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Gilmore Commission - Minutes

Panel to Assess the Capabilities for Domestic Response to Terrorist Acts Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction

Arlington, Virginia 8 November 2002

Present: James Gilmore, Chairman James Greenleaf Paul Maniscalco Bill Reno Pat Ralston George Foresman Ellen Gordon Hubert Williams Mike Freeman Dallas Jones Jack Marsh Patty Quinlisk Ken Shine A.D. Vickery Bill Garrison Jerry Bremer John Hathaway John Lombardi Mike Wermuth Jennifer Brower Guests: Austin Yamada- RAND Staff Susan Everingham- RAND Staff Suzanne Spaulding Nancy Rizor- RAND Staff Hillary Peck- RAND Staff Gabi Bloom- RAND Staff Scott McMahon- RAND Staff

Gilmore: Good morning everyone, we are going to go over a revised schedule in order to get through all the materials. We will begin by taking 15 minutes to review the Agro Terrorism stuff.

I. Agriculture Terrorism Discussion Quinlisk: What we have done is without losing any of the important ideas within the chapter, we have brought it down to five recommendations. The first one is the development of resources, namely the stockpile. The second is the need for the communications network. All these pieces fit together to create a comprehensive plan. The third recommendation would be for the need for a comprehensive laboratory system that minimizes time delays. The fourth one will look at the compensation aspect. We are asking that they look at the compensation to ensure quick reporting. The last will pull together all the recommendations that deal with education and training. No specifics of who should be trained but says that it is necessary to train and educate within this sector.

Gilmore: So Jennifer will put that together and give a draft next week?

Gilmore: Can we distribute this draft on email and if anyone wants to participate in a conference call that can happen.

Quinlisk: I would ask that the sub-panel first revise it as we want before it goes to the entire panel.

Greenleaf: Just curious, what did the UK do about compensation?

Wermuth: We will find that out.

Brower: There was definitely a feeling of unfair compensation there, we have some research that will be circulated to the panel soon.

Gilmore: Why don’t we double back to the military panel.

II. Use of the Military Discussion Reno: Everyone has a revised copy on their desk. I would suggest that the sub-panel review this in a conference call and distribute it next week. The major change is on page seven, under the paragraph that starts with ‘each legal authority…’ there are major changes and I suggest that you look through it carefully. We talk about comprehensive standards. We talk about the limitations of Title 10. We talk about the difficulty of mobilizing US reserve forces versus mobilizing the National Guard. The paragraph below that, talks about the experience of the Guard and the need for an immediate national response which could be calling the National Guard up, like the President did in September. The paragraph below that is on airport security. If you skip the next paragraph and go to the middle of page eight starting with ‘deploying Guardsmen…’ there are changes that elaborate.

Quinlisk: Do you talk about why Bush used the Title 32 instead of Title 10? It might be helpful to add the pros and cons of both.

Foresman: Is our intent to say that we don’t have a coordinated process?

Gordon: Title 32 means that they are under state control but paid federally? And Title 10 means that they are under federal control and paid federally?

Maniscalco: How is the governor empowered in the state in EMAT?

Gordon: I think the issue is Title 32 or Title 10…states like 32, we would push for that.

Reno: If you look at the philosophy of what this will lead to, it will lead to legislation that allows the President to ask the governors to place National Guardsmen with training exercises in advance to have them work more effectively under governors, paid by the federal government in a mission.

Foresman: The Guard has evolved over the years without training and coordination. So we are saying that we need to clear up standards and procedures within the 56 different Guard systems. Reno: Let us write a paragraph about the intent of the change.

Bremer: It might be useful to state the problem, bluntly, and then the recommendation flows right from that. I think if the people around this table aren’t getting it then the audience won’t get it either.

Marsh: I think a paragraph about Title 32 and a paragraph about Title 10 is necessary. It’s the Congress that provides the training for the militia in the constitution, maybe this should be stated in there.

Reno: If you go to the top of page nine you will see the other major change. I would ask that you read that one fairly carefully. It talks of the option of a governor not to participate.

Gordon: But what governor isn’t going to participate?

Jones: It depends on the options. There are conditions where a governor might opt for a different solution.

Reno: Should we somehow put that in there?

Reno: We will make that point about the other options available.

Williams: Why would you use other forces instead of the Guards?

Gilmore: Because they didn’t have specific training whereas police officers are trained their entire career to deal with these kinds of issues.

