The Business of Counterterrorism

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Foreword

When I encountered audiences in the first year or so after the tragedy of September 11^th, 2001, the question I was most often asked was: “When are we going to get back to ‘normal’?” By “normal,” the questioner was referring to the life we knew before 9/11. The answer to the question was self-evident: NEVER! Instead, there was a “new normal,” and our challenge was first to understand it and then to do the learning necessary to secure our homeland in the face of this “new normal.”

Long before PPP was a recognizable acronym for public-private partnerships, it became clear to many leaders in the stand-up process of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that we could accomplish more—and do so more swiftly, efficiently, and effectively—if we reached out to the private sector for assistance. Authors Nathan Busch and Austen Givens have now inventoried and documented for the first time many of the elements that comprise one of the key pathways to what I believe will be a critical tool in securing our homeland.

Over this first decade in the “new normal” we have learned many lessons. Busch and Givens document many of them—especially those learned in the aftermath of natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina or man-made failures such as the Strategic Border Initiative (SBInet). Dozens of commissions and lessons learned studies have helped to shape our understanding of and design efforts toward solving the challenges of the “new normal.”

One of these lessons learned and a harbinger of things to come is that PPPs have evolved and will continue to evolve in the years ahead. For example, when we were challenged to stand up the new ← ix | x → Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Congress outlined 36 specific steps to be taken with hard deadlines provided for each step. I am convinced that we would still be working on steps #8 or #9 of this process if I had not reached out to industry. Dozens of companies, including large system integrators, airlines, trade associations, and leading edge research and development firms leaned forward and made priceless contributions in standing up the TSA. We met every deadline. Busch and Givens provide the framework for not only recognizing the first decade’s collaboration but the value of sustaining that collaboration into the future.

We are now attempting to learn and understand how to lead and manage in a dynamic environment. We must be focused on producing the professionals who will work in and lead the homeland security enterprise for the next several decades. Those professionals must be agile and adaptable. But most importantly, they must be skilled collaborators. Successful local government officials must be able to coordinate their efforts with state, federal and international partners. These players will recognize that in order to be successful agents of change, they will have to be able to examine the structure, processes, capacity for idea vetting, and skill levels of the people present in all elements of the homeland security enterprise. Such a review will determine what needs to be done for those elements to remain a part of the solution for the challenges of the “new normal.” I am convinced that PPPs will be a huge part of such reviews.

That framework and its reasoning are presented here for the reader. This book is a great start down the path of both our requirement to understand the challenges of this “new normal” and our commitment to secure our country. Solutions to many of our problems will be found when government answers the many “what” questions that are now in front of us. They should do so with private stakeholders at the table. Then they should facilitate ← x | xi → leading industry voices to answer the “how” questions. That is the essence of The Business of Counterterrorism: Public-Private Partnerships in Homeland Security: what do we need to do, and how are we going to do it?

For those of us who were in the trenches in the beginning, I wish we would have had this common sense book to read. It would have helped to shape our thinking then, and it can absolutely do so now.

Admiral James Milton Loy (USCG, Ret.)
Acting Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, 2005
Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, 2003–05
Administrator, TSA, 2002–03
Commandant, United States Coast Guard, 1998–2002

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Acknowledgments

This book is an outgrowth of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University’s Symposium on Homeland Security: Enhancing Public-Private Partnerships and Coordination, which took place July 19–20, 2012.

This symposium featured a remarkable group of government and business leaders in homeland security, including Thad Allen, former Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and National Incident Commander for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill response; Bill Bratton, former commissioner of the New York Police Department; Bob Stephan, executive vice president at CRA, Inc. and former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Infrastructure Protection; Thomas S. Winkowski, acting Deputy Administrator for U.S. Customs and Border Protection; and Terrie Suit, Secretary of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

We gratefully acknowledge these leaders’ contributions to the symposium, as well as the symposium sponsors: the Hampton Roads Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), Continuity First, Verizon Wireless, ABM, Lockheed Martin, ITA International, Bosch Global Services, Spectrum, and Mymic.

Outside of the symposium, we sought out many experts to provide us with background information on how government-business partnerships are transforming homeland security today. We especially thank Ami Abou-bakr, Mike Landefeld, Jim Loy, Sue Lynch, Elizabeth Mayo, Mark Milicich, Benjamin Muncy, Bob Newman, and Paul Byron Pattak for their time and expertise.

For their assistance with the cover design, we would like to thank Michael John and especially Amy Mayberry. For help with the references and bibliography, our thanks go to Ben Coffman and ← xiii | xiv → Kelsey Nichols. We also thank Rebecca Francescatti for her services on indexing.

Finally, we thank our wives, Liz and Rachel, as well as our families and friends, whose love and encouragement made this book possible.

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Introduction

I want to just say this about the private sector. In my mind, the government is incapable of responding to its maximum ability without private sector support.

—Hon. Tom Ridge, Former Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, August 3, 2011

April 20, 2010 had been an otherwise typical day. At 9:49 pm, however, the first of several blasts shattered the night air over the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately killing 11 workers and crippling the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.¹ The explosion and subsequent oil spill eventually became the largest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history.² Over the following months, hundreds of government and private sector actors convened around the Gulf of Mexico, summoning an unprecedented amount of equipment and technical expertise to stop the oil flow from the Gulf’s floor. BP, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entities, state governments, local governments, and hundreds of businesses and public sector agencies collaborated in response to the disaster.³ BP and local officials launched initiatives enlisting local fishermen to assist in the waterborne clean-up effort.⁴ The federal government used privately manufactured oil dispersants in recovery operations.⁵ Throughout this process, the public and private sector worked closely together to restore a sense of normalcy in the Gulf.

The Deepwater Horizon incident provides a large-scale illustration of several important trends in homeland security. Although the DHS was initially created after the September 11^th, 2001 terrorist attacks to coordinate federal counterterrorism efforts more effectively, the concept of “homeland security” has since ← 1 | 2 → evolved to address a host of man-made and natural disasters.“Homeland security” thus includes a wide range of subfields and functions, including critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, information sharing, port of entry security, and emergency management.⁶

In addition, as homeland security has evolved, public-private partnerships have increased in prominence. Although these partnerships are a major issue of discussion and study in businesses and government agencies involved in homeland security efforts, this issue has received a much less thorough treatment in scholarly literature on homeland security. This is surprising, as public-private partnerships are perhaps the most dynamic and important subjects for homeland security practitioners today.

Public-private partnerships have been defined as collaboration between a public sector (government) entity and a private sector (for-profit) entity to achieve a specific goal or set of objectives.⁷ This collaboration results in government-business relationships that include service contracts, supply chains, ad hoc partnerships, channel partnerships, information dissemination partnerships, and civic switchboard partnerships.⁸These partnerships have been discussed in narrow ways in the scholarly literature in related disciplines (such as public administration broadly understood) and some of the various subfields of homeland security (such as emergency management or critical infrastructure protection).⁹ For example, Sheffi suggests public-private partnerships are important for supply chain security under threat of international terrorism, a theme that Closs and McGarrell repeat.¹⁰ Others underscore that private sector participation is integral in critical infrastructure protection and homeland security.¹¹ Discussion of the private sector’s role within other subfields, such as intelligence, cybersecurity, transportation security, public health, and hazard mitigation ← 2 | 3 → shows increasing understanding of businesses’ impact on homeland security.¹²

Overall, however, the scholarly literature has not yet caught up to the practitioner understanding of public-private partnerships’ prominence in homeland security.¹³ This book begins to fill a gap in homeland security scholarship by identifying the essential role that public-private partnerships are now taking in homeland security, and by examining the implications of this transformative shift in the field. As we will see, public-private partnerships hold great promise, but also face significant obstacles that will need to be overcome.

