Vital Systems Security

The University of California Police Department, in cooperation with 

the City of Berkeley Police Department, is participating in Alameda 

County’s “Urban Shield” exercise from Friday, September 28 to Monday, 

October 1, 2007.  

Urban Shield, a multi-agency regional training event, will test and 

enhance the emergency preparedness and response abilities of local law 

enforcement in a wide variety of situations.  Tactical teams from 

approximately 25 departments across the country, including our own 

Negotiations and Entry Team, will be deployed around the clock to 

handle a variety of simulations and scenarios ranging from natural 

disasters to incidents of terrorism.  If you would like to learn more 

about this event, please see http://www.urbanshield.org/about.html for 

details.

Warren Hall will be the site of an “active shooter” simulation.  

Especially in light of the tragic events at Virginia Tech and other 

past incidents of campus violence, the University is committed to the 

highest level of preparation and prevention possible, and is proud to 

participate in this opportunity to provide realistic and valuable 

training to so many law enforcement agencies.  

Police personnel will begin staging equipment and preparing the 

building on the evening of Friday, September 28.  At 5:00 am on 

September 29 (Saturday) the exercise will begin.  Activity will 

include role-player movements on the first and ground floor of Warren 

Hall, the arrival and departure of personnel and vehicles in Mulford 

Hall parking lot, and some loud noises.  The scenario will repeat once 

every other hour for the entire weekend, day and night, ending before 

9:00 am on Monday, October 1.  

Thank you for your assistance with this important initiative.

Nathan Brostrom

Vice Chancellor–Administration

Anthony and I are developing some conceptual equipment around ‘biopreparedness’ in relation to Syn-BERC. One area where we are stumped relates directly to the recent posts on the National Response Framework, and I thought would make an interesting VSS discussion. The issue is about what kinds of thinking go into the design of scenario-based plans such as the NRF. As Dale noted, current DHS plans are oriented towards fifteen scenarios. The question is: what criteria are employed to develop the specific scenarios used in exercises? Dale wondered whether the number of scenarios (and apparently distinct response-assemblages for each scenario) meant a shift away from all-hazards planning. But assuming that all-hazards, or generic, planning is still the goal, how does one develop specific ’scenario-events’ in order to test generic preparedness? I think the answer might be that, in the language of the document, “The focus of the scenarios is on response capabilities and needs, not threat-based prevention activities.” That is, specific events can be used to test generic capabilities, not responses to that event itself. Still, there is a fundamental question of which specific events should be used that remains a question of criteria. Second question: given that the development of scenario plans, and their exercise in practice, involves many distinct and often incomensurable expert-groups (public health, international security, bioscience, etc), how are truth-claims adjudicated (i.e. this type of response is ‘realistic’, etc.)? Any thoughts would be much appreciated–including in particular “ethnographic” insights from discussions with actual scenario planners.

This was off my radar — like lots of things lately. So DHS has decided to whittle down the NRP, and turn it into the NRF. Ta-da! The problem is, apparently, that the very emergency managers who will be called on to implement it are *totally* against it. Why? In part, because it is oriented towards 15 scenarios around which are to be formed essentially 15 distinct assemblages. Wait a minute! What happened to all-hazards preparedness? Don’t ask DHS; it is figuring out how to ride out what will probably, in the end, not cause such a big brouhaha: the latest proclamation from the GAO on just how modest — or is it moderate? — progress has been in implementing necessary reforms in the nation’s newest Cabinet-level agency. Check it out here, but prepare yourself for a long read. A thread on either of these items is welcome and encouraged — especially the former, I think!

This summer the UN-initiated “Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction” met in Geneva. The event aimed at increasing political awareness and action on system-vulnerability questions at a global scale. It is interesting to think about this use of the term “platform.” It indicates a space that “brings together a wide range of actors in the various sectors of development and humanitarian work, and in the environmental and scientific fields related to disaster risk reduction.” However, it does not yet seem to point to a coherent way of organizing these diverse elements (including not only actors but also techniques and practices) toward a shared aim.

A recent trilateral powwow originally designed to focus on economic and security issues across Canada, Mexico and the United States, has become the principal venue through which said countries are coordinating their pandemic preparedness efforts. What this coordination entails is an interesting question. A recent piece from the informative CIDRAP news service describes a recently released report detailing some of the issues the countries see themselves facing. One issue (comprising one chapter in this report): critical infrastructure. One strategy to tackle the problem of critical infrastructure protection: Resiliency. None of this is surprising or new. What is interesting, to me anyway, is how these concepts will ‘operate’ or be actualized in practice in and across these different national contexts. Is there such a thing as North American Critical Infrastructure? How about North American Resiliency?

