Paul McHale

Now, Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security, will talk about the Pentagon's role in protecting the US from outside threats and dealing with disasters. This is hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Its just over an hour. Good morning, welcome to the Heritage Foundation, I'm John Hilboldt, Director of Lectures and Seminars. Its my privilege to welcome you to our Lehrman Auditorium to welcome those of course joining us via the Internet at our Heritage.org website and those joining us via C-SPAN. We at this time also ask that every one in house please check that cell phones and pagers have been turned off as a courtesy to our guest. And we remind our Internet and C-SPAN viewers that questions can be submitted to us via e-mail, addressed to speaker@heritage.org, speaker@heritage.org or response during the question and answer session. The Heritage Foundation has long advocated policies based upon the principle of maintaining a strong national defense. And in that context, our program today will reflect upon the challenges we face in protecting America in the 21st century. Hosting our program is Kim R. Holmes. Dr. Holmes is our Vice-President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies and also serves as Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. He oversees our Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, our recently established Margaret Thatcher center for freedom as well as directing our Asian and International Trade Centers. He was a founding editor of Heritage's Index of Economic Freedom that is published annually along with the Wall Street Journal. After as a sojourner as Assistant Secretary of State for international Organizational Affairs during the first term of the George W. Bush administration, Dr. Holmes returned here to Heritage last year to continue his over two decades long association with the foundation. Ladies and gentlemen, my colleague, Kim Holmes. Thank you very much John. Good morning everyone, its a pleasure to welcome all of you to the Heritage Foundation. Our, the title of our speak today "Homeland Defense: Looking Back and Looking Forward" will be featuring the honorable Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense at DOD. As all of you know, defending the homeland is one of the core missions of the department of defense and this is the responsibility of Assistant Secretary McHale, for overseeing all the Homeland Defense activities of the Department of Defense. Since February 2003, Paul McHale has been at the forefront of our nations efforts to defend America from attack. From overseeing the US northern com mands defense of our borders to the National Guards response to catastrophic disaster, his job entails a critical and multi faceted challenges on the Homeland Security front. He had had a hand in creating the office that he now oversees and just in three years he has built an efficient operation that coordinates the military's homeland defense activities with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as of state and local governments. Secretary McHale holds a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown Law Center. In 1991, he resigned from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to volunteer as an active duty infantry Marine Corp Officer and in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. From 1993 to 1999, he was a member of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served in the Arms Services Committee and also where he co-founded a National Guard and Reserve Components Caucus, to ensure the interest of reservists and guardsmen are represented in the Congress. We have had the distinct pleasure to work very closely with Paul McHale over the last months and weeks. James Carafano who heads up our Homeland Security Project is very often in touch with his office and we very much appreciate all the efforts that you have done in cooperating with the Heritage Foundation on that front. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Assistant Secretary of Homeland Defense, Col. Paul McHale. Well, good morning ladies and gentlemen. Let me first of all thank Dr. Holmes for that very kind introduction. Its not often these days that anybody calls me Col., I'm often called other things, but not Col. I'm not always treated that nicely. I would note that on one recent occasion, during an introduction similar to the one Kim just gave me, it was stated that I had earned my "Judus" Doctorate degree at Georgetown University. And for the record, that's Juris Doctorate, there is a difference. I got it right, didn't I? You did, you got it right. Also, I want to say hello to my good friend Dr. Jim Carafano. Jim I think is hiding back there in the corner. Jim has a real doctorate, but he has a... my friends in the legal profession, I apologize for that, he also has a more impressive title, Lieutenant Col.. Jim earned that through gradution from West Point and twenty-five years of superior military service in the United States Army. Jim, it is certainly good to see you. Its good to be back. Let me begin my remarks with a tactical radio format that I think Liutenant Col. Carafano will recognize, alright, here we go. "Heritage Foundation this is Homeland Defense. Sit rep to follow. Stand by to copy. Over." That takes me back to an earlier chapter in my life when I actually spent a fair amount of time talking that way on a radio. By referencing that traditional radio format, I'm afraid I date myself somewhat. These days, most situation reports are sent in an electronic digital format, supported by GPS, contained in a burst transmission from an encrypted key pad. Things have changed a little bit, since the days that I first enlisted in the Marine Corp. But, it is still a requirement to keep a higher headquarters informed and to do that, periodically you provide a situation report, a sit rep. So it occurred to me in preparing this speech, that a