In this book we focus on five areas of homeland security—critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, information sharing, security at U.S. ports of entry, and disaster recovery—to illustrate how public-private partnerships are transforming homeland security as a whole. We chose these areas because they are among the most essential components of homeland security and, perhaps as a result of their importance, they also appear to be where public-private partnerships have developed the most in recent years. Although we acknowledge that these five areas do not cover every aspect of homeland security, it would be neither possible nor practical for us to cover every facet of public-private partnerships in homeland security in a single volume. Despite this limitation, we believe that the five areas of homeland security that we selected for this book serve as reliable indicators of how public-private partnerships influence homeland security today.

The book proceeds as follows. In Chapter 1, we trace the history of public-private partnerships in homeland security since America’s founding, examine the impact of current partnerships between government and businesses in homeland security, and survey some of the challenges and opportunities facing public-private partnerships in homeland security as a whole. ← 3 | 4 →

In Chapter 2, we focus on critical infrastructure protection. Much scholarship has identified the advantages of public-private partnerships in critical infrastructure protection—including reduced duplication of effort, enhanced cross-sector communication, and increased efficiency. Such benefits suggest that public-private partnerships will be a significant and enduring part of critical infrastructure protection initiatives. However, we argue that a pattern is emerging that may lead to a fracture between the appearance and reality of public-private partnerships in critical infrastructure protection. Although some scholarship has focused on specific challenges in this subfield of homeland security, not enough attention has been paid to thinking through the issues facing critical infrastructure protection as a whole. We maintain that unless concrete steps are taken to bolster public-private partnerships in critical infrastructure protection, they will be much less effective than hoped for by homeland security analysts.

Chapter 3 argues that public-private partnerships are now essential to cybersecurity, and will remain so in the future, because of the converging interests of government and private sector actors in cybersecurity. Increasing attacks on U.S. government computer systems, as well as broader efforts to disrupt access to commercial websites, underscore the need for enhanced understanding of the principles of cybersecurity in the broader homeland security environment. Conceptually, however, there are key distinctions between types of “cyberattacks,” which tend to become blurred in public discourse. Cyberterrorism, cyberespionage and cybercrime—while related—are notionally independent, though they often overlap, too. We seek to define these terms and discuss how information technology firms partner with government to bolster cybersecurity.

In Chapter 4, we argue that efforts to correct the information sharing failures of September 11^th, 2001 have inadvertently created ← 4 | 5 → new problems: a trust deficit between the public and private sector, information overload for homeland security analysts, and a decline in information quality. The challenge for public-private partnerships now is to build cross-sector trust, control the flow of information, and manage information quality for decision-makers in government and business. The chapter examines the historic increase in post-September 11^th information sharing within the federal government, as well as among local and state governments and businesses. It also addresses the emerging role of private sector partners in information sharing, and new opportunities for businesses and government to enhance information exchange for homeland security.

In Chapter 5 we turn to security at U.S. air, land, and sea ports, and discuss inspections of persons and cargo nationwide. Throughout this discussion, we underscore the role of businesses in helping to advance changes in homeland security operations. The chapter concludes with an overview of emerging challenges in port security, including inspection of cargo containers, urban and national rail security, transportation of hazardous materials, and the expanding role of the private sector to meet those challenges.

Chapter 6 assesses the effectiveness and limitations of the business community in post-disaster recovery efforts, including the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill.What do FEMA and the business community perceive one another’s role to be during large-scale incidents? What possible lessons for future public-private sector collaboration in disaster recovery can be learned from these cases? We end the chapter with a description of some of the essential elements of effective public-private sector collaboration in disaster recovery.

The final chapter of the book identifies key insights about public-private partnerships in homeland security, based upon the preceding chapters in the book. We underscore how critical the ← 5 | 6 → private sector is in homeland security operations, and argue that this arrangement forecasts a new operational framework for homeland security in the years ahead. Indeed, today’s critical homeland security challenges demand that the private sector continue to partner closely with government for the foreseeable future.

Notes