In the basement of a newly renovated building in Colorado, an army of people in uniform and shirtsleeves is working on a map of North America unlike any ever created. It is a multidimensional, multimedia, top secret compendium of very specific data accumulating at a dizzying rate. The ultimate dream of those behind it is to be able to point to any block in any city in the United States and gain instant access to the expanding universe of digitized information for that location, from speed cameras to wireless network signals, street level photography and video, property records, electricity consumption, floor plans and security layouts, even traffic light sequences. Also incoming would be ultra-high-resolution imagery that can peer into backyards, and other advanced technologies available to pinpoint activity inside the walls of an office building, power station, or, with proper approval, a private home, from the living room to the bathroom to the children’s bedrooms.
Some of the users of this unprecedented surveillance tool are based inside Northern Command, America’s newest military command, and the first in modern times to be focused not on some distant outpost of the world but on America itself. Evidence of their focus can be seen in the poster mounted on one office wall, stark letters declaring their mission: One Nation, One Map.
Until the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the military on home soil planned overseas wars and watched for incoming missiles and bombers but was only otherwise barely focused on the American interior. But then a handful of men in sports attire, armed only with airline tickets and razor blades, demonstrated the nation’s vulnerability not to another army but to a small organization using unconventional methods of warfare. Overnight, airports, bridges and power grids, reservoirs and food supplies—all became potential targets in the eyes of the people charged with protecting against another 9/11-style attack. The October 2001 anthrax incidents, which were immediately (and wrongfully) assumed to be the work of international terrorists, added to the belief that another multiple-target and even a multiple-mode attack, including one involving weapons of mass destruction, was in the cards.
Members of a terrorist force otherwise indistinguishable from legal residents and even American citizens, willing to die for their cause, could strike anywhere. Suddenly the familiar grid of city streets and ribbons of interstate highways and electricity distribution had become a potential battlefield. Defense of the homeland meant building a deep knowledge of the facilities in cities and towns across the country.
For the past century, protecting American territory has been the responsibility of civil authorities and state governments. In the post-9/11 war against al-Qaeda, though, internal security has increasingly become a federal matter, and one in which the Department of Defense is at the center. Through Northern Command, no fewer than eighteen generals and admirals—men who once commanded combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or prepared for missions against the Soviet Union and China—have as their sole focus defending the North American continent.
That defense is coordinated from a cluster of gleaming white buildings at Peterson Air Force Base, on the edge of Colorado Springs. By gargantuan national security standards, Northern Command, or NorthCom, as military people call it, is tiny, both in cost and in its call on resources. (It is indicative of the titanic sums spent in the post-9/11 era that NorthCom’s costs are considered minuscule even though its refurbishment required $100 million.) But its place in Top Secret America’s complex geography is significant; those eighteen generals and admirals are supplemented by eleven generals from the reserves and National Guard1 also in residence at NorthCom headquarters, all of them officers who have been activated and federalized to tend to the day-to-day duties of national homeland defense. Another five National Guard officers are stationed in Washington, DC, with specific domestic contingency planning responsibilities at the Pentagon. In turn, they are backed up by more than 250 additional generals belonging to the National Guard, the old militia force born of the colonial-era minutemen and drawing on a tradition that treated local security and enforcement of laws as a local matter.
At multiple facilities stretching from Florida to the nation’s capital, from Texas to Alaska and Hawaii, Northern Command’s leaders work with a staff of three thousand people—including hundreds of contractors, lawyers, and intelligence officers in subordinate air, army, and navy commands.
Northern Command has additionally spawned a series of new organizations with the intention of making the National Guard more than just a state militia, allowing it to mobilize across state borders and handle duties of both martial law, should it ever be declared, and domestic intelligence, which focuses on Washington’s counterterrorism and homeland security priorities. Hidden beyond talk of cooperation and modernization and the post-9/11 patter of a singular national security effort, the effect is to have quietly transformed the Guard from fifty-four local entities into a single force shorn of the federal-state distinctions at the core of American governance since its inception.
In order to coordinate this massive new federal undertaking, Northern Command officials needed to know a colossal and unprecedented amount of information. For example, to fulfill their immediate task of supporting civil authorities in crisis, Northern Command planners needed to know runway length in each of 5,000 public airports in America, the weight limits of tens of thousands of highway bridges, and locations and capacity of fuel storage facilities that might supply military operations. Disease watchers, on alert for a biological or chemical attack, needed access to near-real-time reports on water quality in 1,800 federal reservoirs and 1,600 municipal wastewater facilities. WMD specialists wanted to know the location and potential vulnerability of each of America’s 66,000 industrial chemical plants and every source of radiological material, be it a nuclear power plant or hospital, a university research lab or a nuclear bunker.
As with most projects begun in the aftermath of 9/11, the Pentagon and the federal government marched forward with the assumption that they needed to start from scratch. But the real detail of fire and police stations, hospitals and schools—all of which would turn into national security outposts or could become rallying points and shelters after a natural disaster or terrorist action—resided at the state and local levels, where emergency managers and first responders were already collecting this information.
The mapping of the homeland fell principally to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of the largest three-letter Washington-based members of the intelligence community.
Now responding to the needs of two new organizations—NorthCom on the military side and the Department of Homeland Security on the civilian side—NGA, with the assistance of the U.S. Geological Survey, began to apply to the United States the mapping matrix it used for battles overseas. The Homeland Security Infrastructure Program, the formal name for the NGA’s mapping effort, began in 2005 with over three hundred layers of data, including everything from political boundaries to chemical facilities, hotels, Internet service provider locations, school buildings, and water bottling stations. The objective was to identify critical infrastructure out of a database of some eleven million facilities—bridges, dams, power lines, factories, communications towers—essential to public safety and the continued functioning of the economy. The focus was on the 120 most important urban areas, encompassing more than 80 percent of the population, but the number was soon increased to 133 when planners were embarrassed by the realization that thirteen state capitals had been left off the priority list. For some areas, such as the southern border, even more detailed mapping was ordered up: illegal infiltration routes, the locations of border security cameras and motion sensors, and security gaps, including the improvised tunnels under the border. Much, but not all, of this information was already available on the Internet or from commercial vendors, but the government had a particular need for consistency, detail, and pinpoint accuracy so that it could be assured that there would be identical displays of relevant information across federal, state, and local jurisdictions.
By necessity, the map, which has primarily focused on those 133 cities and on border security and drug enforcement in the Southwest since 9/11, will always be a work in progress. Construction, revamped traffic patterns, additional cell phone towers, campus expansion projects—all of these and more needed to be accounted for, while new requirements and uses may be identified. Some locations, like the southern border and the nation’s capital, are nearly fully mapped and wired for detailed surveillance. Less high-profile places remain very much works in progress.
Nevertheless, the displays that can already be pulled together in the NorthCom command center are awe-inspiring. Everything that can be portrayed in an automated way is brought together into what is called the “common operating picture”: real-time tracking of thousands of commercial and military aircraft, naval and commercial shipping activity; alerts of computer viruses; imagery of satellite orbits; pinpoint tracking data on the whereabouts of the president and other top officials; and the immediate status of all active and reserve military forces, including troop strength, battle readiness, and alert condition. Some threat intelligence has also been included—missile launches and other “hot” events detected by infrared warning satellites; radar emissions automatically logged by ground, marine, air, and satellite interceptors; video feeds from drones and reconnaissance aircraft.
In the main operations room of the basement command center, rows of watch-officer desks face a video wall of twelve screens, six feet by six feet, which is being fed cable television channels and situational awareness data—maps and reconnaissance images that spell out the location of assets and threats and show who is where and what is moving. The latest and “hottest” images are capped by “box scores” that grade the up-to-the-minute status of North American defense: air, land, maritime, space, and cyber. Box scores is an apt term: to the uninitiated, the columns and figures are meaningless, but like expert baseball junkies, watch officers and planners see the whole game in an instant, from a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alert of an airliner incoming to Los Angeles that’s squawking on a wrong frequency, to a hit on a radiation detector in the Port of Baltimore, to a winter storm closing in on the Midwest that has put the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on alert.
Around the room’s walls are more monitors with additional box scores showing the current level of command center security classification, which depends on who is present and what type of information is being presented; local times around the world; the status of the restricted airspace around the National Capital Region; the DEFCON (defense readiness condition) of the U.S. military worldwide; and other alert levels. The command duty officer, who sits in the middle of the rows of desks, can put the contents of any computer monitor up on the large video wall, including the dozens of chat windows that are constantly occupied and monitored by groups of analysts and specialists. The list goes on and on: at any one time, the command’s staff is typically monitoring and providing assistance in as many as half a dozen declarations of presidential emergency for floods or storms; keeping an eye on more than one hundred active duty units operating outside military bases; logging counterdrug and border missions being conducted in support of the Department of Homeland Security or the Drug Enforcement Agency; keeping tabs on reconnaissance and unmanned drone flights over America—all the while following the news media as they would an enemy’s maneuvers, all the way down to perusing a daily document prepared by Northern Command’s press office listing which military and local reporters are working on what stories, and what, even before the stories are published, the “talking points” should be in response.
The main entrance of NorthCom headquarters, with its austere banks of narrow strip windows and the central rocket-shaped glass-to-the-sky atrium, suggests a space motif fitting for the previous tenant, Space Command,2 before it was moved to Omaha and merged with yet another major military organization, Strategic Command. The existing 140,000-square-foot structure, just a thousand feet from Highway 24 on the northern edge of the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, was expanded by 20 percent in that $100 million renovation. A second glass atrium was built along the length of what used to be the building’s rear, creating a long glass-topped promenade between the old structure and a new two-story annex. In contrast to this soaring grandeur, outside is a remarkably modest 9/11 memorial—a Pentagon-shaped planter filled with Pennsylvania soil and a protruding steel beam from one of the twin towers.
NorthCom’s headquarters is pointedly not hidden away in an impregnable or secret location. Though the command began out of a temporary headquarters in the iconic Cheyenne Mountain bunker of the joint U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command operations center, Pentagon brass resisted that cold war trope of survivability underground and moved the group into its renovated quarters to allow it to remain accessible to its nonmilitary partners. The rationale is symbolic of a new kind of command for a new kind of war, a war in which information and coordination are at least as important as old-fashioned defenses thought to be secure—and one in which private companies are so intimately involved that proximity to them has become a tactical necessity.
But there is an underground contingency plan. Just in case the new command headquarters is attacked, NorthCom and its sister command—NORAD, which detects and scrutinizes every Russian, Chinese, North Korean, or Iranian missile launch, day and night—both maintain subterranean backups at the mountain. And just in case everything goes down—command headquarters, the mountain, the nation’s telephone system, and the electrical grid—NorthCom also operates a fleet of six giant eighty-foot-long eighteen-wheel trucks sitting ready on twenty-four-hour alert in a barricaded compound at F. E. Warren Air Force Base, outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. The trucks, officially called the Mobile Consolidated Command Center, could take to the highways at a moment’s notice in a fifty-vehicle security convoy. A super-secret unit created to survive a full-scale nuclear war, they contain everything required—their own generators, SCIFs, a top secret local area network, satellite dishes, codes, and emergency decision handbooks—to direct a response to multiple terrorist attacks, launch American nuclear weapons, or even take over command of the United States government, if necessary.
NorthCom and NORAD’s combined basement command center is about the size of a large department store. The sprawling rooms with their laminated desks and cookie-cutter cubicle appointments are the epitome of government drab and information age wired. Discreet cameras and ceiling-mounted projectors with dual screens fuel the ubiquitous PowerPoint briefings and video-teleconferencing (VTC) that connect the staff here with the far-flung bureaucracy. In the small conference room—called, creatively, “the Small Conference Room”—a dozen computer monitors clutter the table. Each monitor has a green and a red sticker affixed at the top, reminding users they can connect to both the unclassified and the secret-level networks. For security purposes, each monitor also has a cover, a leatherette protector that mostly dangles behind on two Velcro-attached tabs but can be flipped over the screen when someone who doesn’t have a security clearance is present.
Next door is the even more closed-off intelligence “egg” (each of the separate sections in the basement command center is called an egg by NorthComers), which mirrors the other area’s functions but operates at classified levels beyond the access of most of the NorthCom staff and most of the Canadians who work here. Monitors include feeds from the three-letter intelligence agencies—CIA, NGA, NSA, NRO,3 DIA—via several sources: the Modernized Integrated Database, which tracks foreign military forces and infrastructure; the National Threat and Incident Database, which tracks up-to-the-minute intelligence on terrorist activity; customized military and intelligence maps that receive feeds from other, automated databases that monitor the physical and cybersecurity of the industrial and utilities sectors; the CIPFIN4 portal, which keeps an eye on the same in the commercial finance sector; and the Medical Situational Awareness Tool, which tracks disease outbreaks and potential pandemics.
At top secret classification levels that narrow access even further, analysts use even more databases: terrorist watchlists; the National Counterterrorism Center Online terrorism “datamart,” a repository of more than seven million terrorism documents and the only interagency forum that exchanges counterterrorism information derived from spies; and GIANT, the tool that monitors the health and security of the ubiquitous U.S. global positioning system of satellites.
Room 111, a section separate from the closed intelligence egg, is home to the Special Technical Operations (STO) cell, an even more compartmented facility populated by cyberwarriors from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and military Special Operations whose work is so highly classified that it is impossible to know whether they are there to defend against digital attack or to aggressively engage in it.
