. I said, "Mom, you know, we're fine. Everything's fine. It's all going to be fine. Don't worry." She said, "That's not why I'm crying. I'm not upset about you and your sister. I am concerned about my grandson. My eight year old grandson", she said, "will now grow up in a world that - in which he has to be afraid. That so much has changed now he will not live with the kind of carefree sense of security that we have always had. He has to now live in a state of fear." And, I say to myself and I say to you, "That is unacceptable." As Secretary Rumsfeld has said many times, it is clear that our task is much broader than simply defeating the Taliban or al-Qaeda. It is to route out global terrorist networks and the governments that sponsor them, not just in Afghanistan, but wherever they are to ensure that they cannot threaten the American people or our way of life. Our homeland will be secure when we win that war. Thank you.

Admiral Loy: Good afternoon to you all. I think you're out there. These lights are tough up here. I don't know whether anybody else in the panel is wondering, but I do think there's an audience out there. We have hear some wonderful strategic issues on the table and offered for our consideration by both Senator Hart and by Ms. Van Cleave. I have been asked by the Fletcher School to talk to you a bit about what I imagine the role of my service to be in this homeland security challenge that we now face. And, so I'm going to try, at least, to bring that strategic set of issues down a notch or two to some practical realities, if I can. As a nation that depends so heavily on the oceans and sea-lanes as avenues of our prosperity, I think we have concluded, and certainly we have within the Coast Guard's deliberations, that whatever action we need to take against terrorism must protect our ports and waterways and the ships that use them. These ships and ports are even more valuable to our commerce with the world than airlines and trade centers, I would offer. And, I would further offer, perhaps even more vulnerable.

Let me just offer a couple facts. Almost a trillion dollars of our GDP is provided by way of the maritime industry. 95 percent of the trade that comes and goes to America comes and goes by ships. We have some 98,000 miles of coast line to worry about between those ports and harbors; over three and a half million square miles of exclusive economic zone to be dealt with as if it were truly our territorial seas; some 51,000 port calls from some 7500 ships on an annual basis; six and a half million passengers on cruise ships; 200,000 sailors on those commercial ships that come to our ports; a billion tons of petroleum delivered to this nation on an annual basis, 16,000 containers per day yielding over six million a year with significant questions as to the inspection capability of our nation to deal with them. Valuable and vulnerable. Not a bad combination if you happen to be on the target team for the bad guys.

But, how do we prevent another attack? Is that possible? And, what can this particular service, the Coast Guard, do to protect the vulnerability of our maritime interests? More importantly, and perhaps an extrapolation of that line, is how do we find ourselves as a nation to get out of the response business, which we literally have been in since the 11th of September, and into the prevention business, a much more reasonable thing for us to reestablish that comfort zone that Ms. Van Cleave spoke about. I think it's about prioritizing very difficult lists and initially it's about getting very, very good at risk-based decision making, and many of us in our business need to be about doing both of those things. Preventing another attack requires an understanding of the maritime dimension of homeland security.

We simply can't afford to bring the maritime dimension of our economy to a stop. And, if you think for a moment, that's what we did to the commercial aviation business on the 11th of September. When those 480 planes were directed to the ground by Secretary Minetta, it took us days and, perhaps, weeks to restore a credible aviation economy and system back to our nation. To do the same thing in the wake of four or five or six ports of our nation being brought to their knees would be speaking — we would be speaking about weeks and months, if not years, to restore that kind of fabric, which is the fundamental foundation block for the prosperity of our nation. The biggest challenge facing our marine transportation system today is how to ensure that legitimate cargo, therefore, is not unnecessarily delayed as we and other nations introduce enhanced security measures against some very real and potent threats. Sustained prosperity clearly depends upon our accommodating this global trade that is predicted to double, if not triple over the next 20 years. Most of that trade will come and go through our seaports. So, government needs to be attentive to finding ways to minimize the disruptions and delays caused by federal inspections and other border security kinds of activities. More stuff has to move faster so ports need to become more open. Hold that thought.

Ensuring maritime security, on the other hand, suggests a requirement to tighten down those very ports that we were just so eager to open. Government has an obligation to keep illegal migrants and drugs and weapons and other contraband from entering and leaving through those same ports whose throughput we want to maximize, literally for the interests of prosperity for our nation. This is precisely the dichotomy that was presented to us by the Hart-Rudman Commission in the first phase of their report. Well, how in the world do we protect our nation's maritime security in such a dynamic environment against such elusive threats? This is a question that we had discussed a lot, but rather academically until two months ago. And, it has now become uniquely and vitally important to us as a service and as a nation to get the answer to that question right. We need a systematic approach of complimentary security measures to put together an effective offense and defense on this multi-level chessboard of maritime security.