Williams: The linkage between the Guard and the police is highly problematic, it is always beneficial that the Guard can provide backup to the police but it is difficult to do that because of lack of coordination, no defined roles and responsibilities and a lack of communications structures. The Guard needs more specific roles to back and support the local police.

Gilmore: So like a classic natural disaster rules? It’s a little unfair to ask a Guardsman to go into a terrorist situation with only three days training where the stakes are much higher than a natural disaster.

Williams: I just see a fuzzy area in the linkage between these two entities. It is difficult in dealing with terrorism to decide how to use the Guard. No one has defined how they come together. Should there be joint command where they have common radio frequency? Communication is absolutely critical.

Gilmore: During 9-11 I utilized the Guard for perimeter operations but I put trained police officers in the core of the area. At no time during that did I think about who was in charge.

Jones: We connected the Guards to the airport authority police so they worked in conjunction with them. Normally we have law enforcement branches meeting with local authority. There is coordination that can be done and should be done.

Williams: I guess what I am arguing for is that in the beginning the police can usually handle an emergency but if it lasts for any period of time they get worn down. That is when having the backup component can be important. But there are lots of ways that the Guard could be more effectively deployed. During the Rodney King riots, the Guard was there but they were pretty ineffective. They are used in units and when you break up their unit you break up effectiveness. I think that the resources could be used more effectively if it is thought about.

Gordon: I don’t think we should use the military for law enforcement events.

Reno: I would like to go to page nine. This discussion will yield more clarity. Inherent in this report is that the Guard under Title 32 would have authority under the governor of the state. When you get NORTHCOM and the focus on homeland security the opportunities to change the way the Guard is trained are there.

Wermuth: State law and governor directives can limit the Guard in any law enforcement activity. But the tradeoff is if you don’t do it this way and have the Guard provide support, even law enforcement, you may be trading that for the option that either the President or the Attorney General or Secretary of Defense will send in other forces to take over those missions and they may be less trained to do these missions than the National Guard is.

Ralston: I don’t think we should tie the governors’ hands.

Jones: We are skirting 10 and 32. I am getting uncomfortable because we are starting to set up a shadow operation. It seems like instead of confronting 10 or 32, we are going around and putting them under control of NORTHCOM.

Reno: No, they are not under NORTHCOM control. The idea is that in these circumstances they are still under the governors’ control. The significance is that that would be identified in advance, they would be trained to respond to a lot of hypothetical events, so that if something happens the chain of command is clear and they are trained for it.

Gilmore: This has to be defined on the page, in English.

Williams: Dallas’ point is that once you set the stage that way, it is easy to federalize that arrangement. I think it is more tempting to federalize it.

Reno: We discussed an option of not including this recommendation until next year but the premise to all of this is that there is actually a serious threat and we ought to be prepared for that by designing the control structure and training for it. I would argue that the odds of federalizing would be higher it this doesn’t happen.

Gilmore: Do we all agree with what Bill is saying?

Gordon: I understand the intent but I don’t think it is broken to the extent that we are making it out to be. I think it is just the payment issue, that people are not being compensated greatly enough.

Reno: The bottom line issue is response to large-scale events.

Shine: Rather than try to create this kind of structure, I am wondering whether the focus shouldn’t be on encouraging and facilitating national exercises between the Guard and law enforcement, jointly. Maybe the focus could be on exercising instead of this formal structure.

Wermuth: To the extent that payment is an issue, I would suggest that this solution helps that situation and doesn’t hurt it. If you bring them into Title 10, they are locked in. If you do something like this it gives the governor the right to rotate people through and not keep people in as long as if they were simply under 10. This provides more flexibility for individual personnel when you compare 10 and 32 and this option. But this seems to be a smaller issue than chain of command and timeliness of getting Guardsmen there.

Reno: Would you like us to take this out now and deal with it later?

Gilmore: Okay, take it out.

Reno: We will take it out and circulate a new draft and have a conference call next week or so.

Shine: Are we going to make any comments about the other two recommendations? I wanted to ask about the sense on the units that have exclusive homeland security focus. What does that mean?

Reno: The intent of this one goes back to the requirements that the states and localities would report to the NORTHCOM. The intent is based on the requirements of the states and a select National Guard would be designed and trained for certain missions. For example there is no Guard group that is designed to back up law enforcement officers in a mission where they need to communicate. So there would be forces that are strictly trained on this mission, they would only be for homeland security, they would not go fight a war.

Shine: My concern is the size and shape of these units, some clarification of what we mean by units is needed.