NorthCom’s bewildering array of internal websites, portals, databases, and search engines owes its very existence to the problems encountered on 9/11 and punctuated during Hurricane Katrina: first responders—police, fire, and emergency medical personnel—found it nearly impossible to communicate with each other or with the National Guard or federal agencies. That inability wasn’t merely technical but perceptual: every agency had a different view of the situation on the ground, and no one had a complete or accurate picture of the status of the response force, the civilian population, or the threat, and certainly not in real time. Although Katrina happened four years after the terrorist attacks (and after a security spending spree that exceeded $2 trillion), emergency response agencies still weren’t even using the same maps—thus the emphasis now on One Nation, One Map.
Because of the United States’ 250-year-old legal and cultural tradition of keeping the military out of domestic civilian affairs, NorthCom has had to be particularly sensitive to any appearance of domestic spying or other encroachments on civil liberties. (That was one of the big reasons for so much coordination when it came to press coverage and talking points.) In order to maintain the separation, NorthCom has cooperative and cordial relationships not only with Homeland Security, the FBI, and the other civilian agencies but also with each of the states, with many major city governments, and with the National Guard’s distinct locally oriented factions, each of which has a contentious relationship with the active military.
Such interagency diplomacy comes into play every two weeks when representatives from five dozen federal departments and agencies convene in NorthCom’s basement conference room. A typical meeting begins promptly at 1300 hours (1:00 p.m.), the PowerPoint agenda for the next hour and a half visible on the projection screen. A Northern Command liaison office in Washington is present over video-teleconference, and each of the headquarters directorates (operations, logistics, communications) and subordinate commands are either there in person or represented by liaison officers also visible and audible through VTC. Shirtsleeves outnumber uniforms three-to-one. (Contractors, though embedded on various staffs, are identifiable by the color of their badges or, if there is any confusion as to who is really who, by the letters CTR that appear next to their names.)
Some meetings can be dominated by discussions of subjects not related to the war on terror—a volcano eruption in Iceland, for example. Or take a meeting in which no hurricane or presidential emergency hogs the spotlight: each staff directorate and major agency is allotted time to update the assembled with announcements and news. Despite the opportunity, some participants just pass—the CIA and NSA representatives to NorthCom do so stone-faced, clearly not predisposed to share.
Workdays at NorthCom headquarters are punctuated by an endless series of these videoconferences. By the time the interagency group meets—and it is just one of many similar gatherings at more than a dozen commands and agencies worldwide—the tenor is somewhere between dreaded high school reunion and a weekly family meeting reviewing nothing more significant than the grocery list. As at most open government meetings, it was extremely rare that anything particularly controversial was said, and no dirty laundry was intentionally aired. Between the lines of each routine acronym-laden, unemotional briefing, attendees kept an ear out for any hints of bureaucratic weakness or change. Indeed, the intelligence of most interest was often that which concerned Washington’s ups and downs.
At a briefing on national airspace, an FAA representative’s flat, pilotlike intonation telegraphed routine exercise in bureaucratic chair shuffling, but to a more attentive ear, something astounding was revealed: a dramatic increase in unmanned aerial drones flying over the United States. The FAA representative described new procedures for managing access to American airspace, which is split into two categories—that owned by the military and that owned by the FAA for civilian aviation. Each entity needs permission to put anything in the other’s airspace. An elaborate set of rules and procedures for managing this potential conflict has evolved over time. As the use of drones has dramatically expanded overseas—for surveillance, targeted killings, and, recently, to transport supplies to isolated outposts—the number of drones in U.S. airspace has escalated, too.
Domestic use of military drones is mostly for training drone operators and pilots, but the numbers are surprising: a printed map of the United States pasted on a cubicle wall in the operations egg anticipated thirteen different kinds of military unmanned aerial vehicles flying from ninety-four U.S. locations by 2016. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has its own Predator drones, used for border surveillance; the Coast Guard has some to keep a video eye on coastal waters; and NASA, together with other research and development agencies, fly drones for imagery collection and for trying out new advanced sensors, such as those that detect people and equipment under heavy tree cover.
In May 2006, the FAA issued its first certificate of authorization for the military to fly Predator-type drones in U.S. civilian airspace in support of disaster response, an authorization that came after the agency had been denied their use, for safety reasons, in the aftermath of Katrina. That certificate was followed by comparable drone authorizations for Customs and Border Patrol and even limited authorizations for Arizona law enforcement authorities; the Maricopa County sheriff’s office even purchased its own drones after becoming convinced that using them would ultimately be cheaper than flying manned helicopters to assess accidents and hostage situations.