lot has happened since June 2005, when Kim mentioned I was last year at the Heritage Foundation and therefore a comprehensive sit rep on the current state of DOD Homeland Defense is an order. First, I'd like to establish the post-9/11 context for my remarks. During the nearly five years since the attack of September the 11th, the Department of Defense had fundamentally reassessed the domestic threat environment, incorporating the brutal challenge of transnational terrorism into that assessment. And as a consequence, we have dramatically reoriented the military defenses of the United States to defeat both traditional nation state threats and asymmetric threats associated most frequently with transnational terrorists. Our terrorist advisories see the United States Homeland as the pre-eminent battle space in a global conflict. By attacking here, their intent is to shape and degrade our political will. They have little hope of prevailing in a war of attrition, that is not their intent. Their intent is to inflict sufficient carnage that we back down, that we choose not to fight and that an absence of political will would serve from their point of view as a catalyst for our ultimate defeat. In my judgment, that hard and brutal reality must therefore define and guide U.S. military contingency planning for decades to come. Let me just say in parentheses. I see this challenge as one that extends far beyond the ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda. I believe that its characteristic of conflict in the 21st century and perhaps beyond. That with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, their easy transportability, the desire to acquire and perhaps the actual acquisition of weapons of mass destruction at some point, by transnational terrorists. The kind of threat that we faced initially in the hands of al-Qaeda will likely be inherited by other transnational terrorist groups, certainly throughout the rest of my life and I anticipate throughout most of your. And so let me go back and talk about where we were on September the 11th, talk about the intervening events that bring us up to day and then give you a sense of where I think we're headed as a department and as a nation in confronting that kind of transnational terrorist threat. For those of you who read the 9/ 11 Commission Report in some detail, as I did, you probably caught buried in footnote, the rather stark recognition that on the morning of September the 11th, NORAD, our air defense command, was conducting a previously scheduled exercise. The scenario for that exercise on the morning of September the 11th, involved a Soviet style bomber attack upon the United States. September 11, 2001. More than a decade after the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a country. The primary scenario driving our air defense was a Soviet style bomber attack. Later in that morning, it became painfully clear that the threat in the 21st century, while it continues to reflect the air capabilities of nation states that may be hostile to the United States, also must now reflect in terms of our assesment the unconventional, the asymmetric capability that resulted in four commercial airplanes, being commandeered by terrorists, turned into weapons platform, used as weapons platforms, and ultimately producing the loss of some 3,000 innocent lives. That too is now part of the threat environment. And so we recognized right after September the 11th, that we needed to dramatically reorient our defenses in order to effectively deter and when necessary defeat, that kind of terrorist, asymmetric threat. The first thing we had to do was come up with a strategic framework. There's that old saying that if you don't know your destination, any root will do. We needed to provide an intellectual and a documentary framework in which we could develop a Homeland Security, Homeland Defense and Civil Support Capabilities of our nation to include the department that I represent, DOD. I frankly think we've done pretty well, in that regard. I remember going up to the army war college back in the early days when I was in the office that I hold now and listening to extended, very serious debate as to what is Homeland Security, what is Homeland Defense, when does one transition into the other, frankly I don't think thats the right paradigm, but the discussion at that point was pretty basic in terms of the strategic and intellectual framework that would provide guidance to our evolving operational capabilities. We knew that 3,000 people had died, we knew that al-Qaeda would attack again if we gave them an opportunity, we recognize that Homeland Defense begins oversees. We projected power over Afghanistan and then ultimately to other location, most especially to Iraq, to keep our terrorist advisories on the defensive so that we could seize the operational initiative. But we also knew that all of that activity had to have a framework. And I think over the last five years, that intellectual framework, that series that family of documents has developed pretty well. We have the right thoughts and I think we've expressed them reasonably well in documents like the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, the National Security Strategy, the new National Response Plan which is really a dramatic revision of the earlier Federal Response Plan. And ultimately the strategy that we produced within my own shop, our Department of Defense strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support. We did not see strategic assessment and evolving operational capability in a linear time frame. In other words, one was not going to lead to the other sequentially. We recognized intuitively, that certain operational capabilities were required because we had been attacked. And we knew almost instinctively that some of those capabilities had to be established. As an example, we now have and have had since shortly after September 11th , military quick reaction