A couple of weeks back, I sat down with two senior members of Virginia Task Force 1, Capt. Joseph Knerr and Lt. Rodney Vaughan of Fairfax County’s International Search and Rescue Team for an in-depth interview of what they experienced during a mission to Japan following the earthquake and tsunami. It’s a five part interview that tells their story in their own words.
Ranking Member of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), commented on the newly announced National Terrorism Alert System (NTAS) in a recent press release. When I read it, I had to shake my head in disgust at the inalienable ability of a number of Members of Congress to not recognize the evolution of an information system but deliver a purely partisan pot-shot at the other side.
In an announcement yesterday, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) “lowered its outlook for America’s long-term credit rating to ‘negative’ from ‘stable.'” In other words, we went from “we’re tolerable” to “we stink,” and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen pointed out a year ago, our growing debt is a national security concern.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the BP Oil Spill occurred. There are a lot of important voices to be heard, but for me, the most important one comes from the man who led the months-long response efforts, Admiral Thad Allen, the former Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Last week, Brian Kamoie, Senior Director for Preparedness Policy with the White House’s National Security Staff, shared the contents of the Presidential Policy Directive 8 on National Preparedness Policy. It is the guidance document for how we move forward in making the country more resilient. While I applaud the end product, the wait to get here begs the question: what took it so long?
From my time in government at NASA and DHS, there was an adage I remember: “Don’t put anything in an e-mail or in writing that you are not prepared to defend if it ends up in the Washington Post.” That was healthy advice that I’m sure members of the Napolitano team got when they entered the Nebraska Avenue Complex. But they seem to have forgotten those words and found congressional trouble over FOIA requests.
Around a year ago, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano made a public pledge that DHS would be hire 1,000 or so cybersecurity experts over the next three years. That DHS fell well short of that target number is no surprise. Besides trying to attract some of the smartest, technically versed and potentially highest paid workers out there, the secretary is saddled with a personnel system that even Kim Jong Il of North Korea would reject as a problematic disaster. If the system continues to fail as it is now, the secretary should raise holy hell to make the machinery move faster.
With each passing day of fighting in Libya, it is sadly becoming obvious that the international hopes of seeing long-time dictator Col. Moammar Qadhafi deposed from his more than four-decade rule are fading. President Obama has, from his first day in office, made clear that he has zero interest in taking any type of unilateral approach in regard to use of U.S. military forces. If the Libyan rebellion is crushed and Qadhafi exacts revenge upon the population, what will that mean for presidential debates in the 2012 election?
Here’s a piece I wrote for the Defense Media Network about Virginia Task Force 1, the International Search and Rescue Team from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. With Japan in great need after the 8.9 magnitude earthquake, Virginia Task Force 1 is already deployed in the Ofanuto area of Japan.
Sponsored by:
