Essential Functions
There's an old saying engineers use; "if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority". I've heard that many, many times through the years when trying to arrange work during plant outages. In the early days of the nuclear industry months and months spent with the unit offline for a refueling outage were the norm. As planning got better and better, the outage length got shorter and shorter. Some refuels are now accomplished in weeks rather than months. The same learning process has gradually improved emergency drills that are held on a regular basis.
Which leads us to today's subject, an article in the Washington Post by William Arkin detailing what he sees as shortcomings in the Federal government's plans to provide continuity of government in case of a nuclear attack or other disaster.
On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology — alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups — to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington.
But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe.
I can tell you from experience, learning how to plan effectively for complex operations takes a lot of time and effort. It is not accomplished in a few years even with a dedicated staff. So even though I understand Arkin's upset with the progress, the realist in me says these things take time. He's quite right that the agencies involved haven't figured out what really is vital, but that also comes with time and drills. Is progress as fast as I'd like to see it? Not really. Do I understand how these things take time to accomplish? Yes.
Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created.
At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later.
Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program.
On 9/11, the program was put to the test — and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers.
Obvious here is that the failures in the process started during the Clinton years. The failures of the program on 9/11 can not be laid at the feet of Bush since he had not been in office long enough to have dealt with issues in the program. After 9/11 it appears as if some planning and progress has been made with several drills conducted - which revealed shortcomings in the program. This is the purpose of drills, I might add. It reveals what you got wrong in your plans so you can address the shortcomings. It is an iterative process.
Actually, if the government really wants to make progress in emergency planning they could do worse than to hire some planners from the nuclear industry. They already have been through a lot of the learning curve of planning complex operations and managing emergency situations.
Just a thought.