Reno: We will try to clarify but I don’t know what they are until the requirements are defined by the states and localities. There is no intent right now in the Guard to train units to do anything other than they are doing now. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, if you have a problem in Iowa you call the Guard and you get whoever. Instead I am saying tailor the Guard to deal with specific problems so that when that problem arises you can call a select unit of the Guard to deal with that.

Ralston: Would the governor have a say in what type of unit is established in his National Guard? I think he should have a say in this.

Reno: That occurs today, it is already coordinated.

Gilmore: I want to return to recommendation one again. I think there is common ground here. Lets see if we can put this in an email and see if we can get something that everyone can agree on.

Reno: I think this would provide enormous capability long-term. We will get a clean copy of this out soon.

Gilmore: We are going to move on now. We are going to start CIP now and finish it later this afternoon.

III. Critical Infrastructure Policy Discussion Wermuth: We discussed what to put into the workbooks about CIP…what you will find in the workbooks is rough and admittedly disjointed. It doesn’t have all of the right words in there. It was done at two different times, the cyber piece and the physical piece. It is our intention to make the point that cyber and physical shouldn’t be separated like they have been by the executive branch. This piece is nowhere as mature as some of the other pieces. I apologize ahead of time for this.

Marsh: There are enormous problems within this sector. It is estimated that 90% of infrastructure information is within the private sector and we have to be careful that we don’t recommend too much that would impose on the public sector. The first recommendation deals with burden sharing. This needs a lot of rewriting but there are some helpful things that have not been addressed. If you go to the cyber section, which is on page ten, the problem is that technology is moving so fast that it is impossible to get a snapshot of what is going on right now. It would seem to me that revisiting our earlier recommendation about a commission to identify the legal issues that arise would be the best thing.

Jones: It is clear from the National Strategy that the federal government is hesitant to regulate software and such. But there are other ways of doing this. We think that it could be accomplished by specifications on government computers because they have the lion share of the computers out there. This strategy, though it may be lengthy to implement, would be the best way to go.

Bremer: If you look at the cyber part, we only have one recommendation. There is nothing in the cyber part except an independent commission recommendation. My suggestion is we drop the cyber section entirely and in the beginning of the chapter put something that refers to cyber security, mention the commission, state that they know more than we do about this. Then you can just look at the front part of this chapter more in depth. We all know that cyber is complicated and no one is qualified to deal with it, refer it to a commission and get on with it.

Marsh: I think generally less is more but at some point you have to pin the tail on the donkey. There is the private sector issue and there is the commercial side, these have to be addressed. The role of the federal government has to be addressed. To what extent do you go into federal regulation here? The base of this triangle is technology. The next side is private sector and industry and the shortest side of the triangle should be the government regulation. The regulation is trying to increase this. I think there has to be a powerful statement made to make sure that people do not brush this aside.

Maniscalco: The digital dependency of our government doubles every 18 months. Since Sept 11, we have witnessed a 15,000% increase in attacks on technology. This ranges from organized groups to children. We need to take a real solid stance on this. The digital attacks that we are seeing are increasing, the government doesn’t control any of these assets, it’s all up to the private sector. The technology czar hasn’t gotten his arms around this.

Bremer: We all know there is a problem but what can this panel do? The only recommendation we have is to form an independent commission. I am saying make that point and move on.

Wermuth: There may be more recommendations that are not here yet.

Bremer: If we have concrete recommendations, lets do it.

Gilmore: I think this is a critical area, we mentioned it in our third report. This report deserves some major statement. I agree with Jack that we ought to do something on this. I think we need to fill this out before the end of the report. I would have a problem studying this all year and then just stating something that pawns this off on someone else. We are going to come back to this topic this afternoon. Now we have the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller here to join us.

IV. CLASSIFIED DISCUSSION V. TOPOFF 2 Discussion

Wermuth: I would like to introduce Ted Macklin and Corey Gruber who are here to discuss TOPOFF 2. We have asked them to give us the big picture, some timelines and we may, in the future ask more questions.

Mackin: I am Ted Macklin, the co-director of the TOPOFF 2 exercise. We briefed this panel about three years ago on TOPOFF 1. Since then we have provided 8,500 requests of support. Also we have delivered 151 exercises since the TOPOFF 2000 exercises in May 2000. Soon to be 152. In terms of the budget, I want to make sure that everyone understands, TOPOFF 2000 had $3.5 million to fund participation of the state and local levels. TOPOFF 2 is funded at $10 million, half of which will be distributed to venue cities. One other point, I co-direct this exercise with a colleague from the Department of State. The State Department is funded at $3 million, so that makes the total $13 million for these exercises.

Gruber: (power point presentation). Here is a little about TOPOFF 2000; this was a full scale exercise that was directed by Congress to be a no-notice exercise. When we talk about TOPOFF 2 we will see that we have changed this to a series of exercises. What we learned from TOPOFF 2000 steered TOPOFF 2 exercises, goals and objections. The TOPOFF design was started before 9-11. We needed to narrow our focus on what we want to achieve by these exercises. Last time we had 23 pages of objectives, this time we have prioritized what is essential and narrowed our focus to national goals. This time we will be including the government of Canada in these exercises. The government of Canada will help us to represent the rest of the international community. We are using a series of events that culminate in difficulty to work up to a full-scale exercise. After every seminar we publish the results of the seminar so that all the participants can take the data and act on it right away. We are also going to look at direction and control as we get toward the command post exercise. Some people call them functional exercises, we call them command post exercises, they will be used in correlation with advanced distance learning exercises. Last time we used what was called the virtual lose scenario, we simulated the media, with a virtual news network. Every hour on the hour we had reporting on what was happening. We will do that again so that anyone can download that information. From the 11-16 of May we will carry out a full-scale exercise in the venues that we have identified.

Wermuth: To what extent could panel members participate in this timeline?

Gruber: You will have opportunities to look at the command post exercises and advanced distance learning exercises. At the large-scale event we have a limited amount of people. We may be able to squeeze in one of you maybe but we are really tight on that.

Reno: In any of the exercises are you attempting to test the role of NORTHCOM and where is that? And assuming the new DHS is standing by March, do you have any plans to test any of the design concepts?

Gruber: NORTHCOM will play a role. NORTHCOM reps have been at all meetings so far. DOD is running separate meetings about their participation. It will be limited to command post play most likely. The OHS is looking actively at having Ridge play and some of their staff play. A lot is contingent on what happens with the new department. We are relying on OHS to help us with all aspects of this. Now we have a National Strategy which we got from the last exercises. We have some tasks in the exercises that there are standards for. Others have common procedures. Maybe by TOPOFF 10 we will have all the tasks and all the standards that we will need to do this.

Maniscalco: Is this strictly limited to the macro view? Is there any space for the state and localities to participate?

Gruber: We draw from across the country, we are going to rely on the states for the collaborative effort. We will use experts from every level of government.

Brower: How do you disseminate the information back to local and state levels that do not participate?

Gruber: We are turning around a report on every activity that we do. We have a secure web portal so that anyone registered can get reports and transcripts about each activity. The best payoff at the end is to have those who participated in the exercise to go out and disseminate that activity to others. We have to make it available to everybody, it is our obligation. Important to note is that all of our venues are sharing information with each other. I have already alluded to this before, that the information is available because we have the obligation to let people know but not the wrong people. Whatever we do here we have to be attentive to protect this information, marking it all as official use only. Some of it may end up in a classified realm. Brower: If it is a surprise exercise and you are telling us when the dates are…

Gruber: This time it is not surprise, Congress relieved us of that because of logistics. We don’t think that compromises what we will run in the exercises. One final note, what we are trying to do is give the best synthetic experience we can so that we can have the best unbloody battle if faced with an event.

Brower: How do you decide on the types of threats to address?

Gruber: In the course of the hundreds of exercises that we are doing we are covering the full scale of the threats, from bombings all the way to nuclear and high explosive attacks and bio- terror. The scenario is just an artifice so that all participants can meet their directives.

Hathaway: Is the joint task force civil support also going to be set up?

Gruber: As it is now, no.

Greenleaf: Do you have reps from international associations of police and fire?

Gruber: We have just started to coordinate these people. We would welcome their participation if they would like to get involved.

Greenleaf: It seems to me that when they put on these conferences that it would be a golden opportunity to share lessons learned with a bunch of people at once.

Gruber: Again, we encourage participants of the exercises to take what they have learned and go out and disseminate the information.

Gilmore: Thank you Corey and Tom. We have several more items on the agenda and we should be close to done by around 3:00. Lois Davis is here to discuss the survey. She is from RAND’s Santa Monica office.

VI. RAND Survey Discussion Davis: What I am presenting is the results for the survey for the full sample, state responder, local responders and first responders. We did a survey prior to 9-11 and in August of this year we focused on what has changed since 9-11. On the second survey we focused on preparedness activities to see what has changed. (summary of survey results- see slide show).

Maniscalco: We need to define training, is it sitting in a class or being competent?

