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Pentagon Expands Military Response...
We talked about this before, but I can't find the thread.
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InsideDefense.com
May 17, 2005
Pentagon Expands Military Response To Terrorist Attacks Against U.S. Cities
The Defense Department is expanding its ability to support civil authorities in the event of massive terrorist attacks against multiple American cities, according to a senior Pentagon official.
Paul Wolfowitz, the recently departed deputy defense secretary, in one of his last acts in the Pentagon approved a classified “execute order” for the U.S. military to be prepared to respond to more than a single domestic attack involving chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon, according to the senior official. The order was issued by U.S. Northern Command, which oversees domestic military operations.
“We have identified capabilities within our force structure -- beyond Joint Task Force-Civil Support -- in order to ensure that we could respond not simply to a domestic attack involving a weapon of mass destruction but to multiple attacks at diverse locations, several cities perhaps at once where terrorists might have employed weapons of mass destruction,” Paul McHale, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, told defense reporters today.
“It is now the established policy of the Department of Defense that we will train and equip for the mission requirement of multiple WMD response,” said McHale.
Until now, the Virginia-based Joint Task Force-Civil Support was the Defense Department's only force dedicated to planning and integrating U.S. military forces to support civil authorities in the event of a domestic attack. Beyond saying the Pentagon is assigning other units responsibility for dealing with the aftermath of a domestic terrorist attack, McHale declined to offer any details of the new order.
A Pentagon official familiar with the order said each of the four services is contributing capabilities to meet the new requirement. “It is spread across the entire joint force and refers to all components -- active, guard and reserve,” said the official.
James Carafano, a retired Army officer and homeland security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said this new order could drive requirements for increased numbers of units that are needed for homeland defense activities, such as medics, military policy, mortuary affairs, and wheeled vehicles.
The effort to step up such capabilities comes as the Pentagon is putting the finishing touches on a new strategy for homeland defense and civil support, one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top priorities. The issue of the military's contribution to homeland defense is also being examined in the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review.
McHale said the U.S. military has steadily improved its homeland defense footing since being caught off guard, along with the rest of the nation, by the 2001 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
“Our ability to execute complex consequence management missions has substantially, even dramatically, improved since Sept. 11, 2001. It would have been challenging for our nation to respond to multiple, near-simultaneous, geographically dispersed WMD attacks as recently as three or four years ago,” said McHale, a former congressman and former Marine. “We're by no means satisfied with regard to our capabilities of that type as they exist today. But we are far, far better prepared to respond to multiple WMD attacks than we were just a few years ago.”
-- Jason Sherman
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