forces available for domestic deployment under the circumstance where it might be determined that civilian law enforcement could not provide and adequate counter balance in order to defeat an impending terrorist attack. I'm not sure that there is a great deal of cerebral analysis that went into the creation of those quick reaction forces, we just knew at a very elemental level, that en light of what had happened on September the 11th, in order to provide increased capabilities to augment and reinforce the primary capabilities found within civilian law enforcement, that we needed soldier, sometimes Marines, on alert for domestic deployment, to for instance, defeat an al-Qaeda attack on a domestic nuclear power plant. We knew that critical infrastructure protection might require not just law enforcement capabilities, but perhaps as well, military capabilities. So we began concurrently developing operational capabilities even as we developed these intellectual framework that put all those pieces together into a coherent hole. That transition from strategic theory to operational reality continues most specially in the area of seaburn consequence management and I'm gonna talk about that in a little bit. Early on, it was recognized by the Secretary of Defense, that the structure of our department reflected a Cold War orientation while confronting a terrorists reality. And so Secretary Rumsfeld, at the direction of the President, modified the, unified command plan and created a new combatant command, United States Northern Command. I look out and I see some representatives from that command in the audience. It was recognized that in a world in which the terrorists saw the United States as the pre-eminent battle space in that global conflict, that we needed to have a single military commander who would take charge of all of our forces located within that geographic ares, the United States Homeland, in order to ensure the effective command in control and integration of military capabilities for the defeat of al-Qaeda in the approach to the United States Homeland, or perhaps, within our own country. We are extremely fortunate that the Combatant Commander today, out of Colorado Springs, the Combatant Commander Northern Command is an officer of exceptional talent, Admiral Tim Keating, a good friend and a great American and we're blessed. I think the good Lord looks out for our nation, that we have at a critical time, a superb commander in exactly the right billet. Not long after, the Secretary of Defense created United States Northern Command, the Congress of the United States created the office that I now hold. In the National Defense Authorization Act of 2003, past late 2002, it was recognized there needed to be a civilian who would have the supervisory responsibility within the Department of Defense for all the Homeland Defense activities of the department. So that position, with that mandate was created by the law and I was very privileged when Secretary Rumsfeld asked me to take that job. Um, it has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience. Let me talk to you briefly about our operational capabilities, capabilities that for the most part did not exist on the morning of September 11th, 2001. When President Bush proposed his budget for FY '07, he included 17 billion dollars in Homeland Defense funding to include such things as operational Noble Eagle on the morning of September the 11th, we did not have fighter aircraft controlling our domestic airspace, or fighter aircraft on very short strip alert prepared to deploy into our domestic airspace in order to defeat a transnational terrorist threat. We have had that capability ever since. As we gather here today, we have a classified number, but a very substantial number of fighter aircraft on alert at diverse geographic locations throughout the United States ready to deploy and intercept any terrorist attack within the domestic airspace of the United States. We routinely have aircraft on combat air controls again, randomly selected in terms of geographic location, changes everyday. We want the bad guys to have to worry about an ever changing air defense organization so that we introduce uncertainty into our terrorists advisories planning process. But what we do want them to know, is that we have those planes on alert and we are prepared to use them, even under difficult, even under tragic circumstances in order to defeat a terrorist threat of the type that we experienced on September the 11th. We also anticipate as we did not, in any substantial degree, the possibility that the terrorists might approach the coasts of the United States, moving though the maritime domain, through the commons, moving especially the possibility of moving a weapon of mass destruction into a United States port. Port security should be the last layer of an effective maritime defense, not the first layer. It should be our intent through improved intelligence to identify a maritime threat at a distance, to interdict that threat. We call them "maritime intercept operations", to conduct a mio on the high seas. A mio of the type that we for instance plan to execute as apart of the proliferation security initiative in some of the more distant parts of the world. We need to be prepared to identify and approaching maritime threat, most especially a terrorist threat, to anticipate the possibility that that terrorist threat will employ a weapon of mass destruction to include a nuclear device, or a radiological device. And we must have forces prepared, trained, supported, able to move rapidly to interdict that WMD threat at a distance on the high seas, so that before we even get into the issue of port security, we have defeated that threat at a distance from the coast of the United States. Port security is vitally important to our nation. Do not misunderstand what I am saying, but I would much prefer to locate that dirty bomb 500 nautical miles off the coast than to