Of course we need to think more seriously than ever about how to prevent, how to respond and how to manage the consequences of asymmetric attacks. But, I would offer to you that this notion of prevention, response and consequence management, which was very prevalent in our nation and all of the services and all of the agencies, was not where the failure occurred on the 11th of September. I believe the failure occurred in some piece in advance of prevention that I have at least termed "awareness". We simply were not as aware as we could, would or should have been with respect to the domain in which we work. Awareness involves recognizing the threats well in advance and anticipating our vulnerabilities. And, in maritime port security; it's about ships, people and cargo. It has to do with having access to detailed intelligence about our adversaries, and sharing that information more effectively among federal agencies and with our domestic and international partners in both the private and public sectors. Not talking about it, which we have done a lot over the years, but actually doing it. Without better awareness, we will be forced to take more stringent actions with regard to prevention and response that will close down our economy and threaten literally our economic security.

Well, maritime domain awareness is a concept that serves to reconcile these competing interests of security and prosperity in our ports and waterways. Maritime domain awareness covers all of the information requirements of everyone with any responsibility for homeland security in the maritime domain. Applied to the government interest of getting more cargo through customs and Coast Guard inspectors in less time with greater security, I think its key elements would be these: An integrated, accessible database of information; point of origin inspections overseas in those foreign ports by U.S. or by trusted inspectors in sanitized facilities; in transit transparency to what is mostly a focus of the cargo and containers coming in our direction; one stop coordinated inspections here in the United States; high technology centers and readers and gamma ray scanners; solid, risk-based decision making forums charged with taking on and actually solving problems with accountability at the other end of the day. Thus armed, I believe we can take a risk management approach to decide which vessels need to be boarded on the high seas, at the sea buoy or at the pier based on the greatest threats represented to us.

push the maritime borders offshore, out from the coastline, by sharing information on international arrivals and departures within the United States and among our partners around the world. And, that will help prevent future attacks. We could even incentivize the good guys by offering some kind of quick pass handling to those fully compliant with the security profile that we insist upon. It will also help by telling us simply what's going on daily in our ports and waters and, yes, even in the exclusive economic zone. Events that very well could have escaped our attention before, but now may be vital to our understanding the impending threats against us. International and domestic cooperation, both civil and military, is essential in this regard because we can't hope to ensure our security by working alone or by waiting until the threats have already crossed the thresholds of our ports.

So, I will introduce at the International Maritime Organization's Bi-Annual Assembly next week resolutions and calls for accelerated activity on their part to help us establish international standards for the well-being of those ports over there. I think awareness is the key to preventing the potential threats from being realized and becoming a consequence to manage. Awareness must be an all hands evolution, including returning the Coast Guard to important national security missions in the deep water environment that, because of our multi-mission character, we were able to depart from immediately on the 11th of September to go to where the nation needed us most, which was within the ports and harbors of our country.

So, what is the role of the Coast Guard in homeland security? The Coast Guard is committed to improving awareness of our maritime vulnerabilities and threats, using some of the means that I've tried to describe to you. With regard to the other elements of a maritime security strategy, prevention, response and consequence management, the Coast Guard also stands ready there, as well. As both a military service and a federal law enforcement agency, I think we are uniquely positioned among federal agencies to fight an enemy that crosses boundaries with seeming impunity. Threats can pose as legitimate trading vessels very easily among a very large volume of commercial, and even recreational traffic. Somebody has to engage these vessels one at a time up close and personal. Somebody has to distinguish the suspicious from the obviously innocent.

To separate the guilty from the merely suspicious, somebody usually has to get along side, put a boarding team aboard, even if the suspect refuses to stop. Somebody has to size up each case and dispose of it based often on a very complex humanitarian, diplomatic, military, geopolitical, environmental, and legal issue, which often are at stake. Somebody has to coordinate proposed enforcement actions with other government departments, flag states, law enforcement agencies and anyone else who seems to come out of the woodwork with a seemingly legitimate voice in the matter of the day. And, as Senator Hart has mentioned, it must all be done according to the rule of law in our country. And, for 211 years that someone in our country has been the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard offers scaleable command and control frameworks, suitable for preventing or responding to nearly any military or civil domestic emergency. We do it all the time. Our captains of the port have broad and strong legal authority to secure and manage any situation that arises in our ports or on our waterways. This authority gives them the legal basis for ordering or approving just about any movement of shipping within any of our ports. And, our port security units give enforcement teeth to that legal authority.

To that foundation, we offer experience in disaster relief and pollution response, experience that has made us the most proficient agency in conducting things through the incident command structure. And, that incident command structure, which has been now adopted by FEMA as their standard, I believe is the most effective way for coordinating interagency responses to domestic emergencies. And, if one of those emergencies should require DOD involvement, our status is one of the nation's five armed services links us to the others in a joint warfare environment. So, the sum of these elements - legal authority, coastal assets, command structure for military and civil agencies, command and control systems - offers a bridge among the various players who must get involved within the civil interagency community and the Department of Defense.

Well, since September 11th we have had five goals emerge as what we are trying to do — what we are trying to do on our ports and waterways: Controlling the movement of shipping in our ports; increasing our presence within those ports for both the value that it represents for deterrents and for potential response capability. We have inventories critical infrastructure and we have reached out to others who can help us, the Office of Homeland Security, the Joint Forces Command, the Navy, state and local governments, other federal agencies and, certainly, the private sector. We've conducted over 50 different sessions with many of our private sector colleagues that we work with all the time in our ports and waterways. And, the challenge we left with each and every one of them was to understand this is an all hands evolution and they each must make their contribution to the higher port security profile of our nation.

Immediately after the attacks on September the 11th, the unique multi-mission structure of our service allowed us to radically increase dramatically the security posture using active duty, reserves, civilian and auxiliary personnel, as well as existing shore units, ships, boats and aircraft. We began placing Sea Marshals on arriving commercial vessels to control the movement of shipping in some ports, which we hope to do so on a broader basis very soon, budgets allowing. We established a 96-hour advance requirement for notice of arrival for foreign flag vessels entering U.S. ports. It used to be 24. Coast Guard men and women everywhere have significantly increased the security of the nation's ports and waterways, protected people and property and assisted in rescue and recovery efforts. We've increased our presence within the ports while doing our very best to keep commerce flowing smoothly. We've begun to take an inventory of critical infrastructure needs of those ports and we have gone to each of those critical infrastructure piece owners and challenged them to rise to the occasion of being responsible or the security of that particular piece.

It is crystal clear that never will the Coast Guard have all the adequate resources necessary to guard every piece of that infrastructure. It must be an all hands evolution. Our broad outreach to federal, state and local government partners, as well as members of the maritime industry, is leading to a mutual understanding of ways and means to improve the security of our ports and waterways. Although the Coast Guard is primarily responsible for the security of our ports, as I said before, we can't do it alone. Civil and military authorities will act together to protect those ports and waterways. Private industry must also take a lion's share of responsibility for protecting what is vital to them and to us. The Coast Guard is helping where we can and we will also be there to ensure that the industries achieve a layered approach to security, including adequate facility, vessel and port security plans, and the exercises that will demonstrate their adequacy. The role of the Coast Guard in homeland security is to help provide the maritime security piece to the comprehensive puzzle.

We aim to be effective, we hope, so as to remove maritime security from the host of issues that Governor Ridge is concerned about. We can be most effective in the maritime domain by helping to coordinate the efforts of various levels of federal, state and local civil authorities, as well as of the industries of the private sector. We already perform on a smaller scale the necessary function that is vital, I believe, to the overall success of the office of Homeland Security. Some people see this function as an adjunct mission, another new task added to a growing constellation of tasks for the Coast Guard, but as I suggested to Senator Hart before we came out, this clearly has become our north star. This clearly has become the most important mission that the Coast Guard offers to America today.

The mission of maritime security may be more urgent today than it was two months ago, but it is no less important than it was 211 years ago. Since our founding in 1790, our primary purpose to this nation has been to provide maritime security to our homeland by guarding its coasts. We plan to continue to do that. Thank you very much. (Applause)

General Parker: Dr. Pfaltzgraff, The Fletcher School, General Shinseki, General Peak, I'm very honored to be here this afternoon. Our national power is its people and we need to think about that for a minute because without the people that we have brought up in this land and used their brainpower and used their energy, we would be nowhere today. I'm here and I've been asked to talk about countering bio-terrorism. I have 21 points and I'll deliver them in 15 minutes or less. The battlefield has been redefined. In military terms we used to say, "detect to avoid, detect to identify the threat, detect to protect." And, we were thinking of working in some far-off land with a face to face enemy and now, all of a sudden, the battlefield is the continental United States. Only our people can solve the issues at hand. No devise, no computer, it's our people. We must raise them up.

In my experiences with the recent anthrax contingency that occurred here in Washington, D.C., I learned one thing above all things. It boils down to one person who wants to know, "Am I contaminated? Am I going to get ill? What should I do?" One person. Everybody wants to know if they're personally at risk when something happens. How do we answer that question? We have the technology today to develop sensors for just about everything. If someone comes to me and says, "We need a sensor to detect banana peels in the room today", we can go somewhere in our great system and we'll find a scientist that knows how to take banana oil and get its structure and create a microchip and put a little chip on you to detect the order of banana oil in this room at some level where your nose won't even detect it. We have that capacity. Now, if we go and we build detectors and we have little buttons on our shirt and we say, "We can detect anything", and someone gets a little detection on there, they're going to come to someone and say, "My detector says I've been exposed to "X". And, that's where the mystery begins because we better know an awful lot about "X". We better know what it is, what it's physiology is, what it's human effect is, what the therapy for "X" is, at what level do we provide therapy for an exposure to "X". There's a lot of work to be done and I think this nation can do it, but we have to think almost at the individual level.

Decontamination took on new meaning. Decontamination of people, places, things, papers, file drawers, your favorite pencil; they all became important in the decontamination process. Have we done enough research on the way of decontamination that is done quickly leaving no residual so that people can leave a building, have it decontaminated and immediately return? I think there's a few senators that would pray for that today. What are our research priorities? I'll tell you, since September 11th there's been a sea change in cooperation across this country. Academic institutions, foundations, small study groups, small manufacturing industry want to come together to solve the great solution of how to protect and defend against bio-terrorism. For years, the Department of Defense set the standard working the issues of biological exposure, chemical exposure and nuclear exposure. Ladies and gentlemen, the Department of Defense worked for 50 years to develop the knowledge base that we have today so that we can bounce off and provide questions to some of the answers that are being posed to us today. We must now take advantage of this great sea change and engage and enlarge our capabilities of research across this nation so that we can monumentally change that fountain of knowledge to solve these difficult problems. We must think out of the box.

I defend the Food and Drug Administration. It's an important part of our life to be able to turn and look at a label and say, "It is FDA approved." It gives us a sense of well-being, that it's been tested, it's efficacious and it's safe. But, in a crisis contingency, should we have some auxiliary contingency codes of federal regulations that allow the Federal Food and Drug Administration to bless certain products that have 50 percent efficacy rather than 100 percent efficacy when we know that the alternative is death? These are the types of things that we must wrestle in the future as we think about countering bio-terrorism. What are the standards of contamination? Do we worry about one spore on the table? Do we worry about 100 spores in the rug? When do we worry? We need to develop some standards of what is safe and what isn't. I don't think we can guarantee no spores ever in the Hart Building forever and ever and ever. One tiny little spore is going to find some niche and survive. Now, is that a danger? Well, to some people it is. In reality, I don't think it is. I think there are thresholds that we need to identify where people are safe.

As we walk through our world today, people are shaking hands, hugging, coughing sneezing and the bacteria and the viruses are invisible to us, but we seem to survive in a sea of pathogens that just would love to set up housekeeping in our rich environments of our physiological fluids. We seem to survive until one of those gets out of balance and we need to know when that balance is changed. Learning as we go. Is that bad? No. We need to learn how to do that better. We can't ever know everything all the time. We must accept that a new crisis or a new event may be new to our minds and to our population, and our population must accept the fact that we will bring the brilliance of our people to that event and we will learn as we go thinking every single step of the way that people are important. We will save lives and we will contain the incident. And, we will learn so that the next time we will lose less lives than we lost before.

We in the military probably have quite a library of scenarios. We live and we think scenarios and how we would — what type of a battle plan we would have, what kind of a logistics plan, what kind of a medical plan would we have for that scenario. If we think of the vast future ahead of us, I don't' think we can have a complete library of every possible scenario that could happen to this nation. We must depend on a few basic principles. The Army calls them Commander's Intent. The intent is easy. Discover the incident, contain it, treat those who need to be treated and get to the perpetrators as rapidly as possible so that that event never occurs again.

During this crisis, if I have had one phone call from someone who has the ultimate product, I have had at least a hundred. I was worried about getting down here today. I was on the Hill testifying. And when I finished, someone else came up and they handed me a whole bundle of stuff with a letter from Senator Helms. I think it has 50 letters in it with people that have something that is important for the events of the current day that they want us to buy or to support. What we need is a national test bed. Not just a military test bed, a national test bed where entrepreneurs can bring their equipment to that national test bed and have it tested against a criteria. I think we need to move rapidly in that particular direction and it has to be well funded and it has to be well supported with manpower because, just like the thousand drugs waiting for clinical trials to cure cancer, I bet you there are 10,000 great products out there that are waiting to be tested and the capital investment's not there for the entrepreneur to get it tested.

The other thing that I've learned desperately is that no matter what we do, communication is critical; communication between people, communication between the agencies, communication with our customers and with the people that are involved in the incident. We must do better with communication. I've been in the United States Army for 38 years. I've been in a lot of scenarios, be they real or be they exercises. And, in the after action report of almost every single one of those scenarios or exercises, it's been, "We could have communicated better." We need to think about communication. We need to put dollars to it, we put manpower to it, and we need to learn to do it better. We've struggled with public health versus forensic investigation. When is material so important to a forensic investigation or to a prosecution where it cannot be shared openly where it may have a public health consequence? We don't know when it has a public health consequence.

