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Balancing authorities and responsibilities within our federal
system has been a matter of continuous debate since the earliest
days of the republic. Its continued relevance is exemplified in our
current national conversation over how to most effectively organize
and operate for homeland security and defense. Crises and
catastrophic events in our homeland require Americans from
different organizations, jurisdictions, and functions to work
together. Yet despite considerable national effort and resources
devoted to developing and improving our collective response
capabilities, effectiveness in working together-unity of
effort-still seems to elude us. Achieving unity of effort is the
central challenge to effective homeland response operations. No
single organization, function, or stakeholder has all the necessary
tools to respond completely to the wide range of crises that
routinely occur, or could occur, in our homeland. Combining the
assets, capabilities, expertise, and resources of multiple
participants has proven to be exceedingly complex and difficult.
Our homeland response capabilities are considerable, but they are
dispersed across a patchwork of jurisdictions and functions. The
challenge in homeland response operations is neither inadequate
resources nor lack of capabilities, but rather in being able to
bring them to bear at the right time and place, and in the right
combination. Disasters in our homeland have enormous consequences.
Regardless of cause or extent, they always hold the potential for
significant loss of life, human suffering, economic dislocation,
and erosion of public confidence in government. Given all that is
at stake, we must do better. There are certainly a number of ways
to improve our results; this monograph proposes three specific ways
to do so. First, enhancing our capacity for unity of effort
requires more than simply devoting more resources and rhetoric to
the problem. The challenge is more fundamental; it requires us to
change the way we think about homeland response in order to
establish the intellectual pre-conditions for unified effort. A
second way to enhance our capacity for unity of effort is to ensure
that national doctrine can be broadly implemented. A truly national
homeland response doctrine system will function in an interagency,
intergovernmental, multi-jurisdictional environment. Implementing
it requires a new management structure that can also operate in the
spaces between agencies and governments. A third way to enhance
unity of effort is to remove barriers to employment of military
capabilities for homeland response operations. Achieving unity of
effort in homeland response is a complex challenge, among the
greatest of our age. It is the single most important factor in our
ability to plan for and respond effectively to disasters at home.
We devote enormous resources to public safety and security at many
levels. Our citizens surely have a right to expect that these
resources will be well used by their leaders, elected and
appointed. This means that we must find better ways to work
together. It requires leaders and organizations at all levels to
combine their efforts, resources, and capabilities to achieve
complete and responsive solutions. It requires us to develop new
ways of thinking about and managing homeland response capabilities,
before disaster strikes.
Any significant homeland response event requires Americans to work
together. This is a complex challenge. The authors assert that the
principal obstacle to effective homeland response is a recurring
failure to achieve unity of effort across a diverse and often
chaotic mix of participating federal, state, and local government
and nongovernmental organizations. Despite a decade of planning
since the terror attacks of September 2001, unity of effort still
eludes us-particularly in the largest and most dangerous of crises.
The authors examine how the military's joint doctrine system
affected joint military operational capabilities, concluding that a
similar national homeland response doctrinal system is needed to
create and sustain unity of effort. Doctrine performs a vital
unifying function in complex operations, standardizing ways and
means. A doctrinal system operates in a dynamic cycle, providing a
process to identify capability gaps, develop and validate
solutions, and incorporate new concepts into evolving plans and
operational capabilities. To implement a dynamic national doctrine,
the authors propose a new management concept modeled on the joint
interagency task force. They also propose eliminating obstacles to
unity of effort within the military, including the temporary
employment of any relevant and available military capabilities
under the direction of a governor.
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