None of the domestic drones are armed, and in December 2010, the Pentagon took the step of formally banning the use of armed drones in American airspace. The stated reason was that the potential for accidents was too great, but the fear of a political outcry figured into the calculus as well, particularly since many of those drones operate on and around the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Drones may keep pilots safe, but there are still risks. On August 2, 2010, a navy drone lost communication with its ground station seventy-five minutes into a test flight in southern Maryland, and then failed a second time to follow its preprogrammed fail-safe, an automatic prompt for a return-to-base flight path. As it headed into Washington’s restricted airspace, Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld Jr., then NorthCom commander, coordinated with the FAA and the navy and was about to scramble fighters to shoot down the rogue drone when ground technicians finally reestablished control. It won’t be the last time an out-of-control domestic drone poses a threat to people on the ground. And in the air, should a drone collide with a passenger jet, the results could be catastrophic.
Calling U.S. air traffic control “a mess,” one NorthCom watch officer worried that thousands of additional drone flights (together with less expensive commercially available ultralights and advanced toy planes) could create a nightmare scenario. And the worry wasn’t just that our own drones might malfunction and crash. “The next 9/11 with an unmanned drone,” the NorthCom officer said. “Just think about it.”
Another seemingly routine agenda item during the interagency meeting was really anything but routine. An air force lieutenant colonel bullet-pointed his way through a brief discussion of a money-saving proposal to consolidate the NorthCom air operations center, now at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, with that of the Southern Command, a more senior command that oversees U.S. military operations in South America and has an air operations center in Arizona. NorthCom is scheduled to lose almost one hundred headquarters staffers in upcoming budget cuts, but the briefing slides indicated that no personnel would be cut with the air operations consolidation. One of the nonmilitary people in the room sensed something incongruous.
“What does it mean?” he asked. “What’s the practical effect?”
Greater efficiency, the colonel answered tersely. No operational impact.
“The consolidation means nothing?” the befuddled civilian asked, his question trailing away in the rush of the quickly moving agenda.
Yet far from meaningless, the consolidation of the flight centers was a barometer for a much larger issue: after 9/11, every major regional command acquired its own air operations center. Most of them are expensive and geographically separate from their own command headquarters. Every command got its own joint intelligence center, with the requirement for hundreds of analysts who in turn required their own common operating pictures and datasets, as well as their own maps that often duplicated the work already being done by the national agencies. The creation of NorthCom had required the creation of its own set of intelligence analysts, its own air operations center, its own everything. As the agenda item suggested, that duplication had become too obvious to ignore.
Every major combatant command has to contend with defining its role and jockeying for resources and authority. But in the case of NorthCom, the conditions were truly unique. It was the responsibility of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, which controls the old border patrol and immigration authorities, to detect terrorists coming to America, whether by airliner, ship, or over the border. Investigating an actual or suspected terrorist was an FBI or local law enforcement matter. If a Mumbai-style attack terrorized Houston, for example, it would be federal and local SWAT teams that responded, possibly augmented by National Guard units called for state active duty—not NorthCom, which had no troops directly under its command.
Homeland security in Hawaii and the Pacific territories was a matter for the more senior Pacific Command in Honolulu, not NorthCom. And though the military headquarters responsible for Washington, DC, is officially under NorthCom, the area’s significance as the home of the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the FBI meant the Washington-based headquarters effectively functioned as an independent entity unto itself. “Sometimes we feel like we report to them,” a NorthCom planner griped.
Even in the case of the two hottest threats to domestic security, cyberattacks and weapons of mass destruction, NorthCom was not in charge. National protection of the U.S. electronic lifeline is the responsibility of DHS and the new four-star military Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, activated in 2009. It—not NorthCom—controls all military electronic defenses and would fight any cyberwar affecting U.S. assets. Inside the United States, the FBI, not NorthCom, is responsible for cybersecurity.
In 2005, the Strategic Command in Omaha, and not NorthCom, was given the mission of countering the global WMD threat, with the FBI taking the lead inside the United States. Were military Special Operations Forces called upon to deploy for super-secret operations to prevent a WMD attack at home, they would ultimately fall under Special Operations Command in Tampa or the FBI, not NorthCom.
In fact, the only unit that the NorthCom commander commands is the Joint Task Force Civil Support in Virginia, a small headquarters organization set up in 1999 to deal with the consequences of the use of WMD that itself is dependent upon other military services to supply units in an emergency.