How can we share information and still allow the proper authorities to capture and prosecute intelligently those who have perpetrated against us. I will go back to the coordination of the agencies. We live in a competitive society. We compete individually and that carries into our workplace and carries into the pride, carries into our agencies and our agencies compete. We need to take a look at that because we want coordination, not competition. How can we award and reward for people getting equal credit for working solidly in their lane toward a success of a mission? We do need to identify lead roles. Senator Cleland said it greatly about two weeks ago. He said, "You know, we make rules. The President makes rules. Other people create policy, other people create regulations and sometimes they do this." Not meaning to do that, but we've got to diffuse the confusion of who has what lead role when.

The laboratory base. This goes back to public health. Counties, states, the federal government need better laboratories to be able to identify and verify pathogens and chemicals that are supporting the terrorist events. We need to support that by giving good education and training to those people who want to set up a good laboratory. We in the DOD have developed reagents that identify these pathogens that create havoc on the threat list. I had a reagent meeting just last week. The Department of Defense can stand proud in the fact that they have developed over 100 reagents for developing pathogens. Some overlap. That's good. You want overlap so that you can verify. We now need to take that defense technology objective and expand it, enlarge it and allow the American public and the universities across America to participate to get the right answer.

Our public health infrastructure must be supportive. In various cities across the country they have very good public health systems. And, then as you travel away from some of our biggest cities, it just dives off like a cliff. We must support federal support for public health infrastructure.

We must have medical intelligence, and medical intelligence translates into disease and medical surveillance. We must get beyond the privacy gaps of the medical record. We must be able to interrogate all of the medical records in the United States, not looking at a person's name, not looking at a social security number, so that on a minute to minute basis we know what diseases, injuries and complications are happening across the country so that we can intervene. Funding is always a problem. And, I think I heard it before by the eloquent speakers that before me that it's going to be a priority issue. God bless those who have to set the priorities. Education and training: Critical. If we're really going to go into the 21st Century and counter bio-terrorism, we need smart people. We need them to be trained in what's out there. And, I'm not just talking doctors and health care workers and nurses. I'm saying that the general public must have a knowledge base of what is in their environment, how to act with it and how to take care of it if it becomes personal.

We must launch a campaign across this nation to understand why the American public wants no risk. Zero risk. That's what the American public wants. Can we afford zero risk in this nation? Getting to zero risk is an isotonic curve in which there may be not enough dollars in the future to get there. At what level of risk will a human being feel safe? Every single day we have people on motorcycles. Every single day we have people on motorcycles without helmets. Every single day a thousand more children learn how to smoke. Every single day 50 people die on the highways because of drunk driving. There must be a level of risk that the American public will accept because those statistics prove it. Now, will they accept more than zero risk in a biological event?

Avoiding panic. A terrible onus on someone that has to speak into a microphone in front of cameras when an incident is just unraveling. What do you say? Do you want to tell everybody that it's the worst thing that's ever happened to the United States? Or, do you want to speak to certain facts that you know about and give the sense that the people of this great nation will learn through this and have the right answers? I think it takes strength not to create panic up front.

I'm going to close with a very important personal relationship that I've had with the Executive Branch, with the Legislative Branch, the Department of Defense and other agencies. Ladies and gentlemen, you can be very, very proud that you have great leadership. This is a lucky nation. And, it will continue to be a great nation because of that leadership. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: We will now proceed to our discussion period. We are going to extend this session by 15 minutes so we will have a bit of extra time. We'll go to 5:45. Before I do that, however, I simply want to express thanks to each of the panel members for what they've said so far, for having the statement from Senator Hart about the NSSG study with its prescient recommendations; to Michelle Van Cleave for what she had to say about the new organizational initiatives being taken in the Department of Defense with respect to homeland security; to Admiral Loy for what he has told us about the very important role of the Coast Guard and especially its role in port and harbor security; and finally, to Major General Parker for all that he has said to us about countering bio-chemical terrorism and issues of decontamination. We now turn to the audience for comments and discussion. Who would like to pose the first question? I think we'll raise the lights, hopefully, and shed additional light on the issues that we're dealing with. Who would like to be first? I see a hand in the back of the room, there. I was about to begin to ask my questions because I have a lot of questions if no one else does. But, go ahead. Please get the microphone and identify yourself.

Audience: Dick Field, Defense Technology. A question for Admiral Loy. Do you think increasing the number of U.S. flag vessels would make your job in keeping our ports safe help?