Brower: I wanted to know if the local responders are not getting as much funding as the state people, should that be different? Should the localities get more money since they are the first ones there?

Vickery: I will answer that by saying that the money goes to the state.

Freeman: Some local state responders have many more people to train and that is why it will take longer for them to train.

Maniscalco: It is also an issue of fragmentation and access to that money at the local level.

Davis: If you have any specific comments that you want to put into the next report or survey, please let us know.

Ralston: Is there any information on the Oklahoma survey? The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) survey?

Davis: I am working on both surveys, there is very little overlap of the two samples. In the MIPT survey in the law enforcement part we are going into a lot more detail. Those findings won’t be available until the spring. We are also preparing other documentation and thinking about the next wave of the survey.

Wermuth: We will be putting together a survey sub-panel and anyone who is interested can participate on that.

Davis: If you have any comments or feedback on this can you get back to me within a week because we are writing this up pretty quickly.

Reno: Does the data get distorted by the fact that there are large discrepancies in numbers of populations?

Davis: The short answer is no.

VII. Critical Infrastructure Policy Discussion Gilmore: The next most important thing is to finish the CIP discussion and then we can do administrative work after.

Marsh: Did you intend to de-link cyber from the rest like Jerry said or include it all together? I think some reference to it is in order.

Maniscalco: I don’t think you can separate the two. You take cyber and build it into physical security.

Garrison: You need to stress that percentage of the CIP that is privately owned.

Bremer: I just think that as the group goes back and looks at these recommendations we should take a close look at what we are proposing that has already been proposed. For example on top of page four, it looks like we are saying something that is already there.

Gilmore: Any further presentation on this?

Bremer: General aviation. The key transportation vulnerability we have now is on general aviation.

Wermuth: It is intended to be there, it will be there. There will be at least one specific recommendation on this topic.

Maniscalco: We should probably go back to Steve Flynn’s briefing. Do we intend to mention rail?

Wermuth: Yes, in general but I think it is one of the things we should look at next year.

Maniscalco: Looking at passenger trains and exploring the chemical aspect of rail. We really need to stress that everyone goes and looks at their website to make sure we are not giving the keys to the playbook so to say. We might want to look at what we are telegraphing to the enemy?

McMahon: Rand has an entire study on that just completed from Kevin O’Connell…on what is on the web, what should be and what shouldn’t be. Unclassified. I believe it is for official use only.

Gilmore: What language addresses the port issue?

Wermuth: Not enough.

Gilmore: It seems to me that ports may be the most vulnerable right now. The focus that I am hearing is less on exploding a device and more on the consequences of that. People tend to overreact now, this could stop commerce and this would have a spin-off economic effect.

Bremer: I think our problem is to find a way to say this in a new way. We ought to focus on some new things to say instead of ringing our hands through what other people have already said.

Maniscalco: We are not just talking about just ports, look at the Haitians that came to Miami, it is the entire perimeter. I think we need to recommend that they fast-track our other recommendations.

Marsh: If we miss what we have already recommended then they are missing a large portion of this.

Wermuth: We are going to do this globally, there will be a table in there with each of our recommendations that have been put forth and where they stand.

Gilmore: I think it is valid to repeat ourselves. Even a repetition is a contribution to national security.

Maniscalco: We are about to begin a major military engagement and we are going to see our resources displaced and moved in the near future. Its either tactics or technology here, and the tactics are we are going to lose bodies.

Brower: What does the war with Iraq mean for the cyber section?

Maniscalco: We are going to have to give the RAND researcher a direction here on where we want to go on the port issue.

Jones: The threat is there and the impact is there but I am not sure if the federal structure has been there to fund the Coast Guard and ensure that they have the capabilities to address the threat.

Wermuth: We have these appropriations bills stuck up in the legislature.

Reno: My recommendation is that I think there is enough information now to that suggest that al-Qaeda is intending to attack our economic underpinnings, this should be addressed in the report. As we get involved in more and more activities like Kosovo and Afghanistan we are going to use more and more resources and I would hope that NORTHCOM would be able to deal with that. If we have to go into the Middle East then our capabilities here in the homeland are lessened. I think there should be an economic front end to this infrastructure chapter. The impact is huge and can be energized with fairly little cost.

Vickery: The key is that the Coast Guard isn’t going to do the job alone, the emphasis on ports should be a top priority instead of behind dams and such. It doesn’t just affect the stuff going into the port, it affects trucks and trains, and every single area of this process is affected if a port is shut down. There is a big need to prioritize this. Sabotage is a lot easier than we have thought it was.