To those familiar with NorthCom’s existential dilemma, the interagency group meeting segued from the cryptic and unsatisfying announcement of the plan to consolidate northern and southern command air operations centers to another bureaucratic slight: a new Defense Department regulation regarding protection of the critical infrastructure in the United States. It would be hard to imagine a more obvious role for NorthCom than defending essential infrastructure on U.S. soil. But out of eighteen critical sectors identified in the U.S. government’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan, only one, the “defense industrial base”—hundreds of thousands of plants, factories, and offices that produce the hardware and software needed by the American military—was actually under DoD’s purview, and that sole military responsibility was assigned not to NorthCom but a variety of other defense agencies and commands: Strategic Command was given responsibility for the space sector of the defense industry, Transportation Command for the transportation sector. The Defense Security Service was made responsible for industrial security inspections. In fact, in the July 2010 directive on infrastructure protection, NorthCom wasn’t even mentioned.
With the exception of defending against a direct attack by another military—which essentially boils down to NORAD’s pre-9/11 missions plus naval defense of the coast—NorthCom’s actual homeland security mission was incredibly limited. The only military support it could offer civilian federal, state, and local agencies was to help clean up following a terrorist attack or a major disaster—and even then only if the president declared a national emergency or if they were invited by state and local authorities.
Even in the civil support role, NorthCom did little that the National Guard or the army wasn’t already doing prior to 9/11, and it had to be careful not to step on the toes of the powerful and politically wired National Guard establishment, which itself was bolstered after 9/11 by the appointment of a Washington-based four-star general to lead it.
But there is one area in which NorthCom has unambiguously taken the lead: preparation for the civil support role following an attack involving weapons of mass destruction, which the government expansively defines as including a wide range of nightmare possibilities—chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or even high-yield explosives (CBRNEs). Not surprisingly, reference to this was on that day’s interagency group agenda—specifically, an upcoming exercise named Vibrant Response which simulated the civil support response to a domestic WMD attack.
In fact, there isn’t an interagency coordination group meeting that doesn’t return again and again to the specter of saboteurs or snipers or suicide bombers cutting loose in a shopping mall. That is grim enough, but the status of those events as acts of war, as opposed to brutal crimes, is ambiguous. There’s nothing ambiguous about a suitcase nuke. Arkin obtained and examined more than 120 internal agendas and minutes for the interagency group covering the period 2005 through 2011 and found only eight meetings that did not deal with some aspect of potential terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction in the United States.
“The gravest danger to the American people is the threat of a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon”; this was Obama’s first White House foreign policy agenda point, announced the day after the inauguration. Six days later, Robert Gates, in his first congressional testimony as the new administration’s secretary of defense, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “One of the greatest dangers we continue to face is the toxic mix of rogue nations; terrorist groups; and nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.”
After 9/11, the Bush administration directed numerous intelligence assessments of the actual domestic threat from terrorists wielding WMD. The results were always the same: lots of evidence existed that al-Qaeda had pursued the development of biological and chemical weapons and had even tried to obtain nuclear materials, and lots of such claims had been made by Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. This was piled on top of vague intelligence that some Russian nuclear weapons had gone missing. And, as in the case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, since U.S. intelligence couldn’t prove that al-Qaeda, domestic militia groups, or lone-wolf terrorists didn’t already have or couldn’t obtain CBRNE, the possibility that they did had to be planned for.
In March 2003, just weeks after President Bush appointed him assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Security, Paul McHale signed a classified memorandum directing that NorthCom build itself up to the point of being able to react to not just one and not just two nearly simultaneous catastrophic WMD events in the United States, but a minimum of three and a maximum of six.
Why three? Why six?
An army officer assigned to NorthCom said it was three because that was the number of locations attacked on 9/11; and six because that would mandate a capability to quickly assist all geographic points in the continental United States even with multiple simultaneous events. A senior intelligence officer who witnessed the development of this requirement said the numbers were just gut guesses, and never based upon any intelligence or even upon some sophisticated simulation or war game. And though funding considerations weren’t a factor, once planning started for three to six exercises, the money was needed to implement it.
Whether such a multipronged threat is likely or not, it is NorthCom’s responsibility to prepare, train for, and, if the time ever comes, execute an effective response. “Effective” in a WMD event is defined as managing mass casualties, maintaining order, and establishing the conditions in which recovery can begin. To this end, in 2003 NorthCom was directed to create three standing units dedicated full time to prepping for a WMD catastrophe.
Ten small National Guard WMD teams existed before 9/11, one assigned to each FEMA region; the Marine Corps also had a chemical and biological incident response force (called CBIRF and established in 1996) for the purpose of search and rescue in a WMD-contaminated environment. The post-9/11 NorthCom units, charged with responding to a WMD catastrophe anywhere in the country within forty-eight hours of an attack, would be given the unlikely nickname Sea Smurf, for the mouthful acronym of their official designation: Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-Yield Explosive Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF).