Admiral Loy: Well, I think the easy answer to the question is probably yes, but there is a marketplace reality that you have to grapple with as the real answer to your question. The essence goes back to the — to what I mentioned earlier in my remarks. It's about vessels, people and cargo and to the degree we gain comfort with an adequate review of who's on board, what's on board and the vessel itself that will heighten our Captain of the Ports comfort zone that that vessel is among those that he has to spend less attention to than to others. So, I think he flag is important. There's no doubt about that. But, at the other end of the day it's all three factors that have to play into a risk based decision making process that they'll have to consider.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Anyone else want to comment? Let's now move on to the next question. Let's try to take one from this side of the room, if we can. If there's someone over here who would like to pose a question? Please wait for the microphone.

Audience: Thank you. I'm Lee Ewing from Homeland Security and Defense New Publication. I'd like to ask Admiral Loy, considering all the discussion recently in Congress and elsewhere about who should handle airport security, whether it should be federal or private contractors, what do you think about the idea of the Coast Guard having a role in that?

Admiral Loy:We work on the water. I use three "M" words to talk about my service. It's "military", it's "multi-mission" and it's "maritime". And, the maritime point is, I think, the telling point with respect to that. So, I think there is and has been an absolutely excellent discussion both on the Hill and in the Administration with respect to getting that right. There had been, unfortunately, a little bit of finger pointing in one direction or the other, but the reality is the cards you face up on the table are the Administration and the Congress are working that very, very hard and I'm confident they'll get the right answer.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Are there any other comments on this very important issue of who should control airport security? Does anyone want to venture into that arena? With all the minefields that may lie there. Anyone else? I take it that no one would like to do that at this point. Let's go to our next question, then. Who would like to be next. Please?

Audience: A question for Senator Hart. Sir, Bob McClure, Army Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations. With the Office of Homeland Security, do you fear perhaps a fault line developing between the actions we're going to take in a war on terrorism that will be the war overseas and the war in the homeland and given the responsibilities between the Department of Defense and the Homeland Security Office, do you see a fault line developing there that perhaps we can avoid?

Senator Hart: I really don't. I see more seams and gaps, and I think the Commission did as well, between the approach presently being adopted by the Administration domestically than I do between the domestic effort and the international effort. One of the reasons why I'm optimistic about a coordination, international and domestic, is the historic 20th Century relationship between the standing Army, the professional military, and the National Guard and Reserve. The National Guard — the National Guard was the militia under the Constitution. In the late 19th Century it became the National Guard. In the 20th Century it became a follow on expeditionary force to the regulars. And, that's the way the Guard has come to think of itself as they would say as their primary mission. What I believe, and I think others in our Commission believed, was that they have a new primary mission and that is homeland defense, which brings it full circle to 214 years ago, which is what the founders intended.

The question is are they properly trained and equipped. Probably not right now, but they can be. There is nothing institutionally that prevents them from doing that, and it solves a constitutional problem, it solves a statutory problem, the controversial Posse Comitatus Act, and it solves a practical problem; they are forward deployed. They are a forward deployed force and they are citizen soldiers. So, that's the reason we advocate the role of the Guard. But, given the century of cooperation between the Guard Reserve and the regulars, I think that helps prevent some of the gaps that you're talking about. Now, you may have a more precise problem in mind than I've touched on, but I think what we're concerned about are the gaps and seams on the three uniform border patrols, Coast Guard Customs and Border Patrol. Those, it seems to me, need to be brought closer together, not losing their identities by any means with their historic missions. But, coordinated or commanded, if you will, by a cabinet officer rather than a counsel. That's a long discussion.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Would anyone else on the panel, especially Admiral Loy, want to comment on this question?

Admiral Loy:Anyone else on the panel, especially — (laughter) Senator Hart and I have chatted about this before we came out. I think clearly there are potentially some organizational implications to the challenges that face the nation in this crisis. There's no doubt about that. But, I would also hasten to add two very sort of management 101 cautions. And, the first one would be I hope we get around to understanding that form must follow function and our imperative is to get the functionality right and allow the form stuff to follow whenever it is appropriate for that to occur. The second point is that in the middle of a crisis it's probably about the worst time you can go through, the reorganization upheaval associated with must be part of that process to gain the organizational integrity that I think Senator Hart and his colleagues had very much in mind with an Office of Homeland Security integrated well, put together well and, you know, with that being accomplished in the middle of a crisis. So, I think the notion at the moment is to sort through the crisis carefully and to give certainly the Executive Order direction that has been generated by the President, enacted now by Governor Ridge, an opportunity to do the right thing and be watchful with respect to that as it plays out and have voices at the other end of the day that could — to bring the right things back onto the table when it would be appropriate to do that.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Who would like to — yes? Next question. Right down here.

Audience:Hi. Ed Winn with Raytheon. A question to Ms. Van Cleave and also to Senator Hart. It relates to terrorists. A terrorist internationally is a SOLIC problem. A terrorist in Kentucky is an FBI problem. Some of us were joking that the right thing for bin Laden to do was to give himself up to the United States and fall under the U.S. Rules of Evidence. There's a policy issue in terms of the coordination between the Department of Defense in terms of how do you suppress a terrorist actively potentially overseas versus how do you do the same thing in the United States. With these people going back and forth, they're actually working in two domains. Probably within a week they'll be in both domains, and that's probably how they'll work the hiding. So, could you comment a little bit maybe, both of you, on number one, the coordination between Defense and let's say Special Operations and FBI? And, then, Senator, from a standpoint of Rules of Evidence, how you see how we handle bringing terrorists to justice and still follow rule of law. Thank you.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Who would like to begin with that question? Senator Hart?

Senator Hart: Go ahead, please.

Ms. Van Cleave: No, you go ahead.

Senator Hart: I can hardly wait to hear what you have to say.

Ms. Van Cleave: Yeah. Clearly, that is not a new question that the appropriate relationships between the law enforcement aspects of — where the FBI has lead responsibility and in areas where the Defense Department might have lead responsibility have been questions that have been with us for quite a long time. And, working through the proper relationships between those organizations has, in fact, been done. And so, in ways, in appropriate ways, there are — there is a sharing of information and operational understanding and I think that that is enhanced, has been enhanced, in the aftermath of this crisis. If you're asking specifically how do you divide up responsibilities given the porosity of our borders and the fact that we have threats now that go across our borders, I would say that that is a question that is front and center in national security strategy in many different areas today.

Dealing with specific terrorists who present physical threats is a part of that. Another part of that might be the cyber threats that we're seeing and understanding ways where to try to discern whether we're facing a foreign adversary or whether we're facing a domestic criminal activity. Those things are very ambiguous and they're very, very difficult to characterize. I guess that the best thing that we can say is that we're bringing technology to bear to try to find ways to discriminate between origins of the attack and then the appropriate roles and missions for the different parts of government agencies have to flow from that. But, whatever we do in the national security context, I think we need to be mindful of the civil liberties end of that to understand whether we're dealing with a domestic U.S. person or a foreign person next in any particular context makes an extraordinary difference under our Constitution and our way of life. So, I wish I had easy answers for the question that you pose, but I think that we're very sensitive to the need to be attentive to that in many different areas of national security.

Senator Hart: One of the reasons I emphasize the blurring of the distinction between war and crime and the police and the military function commonality is that we're in a new era. I mean, we are treading on new ground here. And, we will spend the next five to 25 years or more trying to strike, not just the risk balance, which I think is a very important factor for our society, but the liberty security balance. And, there's no true north in a system like ours, a mass Democracy with constitutional guaranteed freedoms and a judicial structure. And, it is — and I think we've seen this week or even yesterday the first indication of this amorphous gray area when the President assigned Mr. bin Laden to a new — to a military court, which as I heard on NPR today, can be conducted on a ship offshore. Now, that's going to be an interesting — maybe one of the Admiral's ships. I don't know.

Admiral Loy:We'll order that. (Laughter)

Major General Parker: And, if you get lost we won't mind. And, I think, although I didn't get to read the story precisely, I think there are rules — there are going to be rules of evidence to go along with that court. Maybe not. If not, if they don't adopt courts of military justice rules or whatever are standard there, then you could have a whole new field of the law, which I think also is going to happen. I'm going to lecture next summer — spring at Yale Law School and it's amazing. The Law School is now offering courses in terrorism, courses in the areas of law that didn't even exist a year ago. It's amazing. And so, society is trying to adapt to this new era.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:We have time for one more question. And, since I do not see a hand, I'm going to ask the final — oh, there is a question. OK. Then, I will not ask my question. Right here, ask yours.

Audience: I'm Pete Schifferly. I'm with the U.S. Army from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Heartland. General Parker, you made a comment that said that we needed bright minds. You also, I think, began your presentation by saying it was people. And, for I believe his is really for Senator Hart, if you want a militia, you want a conscription. And so, my question is if we're focusing national power and national power is the people, when do we start conscription?

Major General Parker: Did he aim it at me or you? (Laughter) Well, I think if you look back in history, there are a lot of good things that came out of conscription. I think it was the early opportunity for youth to understand what the nation was all about. It was the basic entry point where people started to understand that people are different, they come from different parts of the country, they look different; but their hearts and souls are the same. It created that mandatory mixing bowl that was very important for a society. It had the benefits of when that youngster left that service, and history would say "only males", when in the 21st Century that will change, I believe. I think it has to be debated. It has to be looked at very carefully. And I think history will say that it gave a lot of youth a second chance in life. It gave a lot of youth a purpose. It gave a lot of youth a reason to look back and say, "I served." So, there are a lot of positives for conscripted service. It doesn't all have to be in uniform. There are all sorts of sectors of this great government where people could serve and learn the same cultural benefits. So I, for one, will be for it. And, I think it would be a great debate.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Are there any other comments on this very important question? Senator Hart?

Senator Hart: Well, we've had a militia for 214 years without - except I in time of war - conscription. When there was conscription enlistments in the National Guard and Reserves obviously went up because a lot of people didn't want to go to Vietnam. I think you can maintain — it would be an interesting thing to watch — that we can maintain strength levels in the Guard and Reserve without conscription. If not, then we'll have to reconsider hat, obviously, given the national emergency. But, having been on campuses in the last two months it is amazing to me how young people in this country are reevaluating - are reconsidering their values. Young people, bright young people, said to me, "You know, before September it was Goldman Sachs or Arthur Anderson or I didn't know what. But for the first time in my life, I'm thinking about going into the government." Well, we haven't heard that for 25 years. I mean, my generation heard it in the early '60s and it conditioned us heavily.

But, we need — our political leaders now need to take up this new patriotism if you will. Kids were asking me, "What does patriotism mean? What does it mean to be a patriot?" And, they weren't being facetious and really didn't understand the concept. Was it just waving a flag or wearing a pin? They thought it was more, but they needed someone to tell them what it meant. So, they were hoping that the State Department would recruit, the military services would recruit, the CIA is very popular. So, I don't think we need conscription right now, but obviously we've got to think about that. I have been, in my public life, a long term advocate of a national service program. I very much support the legislation John McCain is putting forward now, which is very close to legislation I introduced 20 years ago.

With a military/non-military option, probably not mandatory for the time being at least, because we've got all kinds of cost and administration problems, but I think now is the time to give young people a chance to serve their country in some capacity. Maybe not the rest of their lives, but for a little while. And, I - by the way, just finally and off the point, this idea of the test bed is fascinating, General, because as a civilian, as a out-of-office citizen, I've been inundated with phone calls, emails, faxes, proposals, people saying, "How can you get me to Governor Ridge?" Well, obviously, we can't get to Governor Ridge. But, there are a huge number of Americans out there who think they can do something for homeland security. It may be a technology, it may be an idea, a concept, or it may be a way of screening people coming into the country, but the Administration would be well served if you do set up a clearing house and just walked people through on a 15 minute basis and said, "Tell me your story. Leave your documents behind." And, I must say, there are a few of us, General, on the banana detector that would like to know if you could devise one that would work with the National Enquirer. (Laughter) (Applause)

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Well, ladies and gentlemen, on that concluding note —

Admiral Loy:I hate to follow that one.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:OK. All right. We can stay as long as you wish.

Admiral Loy:But I do have at least a thought with respect to the national service question, and I couldn't agree more on a personal level with Senator Hart as to the notion of national service and its value to all the citizens of our country who many of us have encountered just looking for an opportunity to contribute. How do I find a way to make a contribution? I can't tell you how many times my email circuit is lighting up with retired Coast Guard folks who are looking for a way to make a contribution. I think it is a concern that we have what I'll call a widening gap between those who find themselves in uniform and those that do not, whether those are professional folks, especially, you know — I ask the question every time there's a bi- year election. OK, what's the freshman class look like? How many of them have ever served their country in uniform? And, sadly, those numbers are deteriorating. And, it's the same with judges and it's the same with fill in the blank.

So, I think the notion of a widening gap between those who serve and those who don't, whether it's serve at large, that is military or as the Senator suggests, a public service of some kind, federal service of some kind, Peace Corp, Americorp, call it what you will. I find today Americans are looking for a way to contribute to the national well-being and we should be finding ways to help them do that. I also do believe that there are very real competency implications to this at the long end. Someone asked the original question about are we going to have competent people dealing with the sophisticated hardware that your Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corp and Coast Guard are using these days, and to whatever degree you take that widening gap to some unknown end, you truly do have an opportunity to put the challenge on the services to make up the difference, so to speak, when at the other end of the day a national service notion would perhaps have less of a challenge placed on the services and more of an opportunity to contribute at a sophisticated level available to an awful lot more Americans.

Dr. Pfaltzgraff:Let me express thanks to the members of the panel and to you, the audience, for what has been an outstanding contribution to this conference. We will, of course, be building upon the themes that have been discussed today and especially in this last panel in the sessions that follow tomorrow. Let me now adjourn this session and invite everybody to the atrium where we have refreshments, where we have a reception and then, of course, the dinner beginning at seven p.m. which will also be held in the atrium with, of course, the address by Secretary Wolfowitz. So, again, we look forward to seeing you shortly. Thank you very much.