WMD Strategies Part II

I alluded to the break out of consequence management from counterproliferation in an earlier post. I wanted to briefly discuss the whole confusing issue on that point. As far as I can tell, the term "consequence management" came up in the mid-1990s when the White House issued a presidential directive on WMD terrorism and told the FBI that they would be in charge of managing the crisis and FEMA would be in charge of managing the consequences of a terrorist WMD incident. This lead to a special annex in the former Federal Response Plan (replaced by the  National Response Plan) on terrorism that provided more details on the execution of crisis and consequence management.

The military was expected to support the FBI and FEMA as subject matter experts in the area of NBC weapons - both disarming and neutralizing devices and cleaning up the hazards, if any were released. Simultaneously, the military was working on its counterproliferation strategy, and someone added the term "consequence management" for battlefield operations. The intent was that, following an adversarial CB warfare attack, there was passive defense to ensure that forces could continue the fight. However, following the fight, someone had to return the military assets - air bases and sea ports in particular - to pre-incident conditions, if one wanted to return to unprotected use of those assets.

In the late 1990s, DoD consequence management (CoM) got complicated. The focus remained on WMD incidents, but there was battlefield CoM, there was domestic CoM (assisting local/state emergency responders) in support of FEMA, and there was foreign CoM (assisting nations attacted by terrorists using WMD) in support of the State Department. Because there were different conditions, there were different oversight agents - J5 and OSD Policy's counterproliferation office had the battlefield CoM, J3 and OSD Policy's ASD(SO/LIC) office had domestic/foreign CoM. JFCOM was the official combatant command to work CoM, until 9/11. Then ASD(HD) and NORTHCOM came in to take domestic CoM, while ASD(SO/LIC) kept foreign CoM. Multiple bureaucratic agents meant multiple definitions and conflicting resources and chains of command.

Then came the National Response Plan and Katrina, resulting in another change - now NORTHCOM is seeing CoM as a general federal response to disasters, man-made or natural, WMD or high explosive. FEMA and the local/state emergency responders have this "all-hazards" approach that is intended to make it simpler to organize and plan for incident response. The NRP even tried to get rid of the terms "consequence" and "crisis" management. But the military defined CoM, and (as the military is) it wants to stick with the term.

Recently, DoD put out a new instruction on foreign CoM. Couple interesting things in this document - first, it tasks NORTHCOM to be the lead, which reduces the number of players trying to define/plan for CoM to two - NORTHCOM and STRATCOM. It uses the CBRNE term, which I dislike - it's an antiterrorism term, but perhaps appropriate here. It tasks the ATSD(NCB) to support radiological incidents with technical expertise and assistance - but not CB incidents. Weird. It states that DoD is in charge of its own forces in foreign CoM - a not so subtle jab at the lead federal agency, the State Dept. Jumping back to the NMS-CWMD, the document states that "the military must be prepared either to support or lead consequence management operations, as directed." Translation - as we've heard from ASD(HD) and Rummie in the past, it may be necessary for DoD to be the lead in responding to CBRNE terrorism incidents, in both domestic and foreign CoM cases. DHS, State, thanks for calling us but we're taking over now.

That would be nice IF DoD had a serious CoM capability on the sidelines. My view is that it's often a pick-up game, depending on the scenario, location, and timing. You might rebut that every military operation is like that, but it's not. There are CONPLANs, OPORDs, work done prior to the operations. There are CONPLANs and orders for CoM, but just no dedicated forces - save a few small units like CBIRF, 20th Support Command (CBRNE), and maybe some Guard units (other than the WMD CSTs) being formed.

I'm rambling. My point here (did I have a point?) is that there are at least two major aspects being discussed here - support to the response to a terrorist WMD incident and reconstitution of a fixed military site during/following a military conflict that involved NBC weapons use. They are very different situations requiring similar equipment and trained personnel but under different time constraints, conditions, and outcomes. Lumping them together - as the National Strategy to Combat WMD and the NMS-CWMD does - is a mistake made by bureaucrats that don't understand the nuances. That mistake is magnified when the military salutes smartly and echoes these points.  I guess some day we might straighten it all out.

Comments

[Fiml]

I like it very much