Because of the demands that the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put on soldiers, the first of the three Sea Smurf units, the 1st Heavy Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division based in Georgia, didn’t even begin training until October 1, 2007. That brigade had just returned from a fifteen-month surge-deployment to Iraq. The army did its duty, but it wasn’t until the following June, five years after McHale’s memo, that the Pentagon assigned “operational control” of the 4,700-person CCMRF to NorthCom, an arrangement that lasted only until October 2009.
One month later, in November 2009, NorthCom mobilized 4,000 people for Vibrant Response 10.1, its largest-ever field training drill. The exercise was taken right out of National Planning Scenario No. 1, a set of planning scenarios created for the entire federal government and approved by the Homeland Security Council in the fourth year of the Bush administration and affirmed by its successor: terrorists detonate a ten-kiloton nuclear device in downtown Indianapolis and thousands are dead and dying, the urban landscape a jumble of flattened buildings and irradiated rubble.
The Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations, near Butlerville, Indiana, served as the stage for the grim drama. Once the home of the Indiana Farm Colony for Feeble-Minded Youth, the 1,000-acre urban warfare site had been refurbished to resemble a small city, with a nine-mile road network, underground tunnel systems, houses and buildings, a hospital, parking garages, a power plant, schools, and a police station. The mock city was replete with upended cars and manufactured piles of debris, smoke pots and burning straw simulating fires, even expert role players contracted to act as injured and irradiated residents.
The response teams, suited up in moon suits (radiological, biological, and chemical protection gear), rappelled, burrowed, directed, and simulated while exercise referees hovered nearby and VIPs watched. Identifier teams roved the wreckage in their all-terrain vehicle (ATVs), taking radiation readings and looking for chemical and biological traces that had been seeded by the umpires. Survivors were gathered together at decontamination stations, where they were washed with miraculously available and abundant water. The “residents” were then directed along neatly marked lanes—based upon levels of exposure and severity of simulated wounds—to immaculately clean tented medical stations. There, mannequins were saved; hysterical actors were reassured. The CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force’s first full-scale, full-deployment exercise was declared a success, confirming, NorthCom’s briefing slides said, “CCMRF’s capability to deploy to and support a catastrophic CBRNE Consequence Management event from a standing alert status.” Mission accomplished.
But even in peacetime, even with months of preparation, endless meetings, modeling and pre-exercise exercises, with everything in the country working perfectly, it took this Vibrant Response force more than a week just to get to Indiana and set up. What’s more, when they got there, everyone worked under brilliantly sunny skies, and because of local restrictions on air traffic and noise, very little to none of the exercise activity took place at night.
Compare these vacationlike conditions to the panic, chaos, and physical disruptions of an actual WMD attack—in which there wouldn’t be nice decontamination lanes to triage compliant survivors and calm doctors and nurses—and the mission of responding effectively within forty-eight hours could be considered unlikely to come close to success. In fact, NorthCom officials have faced a hurricane of criticism from auditors and observers for both the readiness and the adequacy of the CCMRF program. A 2009 War College study documented that the command is unprepared, undermanned, unable to mobilize, and suffers from inadequate transport. And if the immediate response unit was able to get to a contaminated area, it could only handle about 120 casualties an hour, a horrifying mismatch with the National Planning Scenario for a single ground-level ten-kiloton nuclear detonation by a terrorist in the center of Washington, DC, which estimates 57,000 immediate deaths from the blast and as many as 180,000 radiation deaths in the first twenty-four hours.
The Government Accountability Office has levied similar critiques, and the army not only stiff-armed NorthCom for years in allocating a combat unit but has now managed to shed responsibility for CCMRFs 2 and 3, foisting the mission off on the National Guard. Then came the final bureaucratic indignity for NorthCom: after just one year, the CCMRF was “allocated” to the command rather than assigned. In simpler terms: the supposedly full-fledged homeland defense combatant command would have to ask permission if it wanted to activate its allocated unit or take control of the National Guard.
Now, as the PowerPoint slides ticking off in the interagency group meeting were making clear, NorthCom was facing another mission adjustment: the three dedicated CCMRF units with a force of approximately 15,000 would be transformed into a single unit a third the size—just 5,200—renamed the Defense CBRNE Response Force, which would be “faster, more flexible,” according to the upbeat assessment in the presentation. The Defense Department, the slides declared, would now focus on creating five-hundred-person “all-hazards” National Guard “homeland response forces,” one in each of ten FEMA regions—a force that would be prepared by as early as 2012 but, tellingly, under the control of state governors. NorthCom is nowhere to be found in the chain of command between the secretary of defense and the National Guard.
