Enabling Unity of Effort in Homeland Response Operations

Publisher Marketing: Balancing authorities and responsibilities within our federal system has been a matter of continuous debate since the earliest days of the republic. Its continued relevance is exemplified in our current national conversation over how to most effectively organize and operate for homeland security and defense. Crises and catastrophic events in our homeland require Americans from different organizations, jurisdictions, and functions to work together. Yet despite considerable national effort and resources devoted to developing and improving our collective response capabilities, effectiveness in working together-unity of effort-still seems to elude us. Achieving unity of effort is the central challenge to effective homeland response operations. No single organization, function, or stakeholder has all the necessary tools to respond completely to the wide range of crises that routinely occur, or could occur, in our homeland. Combining the assets, capabilities, expertise, and resources of multiple participants has proven to be exceedingly complex and difficult. Our homeland response capabilities are considerable, but they are dispersed across a patchwork of jurisdictions and functions. The challenge in homeland response operations is neither inadequate resources nor lack of capabilities, but rather in being able to bring them to bear at the right time and place, and in the right combination. Disasters in our homeland have enormous consequences. Regardless of cause or extent, they always hold the potential for significant loss of life, human suffering, economic dislocation, and erosion of public confidence in government. Given all that is at stake, we must do better. There are certainly a number of ways to improve our results; this monograph proposes three specific ways to do so. First, enhancing our capacity for unity of effort requires more than simply devoting more resources and rhetoric to the problem. The challenge is more fundamental; it requires us to change the way we think about homeland response in order to establish the intellectual pre-conditions for unified effort. A second way to enhance our capacity for unity of effort is to ensure that national doctrine can be broadly implemented. A truly national homeland response doctrine system will function in an interagency, intergovernmental, multi-jurisdictional environment. Implementing it requires a new management structure that can also operate in the spaces between agencies and governments. A third way to enhance unity of effort is to remove barriers to employment of military capabilities for homeland response operations. Achieving unity of effort in homeland response is a complex challenge, among the greatest of our age. It is the single most important factor in our ability to plan for and respond effectively to disasters at home. We devote enormous resources to public safety and security at many levels. Our citizens surely have a right to expect that these resources will be well used by their leaders, elected and appointed. This means that we must find better ways to work together. It requires leaders and organizations at all levels to combine their efforts, resources, and capabilities to achieve complete and responsive solutions. It requires us to develop new ways of thinking about and managing homeland response capabilities, before disaster strikes.