Insights into Establishing a State Homeland Security Organization

Abstract

The citizenry no longer displays abject fear when the phrase homeland security (HS) is spoken. Where once they envisioned hordes of foreign enemy troops storming ashore or floating down from the sky, today they think of car bombs, bomb vests, aircraft jacking, and poisoned water supply among other catastrophes—clearly something that happens elsewhere. When asked what is homeland security, they speak of police, firefighters, and the military. After some thought, they may add the Coast Guard, emergency medical teams, and emergency management organizations. Very few would add physicians, nurses, teachers, businessmen, river and stream patrol, Civil Air Patrol, National Guardsmen, State Guardsmen, students, or themselves. The fact is that HS is none of the above and all of the above. The organizational concept of HS at the state level is an integrated management effort by a small number of dedicated persons with strong management talents and an army of existing state organizations, industry, and citizen groups whose missions and members can be organized to provide protection for the citizenry, government, industry, and critical infrastructure of the state. In practice, the existing organizations primarily focus on mitigating the emergency as it arises, HS focuses on preventing that emergency from occurring at all. In effect, for the most part the existing organizations’ missions are reactive, while HS’s mission is proactive. Under the integrated management concept, the HS Program would consist of an integrated team of management, oversight, and action specialists. The HS Program Director is the principal policy and planning specialist, the next ranking program official is the operations management specialist followed by resource guidance specialists, and all the remaining organizations and groups are the action specialists functioning at one level or another. It is important to note that the action specialists are in reality the leaders