discover its presence in the port of Long Beach. And then finally in the land area. We have substantial capabilities including those quick reaction forces that I mentioned earlier and consequence management capabilities to deal with the, the outcomes of a terrorist attack, should the terrorists be successful in penetrating our defenses. The assumptions of our strategy, when we published it in June of last year, we're meant to be sobering. The assumptions in the strategy for Homeland Defense and civil support reads as follows. And they were meant to be blunt. Frankly they were even sharper in earlier drafts than they ended up in the final document. And we knocked off a few of the rough edges, but these words are not characteristic of a carefully coordinated document where ordinarily, the result of that coordination is mush. You know you get to a consensus at the end which says very little in substance. We, we really tried hard to avoid that, so let me read to you the assumptions of our strategy. And they are meant to grab your attention. The strategy makes the following key assumptions: the United States will continue to face traditional military challenges emanating from hostile nation states, nation state advisories will incorporate asymmetric threats into their broader strategies of competition and confrontation with the United States. Terrorists will seek and potentially gain, to be candid, we originally said likely gain, but terrorists will seek and potentially gain surreptitious entry into the United States to conduct mass casualty attacks against Americans on U.S. soil. The next assumption, I believe, should through the strength of its sobriety, burn itself into your consciousness. It reads as follows: Terrorists and or rogue states, will attempt multiple, simultaneous mass causality, sea burn attacks against the United States homeland." We didn't caveat it, we didn't put it in a, you know, a questionable format, we said they will and we believe that to be true. Terrorists and or rogue states will attempt multiple, simultaneous, mass casualty see burn attacks against the United States homeland. What's at the issue is the timing of such attempts, not that they will occur. Terrorists will try to shape into great, American political will in order to diminish American resistance to terrorist ideologies and agendas. The Department of Homeland Security and other Federal, state and local travel authorities will continue to improve their prevention, preparedness, response and recovery capabilities in a language that was published three months, two and a half months, before Katrina, we concluded, in the event of major catastrophes, the President will direct DOD to provide substantial support to civil authorities. We recognized, when we drafted that strategy that in both in Homeland Defense and most especially civil support, there would be a focused reliance upon reserve component capabilities, Terry, I put that in here for you, with an emphasis most especially upon the National Guard. Let me tell you how that worked out. When Katrina occurred on August 29th, 2005, the President has indicated quite accurately that our nations response to Katrina was inadequate. We in the Department of Defense conducted a careful, after action review of our own performance and while we believe the Department of Defense did pretty well in responding to Katrina, we too have lessons learned to ensure that our performance is better next time than it was last time. We in DOD routinely incorporate that kind of self criticism into any after action assessment of how well we have done on a previous mission. Its not a confession of, of a incompetence, its a recognition that any organization, particularly a professional organization, needs to be unflinching in recognizing any deficiencies that have occurred, so they can be corrected. In fact, the DOD response to Hurricane Katrina was the largest, fastest civil work mission in the history of the United States. Seventy-two thousand forces, military forces, men and women in uniform, deployed between August 29th and September 10th. That may well be the largest deployment within that kind of time frame in history. It certainly was the largest civil support mission, fastest civil support mission in the history of our department. But there were areas where, we in retrospect, recognize we need to do better. These were the areas that jumped out to confront us with our own requirement for better performance. I mentioned that we deployed seventy-two thousand forces. Fifty thousand of those forces were National Guard. Twenty-two thousand were active duty, title ten military personell under Admiral Keating's command and control. While both elements of our response performed superbly, those two elements, the National Guard element and the Title 10 active duty element, were not well integrated. The National Guard movement of force was not well known to or understood by NORTHCOM and similarly, NORTHCOM'S deployment of active duty forces, really was not integrated into the conops developed for the deployment of those fifty thousand National Guardsmen. We had two (unidentified) approach led by superb professionals, well executed operationally and tactically, but they were in parallel. I come out of an infantry background where I know little bit about deploying machine guns. You never put out a machine gun as a single weapon. You always deploy machine guns in pairs, two guns, so that they can be mutually reinforcing, so that they can have intersecting fields of fire so that one gun improves the performance of the other. We didn't do that in terms of our National Guard and Title 10 forces in response to Katrina. These guns were not mutually reinforcing. They ran along parallel, not intersecting, paths and we learn from that experience we got to do a better job in the planning process of pulling together into a total force concept, the superb capabilities found both within the National Guard and