Gilmore: It’s hard because you have other things like gas, telecommunications and others, which are so important. To prioritize this would be hard.

Bremer: There are lots of studies on this, there are a lot of recommendations around, we need to say something new.

Brower: Has anyone made a recommendation about spreading out port diversions a little? Jones: While that is a great idea, I don’t see any short-term relief for that.

Gilmore: What can this commission do? Can we do something productive in this report? I think cyber adds a great deal to this report.

Spaulding: Something that hasn’t been done is to highlight innovative things that have been produced by the private sector not just the government. It is to encourage others to pick up on these.

Wermuth: We will go back and with consultation of the panel revisit this from top to bottom. We will circulate something else for the panel before the final version is published. There is more out there that needs to be put on the table.

Gilmore: Now we need to discuss where we go from here.

VII. Administrative Discussion Wermuth: What we will do next week is publish a backward publishing schedule that will take us from Dec. 15 to the current day. This includes all the other conference calls and the new interim report that we decided to do about Strategy and Structure. We will put that out next week, including a couple placeholders for full panel conference calls if needed, as well as a final teleconference before the final report. I would like to take a few minutes to talk about where we are going for the 5th report.

Hathaway: We don’t have a national policy for quarantine…should we discuss this? We need to have some national policy.

Brower: The way we discussed this so far is to delegate this to the states.

Wermuth: Good point, we will talk to the Health and Medical sub-panel about that. We will put that in the report. Quarantine.

Reno: Have we helped Congress to determine the right allocation of funds? Maybe this should be in the next report…look ahead like a decade.

Wermuth: Here is what I think we have for the 5th report. Chapters include 1. Strategy and Structure 2. Use of the Military 3. Health and Medical 4. CIP Those four things are the core of this report and should expand another year. Patty mentioned that the psychological issues of an attack should be addressed in depth.

Williams: Could psychological issues be a subset of Health and Medical?

Brower: The good thing is that RAND is already doing research in this area.

Gilmore: We will call that for a vote at a future time.

McMahon: There is a related topic; citizen preparedness and how the government should prepare individual and groups in terrorist event. DHS is supposed to be involved in this somehow.

Wermuth: There is one more thing that might be a chapter and that is the whole issue of measures of effectiveness, metrics etc…is that worthy of a separate chapter? It might be a cross-cutting issue. If it is a major chapter, we are going to look at it and come back with a plan for research on we are going to do. Jones: I think it is worth talking about. The Congress is saying that they need performance measurements to determine if the money that is being spent is working. It will be coming up next year.

Freeman: I would concur, I think we should start with it as separate and see where it goes from there.

Wermuth: Our cross cutting themes for this report are the following: 1. Private sector 2. Civil rights 3. State and Local preparedness We have been focused on recommendations and these have not been flushed out yet. There will be more language that you will see as we fill out the chapters. Measures of effectiveness could be added to that list or could be a stand-alone chapter in the future.

Brower: If the commission could come up with some way to create specific recommendations for the private sectors that would be helpful. Would you like to consider that as a full chapter?

Gilmore: I think that is valid.

Wermuth: I propose that we look at it separately and then from there it can be more or less important.

Reno: I know that FEMA is starting to look at the private sector’s role.

Wermuth: We simply have no strategy at all to deal with private sector interfaces. Somebody has to take a stab at how the federal government should be working with the private sector. They are flat on their backs right now.

Maniscalco: I think we need to deconstruct this and go back to square one. We have yet to define what ‘readiness’ is. What is ‘readiness’? They keep passing laws and fragmenting this but we may be measuring something that may not be relevant. What is enough? Who is ready? Somewhere in the future someone is going to ask where all the money went, what it got us. We have to get a definition of ‘readiness’.

Gilmore: The real issue is that there will never be a stop point. The real question is when do you stop? When is it sufficient? Maybe that is a good overarching strategic question.

Maniscalco: It is all-hazard. It is economic and psychological. We haven’t gotten to the point where we have institutionalized anything.

Gilmore: I think it’s a powerful statement. Is there anything anyone else wants to say?

Wermuth: I recommend that we approve the two sets of minutes that are in your books. (no objections).

Gilmore: I think we are going very deep into the substance of the material that we are working with. This looks a lot more in-depth than what we have done in the past. It is more sophisticated than it was even last year. I thank everyone for their diligence. An editorial sub- panel is usually made of George, Jennifer and Mike. Anyone else?

Adjournment