For some reason, all of this calls to mind the notion of “regionalization”, which has been pushed — albeit not very hard — by a number of federal agencies and states which foresee advantages to realizing efficiencies in preparedness efforts — check out an example from AHRQ here. These efficiencies are based not only in economics, per se, but in geographies as well. Counties have banded together, as have states, in a variety of different emergency services and disaster preparedness contexts (e.g., one EMS agency covering several counties; states and counties signing mutual aid agreements in times of need, etc.) for decades. The dynamics of multinational ‘regionalization,’ I suspect, is substantially different.

Andy and I have written about the origins of “vulnerability thinking” and many dimensions of vital systems security in total war and strategic bombing. In reading Churchill’s “Their Finest Hour,” the second volume of his four-volume series of World War II, I came across a couple interesting nuggets along these lines. In World War II, concern with vital systems was essential to strategic thought on both sides, and at certain points was the dominant consideration. After the fall of France, when Hitler turned his attention to Britain, there was a kind of military stalemate, or at least a situation in which neither side could turn its major strength on the other. The overwhelmingly dominant German army was prevented from invasion across the channel by British naval dominance. Churchill claims that he never believed that Germany could launch a successful invasion. As a consequence, the major concerns revolved around attacks on vital systems. Churchill writes that he considered German u-boat attacks on shipping to be the most serious strategic threat, and the Germans engaged in various forms of terror bombing and strategic bombing during the Battle of Britain, particularly on major centers of industrial production (particularly aircraft production — which seems to have been rather concentrated). Churchill also has some very interesting things to say about vital systems and civil defense, among which the following about preparations for a German invasion. Note the interesting use of quotes around ‘vulnerable points’ — perhaps it was something of a neologism at the time:

Obstacles were placed on many thousand square miles of Britain to impede the landing of air-borne troops. All our aerodromes, radar stations, and fuel depots…needed defence by special garrisons and by their own airmen. Many thousands of ‘vulnerable points’ — bridges, power-stations, depots, vital factories, and the like — had to be guarded day and night from sabotage or sudden onset….The destruction of port facilities, the cratering of key roads, the paralysis of motor transport and of telephones and telegraph stations, of rolling stock or permanent way, before they passed out of our hands were planned to the last detail. Yet, despite all these wise and necessary precautions…there was no question of a scorched earth policy. England was to be defended by its people, not destroyed (p. 177).

Melinda Cooper recently drew my attention to an interesting study conducted by Harvard Medical School Center and sponsored by Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. The study predicts that “climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.” In addition, the study attempts to “survey” existing and future costs of climate change. It argues that the insurance industry “will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.”

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William J. Perry, Ashton B. Carter and Michael M. May write an Op-Ed in today’s Times about the prospect of nuclear terrorism. The threat of a bomb going off in an American city, they write, is “incalculable,” but higher than it was five years ago. Their argument recalls arguments of the early Cold War: we must find ways to make this unthinkable event thinkable.

All familiar stuff. But there is an important difference. In the early Cold War, the questions was whether the United States could survive a nuclear attack: whether it would have the capacity to launch a second strike, and whether the “vital nodes” of the industrial system would be destroyed. But now, these authors note, the prospect of nuclear terrorism does not threaten our entire system: “After all,” they argue, even in the event of a nuclear detonation “the underlying equation would remain a few terrorists acting against all the rest of us, and even nuclear weapons need not undermine our strong societies.”

The biggest threats, rather, concern auto-immune response: the instinct to immediately strike whatever country was the “source” of the material; the instinct to undermine the constitutional structure of U.S. government. It is to forestall these responses — and, of course, to minimize the loss of human life — that , they argued, preparedness planning is necessary.

“World Without Oil” is an alternative reality game–not a video game or a “world” but more like a cross between a writing contest and a role-playing game. It asks participants to imagine what an oil shock would look like, and what living without oil will do to their lives, in real time, as the “oil shock” scenario unfolds. Thus it shares something with the scenario stylings of our vital systems friends, but one that is going directly to the people–albeit probably to preteens, hipster bloggers and youtube users first. What makes it so interesting is that it is actually very technically thin: just a web site where you submit links to content you create on your website, blog, video or by telephone. The site “masters” grade the content and choose the winners–presumably with the aim ofcollecting  a set of scenarios that might otherwise be difficult to generate. I’m skeptical that this particular game will get interesting, but the real issue is that it is pure genius.  I’m sure there will be others…

DHS, please take note.

What does it mean to move ‘global warming’ into the domain of security? - Here is an article in today’s New York Times.

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