within the active duty Title 10 military. Thousands of Americans along the Gulf Coast were saved by search and rescue operations, many search and rescue operations executed by the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense to include the National Guard. While the search and rescue missions saved countless lives, we did not coordinate the various elements of those sar missions in our planning process in way that would ensure the efficient use of all the platforms we had available. It is, I think accurate to say that on some occasions we had two and three helicopters showing up to execute the same mission, because those helicopters may have belonged to the National Guard or to NORTHCOM or the Coast Guard or Fish and Wildlife, it was not a coordinated, integrated concept of search and rescue, we need to do better. We did not rapidly or accurately asses the damage after Katrina. The bottom line of that is that we need to take what our oversees intelligence and surveillance assets, aircraft like 3P's to C130's unmanned aerial vehicles, like the Predator. We need to have those kinds of assets available for wide area damage assessment following a catastrophic event because early news coverage of the damage associated with Katrina was not accurate and it took 24 to 48 hours to get a very clear picture of how devastating the damage was, particularly along the Mississippi gulf coast. In anticipation of Hurricane Rita, Admiral Keating acted decisively and put together that kind of package of aerial observation assets so that for Hurricane Rita, which occurred a few weeks after Katrina, we did have those aviation platforms available to get eyes on the ground in order to assess the full scope of the damage. We need much better communications in our "operability". First responders must be able to speak seamlessly, communicate seamlessly with the National Guard and both must be able to communicate without impediment in coordination with our active duty military forces. Our hardware is not compatible and in a more challenging way, our communications planning has not been done in a coordinated way. We have corrected that. This year if there is a major hurricane along the Gulf Coast, we will have, through careful planning and the right kind of technology, full inoperability of communications. And then lastly we need to be prepared to use military forces, consistent with the law, when in the aftermath of a catastrophic event, we experience significant outbreaks of civil disorder. We are relied upon civilian law enforcement to provide for the public safety of our citizenry, but following a catastrophic event, perhaps an event much larger than Katrina, we learned from Katrina that civil disorder must be anticipated and we have to preserve Constitiutional rights, we have to be prepared to enforce Federal Statuatory law by the proper employment consistent with the law of military forces when directed by the President of the United States. Let me summarize for you, I was, as always I had far too many thoughts for the minutes that I had. And also, as always, it takes me much too long to express those thoughts, but let me just give you a five minute summary and then move to questions. Katrina was not an event, it was a sober warning. If you look at the fifteen national planning scenarios that had been developed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Council, you will quickly discover that while Hurricane Katrina was indeed, in my judgment, a catastrophic event, it was at the low end of catastrophic events in terms of tragic loss of life and destruction of property. The fifteen national planning scenarios that have now been envisioned by DHS, could potentially involve a loss of life or a level of property destruction far greater than Hurricane Katrina. And so in that sense, Katrina was a very challenging wake up call to notify us that we were ill prepared at that point, last year to respond to even more challenging catastrophic events. And so the primary point that I want to make today, is an emphasis upon and an expression in my belief, that the time has come to move decisively toward a Goldwater-Nichols type of reform within the inner agency. And by that I don't mean necessarily the passage of a statue, which is what happened in 1986 and under the direction of that statue, the follow on integration of DOD capabilities into a joint war fighting concept, whether its required by law or by some other appropriate authority, we have got to come together in our inter agency planning because catastrophic events require a national response. No one department, including mine, has the capacity unilaterally to respond effectively to a catastrophic event. In our planning process, we must come together in order to anticipate the operational and tactical requirements able to be met by all Federal Agencies in partnership with state and local competencies, public and private sector, civilian and military, so that we fuse that national competency in a well prepared plan oriented toward, in my judgment, each one of those fifteen national planning scenarios. The national planning scenarios give us a framework for the development of true inter agency jointness. In my judgment, we should develop a departmental plan for each one of those fifteen national planning scenarios. And then, the Department of Homeland Security, in the exercise of its authority under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and HSPD 5, should integrate those departmental plans into a national response fully coordinated with all levels of government in the private sector so that when one of those fifteen national planning scenarios becomes a real world event, we are prepared, with a plan, that gives the 80% solution for the anticipated requirements. You cannot pull together a national response to a catastrophic event on the fly. You need to have a detailed plan able to be modified in a crisis environment so that before a nuclear