Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Mastering homeland security- Naval school offers anti-terrorism degree

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 13:18:27 -0400

Mastering homeland security
Naval school offers anti-terrorism degree
Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004

Protecting the homeland can now get you a college degree. A master's
degree in homeland security, to be precise.
Last month, 12 students stepped forward at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey to receive their degrees before returning to their jobs at
some of the nation's top emergency management and anti-terrorism
agencies.

The federally funded program, conducted at the Naval Postgraduate
School's Center for Homeland Security attracted students from such
agencies as the New York City Office of Emergency Management, the
National Guard and the Chief of Naval Operations Warfare Policy and
Doctrine Branch.

Paul Stockton, director of the center, said the program is a response to
the increasing demand for experts in defending the nation against
terrorism. Stockton said the program was designed to develop leaders
with the experience and expertise necessary to respond to -- and,
especially, prevent -- terrorist acts.

"We need to get that language and leadership development process under
way immediately because the bad guys are out there," he said.

Conducted largely over the Internet -- allowing students to continue
working in their current positions -- the course combined elements of a
think tank with practical exercises, many of them centered on San Luis
Rey, a virtual city of 2.5 million where, as Stockton put it, "all bad
things happen."

Much of the coursework, which began in January 2003, was deliberately
aimed at wrong-footing the students, Stockton said. If, for example,
they focused on building up physical security, a terrorist in the
exercise might instead hack into the local dam, open it and flood the
city -- all to the accompaniment of realistic-sounding emergency
bulletins and newspaper stories.
"The adversary is adaptive, very smart, and in it for the long haul,"
Stockton said. "We need to anticipate that they're going to try to hit
us where we ain't."

The course catalog included basics from Introduction to Homeland
Security to advanced work in areas such as Asymmetric Conflict, Law
Enforcement and Judicial Issues. Electives included weapons of mass
destruction detection and fear management.

The high level of expertise among the students was at first a little
overwhelming, said Gerry Charlton, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander
based in Alameda whose field is "command control communications
computers information technology" -- known by the punchy acronym C4IT --
or working with the communications equipment and sensors used to guard
the coast.
"I was very intimidated when I first started the program," Charlton
said. "I wanted to run."

But Charlton said he and other students discovered that bringing
together their diverse backgrounds and experiences gave them a chance to
overcome "stovepiping" -- the fixed perspective that each agency has on
its own piece of the homeland security puzzle that has been repeatedly
criticized in federal investigations, including the federal commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I would go so far as to say ... that is the single greatest thing this
program offers," said Charlton, who wrote one of his first papers for
the class on communications systems interoperability -- the ability of
different agencies' radio systems to talk to one another.

The approach also gave students a chance to look at their own areas of
expertise with new eyes, said Charlton, who acknowledged that at one
point he was startled to discover a vulnerability in a system he himself
had designed - - significant enough that he wouldn't discuss specifics.

"It's taught me the magnitude and the scope, of how massive the problem
really is, which I was never aware of before because I was only focused
on my part of it," Charlton said.

It was also a learning experience for the faculty, drawn from the Naval
Postgraduate School, Stanford University and elsewhere. Stockton had
designed elements of the course, for example, on the premise that
military units would be called on to support civilian emergency
personnel in the case of a terrorist attack, but realized during the
program that the military units themselves would probably be targets of
an attack, and would require support from the civilians.
The course already is having some real-world applications.

Charlton, for example, brought his new knowledge to a working group
looking at ways to make sure different Bay Area agencies can communicate
during a disaster. Right now, he said, some law enforcement agencies
don't have equipment with that capability. A patrol car on the beach,
for example, may not be able to talk to a Coast Guard cutter a mile off
shore. "By the time people make those phone calls and get passed around,
the bad guy's already gone," he said.

Other Bay Area agencies are benefiting from the work of Michael Petrie,
administrator of San Francisco's Emergency Medical Services Section,
whose office sits in a nondescript downtown building ready to coordinate
all emergency medical services in the city in the event of a terrorist
attack.

Petrie's concern with homeland security has led him to spend 13-15 hours
a day on the subject since the Sept. 11 attacks and to launch personal
projects, from organizing his office's emergency manuals with colored
dots indicating their importance to taking vacation time to fly to
Israel and see how ambulances there respond to terrorist attacks.

Petrie is a student at the Monterey school, and his work has included a
treatise on a homeland security program for San Francisco that includes
concepts already in use in the city and in Los Angeles. Now he's looking
at how military resources in Hayward could be tapped for an emergency on
the other side of the bay.

"We are producing reports and studies that are immediately implementable
in our jurisdictions," he said. "We're actually creating new concepts in
the class right there."

Now, Petrie said, he is pushing San Francisco to do more -- more and
different interdepartmental training, drilling, testing and revising in
a never-ending cycle.

"Terrorists adapt. Terrorists adapt. Terrorists adapt," he said,
repeating what he said were Stockton's first words to his class. "And we
have to adapt. Our cycles have to be faster, our planning has to be more
complete, and it has to be more centralized."

Stockton hopes the master's degree will evolve from
an intensive program designed for the highest-level
administrators to a more stripped-down Web- based
one that teaches the basics of strategic thinking and
preventive planning to rank and file homeland security
workers.

"There are tens of thousands of first responders and first preventers
who need access to graduate-level study and policy course work in
homeland security," he said. "We need certification programs that are of
graduate-level quality that we can make available to sergeants in the
San Francisco Police Department."
E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at

[email-masked]
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/06/MNG1Q7H7261.DTL

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