Randall Larsen | In the Media

CQ Homeland Security – Weapons

Nov. 30, 2007 – 6:58 p.m.

We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About Homeland Security, Says Author
By Eleanor Stables, CQ Staff

This is not the usual way a reporter reports a story—usually, I ask the questions, and the person I’m interviewing answers them.

But this time the man I’m writing about has all the questions. Randall J. Larsen, director of the Institute for Homeland Security, is the author of “Our Own Worst Enemy: Asking the Right Questions About Security to Protect You, Your Family, and America.”

Here’s Larsen’s suggestion for a conversation starter at the 2008 presidential debates: “What’s your plan for preventing a mushroom cloud over an American city?”

In the first presidential debate in 2004 between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both agreed that preventing the proliferation of nuclear material was their first national security priority. But the Bush administration has not made nuclear nonproliferation enough of a priority, according to Larsen.

“I have not seen the serious issues of homeland security debated,” he says.

On a related note, he asks, “Who is in charge of preventing a mushroom cloud over an American city? . . . Other than the president, you can’t find who that is.”

Similarly, and even more importantly, no one person is in charge of biodefense, Larsen says. “If the president said who’s in charge of my national missile defense system, they could bring two people into the Oval Office — one guy’s in charge of money, one guy’s in charge of policy. That’s it . . . why can’t we have something like that for biodefense?”

There are few topics on which Larsen doesn’t have a question, for the presidential candidates, or anybody else who wants to offer an opinion on homeland security policy:

“What is their plan for 47 million people without health care? That’s not very helpful in trying to build a better biosecurity system in the country,” says Larsen, who is the national security adviser to the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
What do they think of the 2001 anti-terrorism law known as the Patriot Act (PL 109-177)?
Do we need a domestic intelligence organization? Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, he says, “the FBI is still failing at domestic intelligence.”
What incentives would they give universities to increase the study of homeland security? “Universities really led the effort for the serious academic study of the policies and strategies that succeeded in the Cold War. The major universities have not really picked this topic up,” he says. Members of Congress and their staff lack homeland security expertise largely because of the few degrees available in the subject, and short executive education classes are an interim solution, Larsen says. Because homeland security is a new field, homeland security committees are at a disadvantage to other congressional committees that have members who have been on the committee for 20 years and staff with Ph.Ds in the field, he says.

Ask a Stupid Question . . .

In his book, Larsen writes that “The number one problem of homeland security is that the majority of leaders in the public and private sectors, academics, self-appointed experts, and pundits rush to provide answers before they have properly constructed the question.”

First, the questioner has to recognize the importance of constructing the right question, and second, he or she needs an understanding of homeland security that comes from operational experience and academic study, says Larsen.

Larsen has spent “most of my life out on the pointy end of a sword” getting that hands-on experience. He flew 400 combat missions in Vietnam.

He’s also spent many years wielding a pen as an academic, and served as chairman of the Department of Military Strategy and Operations at the National War College, where he created the nation’s first graduate course in homeland security.

He’s also put those two vocations together, designing and leading war games and table-top exercises with sinister names like Dark Winter, Silent Vector, Terminal Risk and Oil Shockwave.

Outside the classroom, he co-hosts the public radio show “Homeland Security: Inside and Out,” out of Texas A&M University in College Station.

He answers and asks a lot of questions on the show. One Larsen cites as an example of a bad one is: What can we do to prevent a biological attack on a U.S. city?

It’s a bad question, he says, because the correct answer is “We cannot prevent it, period.”

A biological attack can’t be prevented because biotechnology is developing so quickly and much of it is dual use, such as in the agricultural industry. Thus the government’s focus should not be on preventing terrorists getting their hands on such a weapon, but rather responding to such an attack. That is a different approach than to nuclear weapons, where preventing terrorists obtaining the weapon is the priority because “response and recovery is pretty grim,” notes Larsen, who manages to sound warm and relaxed even when discussing such scenarios.

With biological weapons, rapid detection, response and recovery is key: determining an attack has taken place, identifying the biological source, bringing in medical supplies and care, and cleaning up the contaminant.

The public health system “will be as important to our national security as the Department of Defense, and one of our problems is . . . in the last 40 years we’ve allowed public health to deteriorate in this country,” he adds.

Shouldn’t we put the military in charge of logistics for disaster response? It sounds good, but according to Larsen private corporations are better than the military at logistics.

The corporations should be overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency — with only a few thousand employees, FEMA “should just be looked at as a manager” that can harness the resources of private companies, Larsen says.

Big box stores like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Safeway and others, as well as companies specializing in delivery, such as UPS and FedEx, are successful because they are efficient and a big part of emergency response is trucking in water, food, medical supplies and temporary housing —“Wal-Mart knows where every carton of Kleenex is in their system,” Larsen says. Contracts between the government and companies should be negotiated in advance to prevent price-gouging and minor disasters would serve as practice exercises. The military should be used more specifically for its expertise, such as National Guard military police for maintaining law and order, he says.

But doesn’t it all come down to how much money you’re willing to devote to the problem? Well, no, says Larsen. Instead of asking how much more money should Congress provide to ensure sufficient manpower for crisis response, Larsen says we should be making better use of volunteers. He points to what he says are 40,000 nurses in Texas who are working in fields other than health care as one example of an untapped source of volunteers who could be mobilized in an emergency.

“We cannot afford to further al Qaeda’s war with unsound, knee-jerk spending programs,” Larsen writes in his book. “Wasting money with good intentions makes us no more secure.”

Eleanor Stables can be reached at estables@cq.com.