The interagency group briefing slide on the status of WMD consequence management again seemed designed to minimize the appearance of any loss on the part of NorthCom, but the truth of the command’s diminished status, even in this, the one area in which it had seemed to have unambiguous leadership, showed up in a final bullet: under the new arrangements, all the response units weren’t even obligated to come to the aid of NorthCom; rather, the military services could make forces available “to the greatest extent possible.”
These developments were heartbreaking to those who had spent years building up Northern Command. But the fact that Northern Command would even continue to exist as a major, four-star-led, geographic military command, with virtually no responsibilities, no competencies, and no unique role to fill, demonstrated the resiliency of institutions created in the wake of 9/11 and just how difficult it would be to ever actually shrink Top Secret America. Northern Command, with its $100 million renovated concrete headquarters, its two dozen generals, its redundant command centers, its gigantic electronic map, and its multitude of contractors, looked as busy as ever, putting together agendas and exercises and PowerPoint briefings in the name of keeping the nation safe.
If it took Northern Command a surprisingly long time to get to Indiana, it wasn’t because it lacked directions. Indeed, as NorthCom’s status diminishes, the national One Map continues to grow. Over eleven million individual records have now been entered, almost double the number appearing three years earlier. A total of 44,000 government entities have been identified and mapped, 116,000 emergency services, and 182,000 public health facilities. Thirty-two new datasets were included for military recruiting stations, quite a few of which had been the target of protests and even attacks. Seventeen thousand “national symbols” were also included, as were 315,000 “public venues,” and a hodgepodge “other” category that included “places of worship.”
The Pentagon has gone out of its way to soften the official jargon to make the mission less offensive-sounding. After 9/11, military planners replaced the phrase “Military Support to Civil Authorities” with “Defense Support of Civil Authorities” (DSCA), a less martial wording in an ever more militarized America. Similarly, in its voluminous January 2011 Handbook laying out planning factors to be used by local military forces operating in the United States, the Pentagon sternly instructs, “do not use the terms ‘Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)’ or ‘Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB).’ The appropriate terminology in a DSCA environment is Incident Awareness and Assessment” (emphasis in original).
But information will always be information, even while the intent can change. And there is already abundant evidence, from what is happening in communities and local police stations throughout the nation, that the intent is sometimes less than purely to offer support and solace to the afflicted. Consider the careful cataloging of places of worship on The Map.
Most states keep track of places of worship as part of their emergency management missions, and many since 9/11 have developed faith-based cooperative initiatives where police work with religious communities to prepare for a hostile event such as an act of violence or vandalism. But not all states had yet shared their data, and the federal government wanted to know more.
In 2008, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency decided to purchase its own information on places of worship. It went to a small company, Ionic Enterprise (since bought and gone out of business), that was already tracking the data for commercial vendors and numerous state governments. The government asked for the data to be delivered in four subgroups—Catholic churches, Protestant churches, mosques, and synagogues—with quarterly updates, according to the mapping contract. A young NorthCom intelligence officer acknowledged that some state officials were befuddled by the priority the federal government placed on religious institutions, but, as the officer explained, “It isn’t only first response that’s important.” She added, “Our responsibility is also to look at the threat.” The threat to religious institutions? Or the threat from religious institutions? She didn’t say. The details of the contract for the dataset itself reveal an odd emphasis: only churches with congregations greater than 750 people are tracked, while all mosques and synagogues are tracked. The divisions are even starker in the June 2010 DHS Geospatial Concept of Operations, a 161-page document that contains “the authoritative data matrix” for map users. There, two separate subcategories exist under public venues: “houses of worship” and “mosques.” And in the sensitive NorthCom intelligence egg and in Room 111, where the Top Secret version of The Map is kept, intelligence officers can consult the Integrated Common Operating Picture, where “Muslims in America” is one of the categories of information collected and mapped, 24/7.
In the top secret version of the nation’s geography, the government tracks all threats picked up by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement in the past forty-eight hours. NorthCom analysts and interagency liaison officers from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies can access the raw intelligence—the actual reports from local authorities, in many cases—and can interact with colleagues across the nation via specialized chat rooms for those following gangs, drugs, human smuggling, or reports and even suspicions about people and places on the map just possibly linked to terrorism. As the young intelligence officer in the top secret egg proudly summed up: “It’s all here.”