The COE, as the Homeland Security Act of 2002 mandates, are “a coordinated, university-based system to enhance the nation’s homeland security.” A consortium of universities work through 12 centers focused on multi-disciplinary research in different homeland security areas, the results of which give government agencies and organizations tools and methods for addressing security threats.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Under Secretary for Science & Technology Tara O’Toole visited the DHS Coastal Hazards Center of Excellence in Chapel Hill, N.C. on Oct. 20, 2011. Pictured: back (left to right), Gavin Smith (UNC CH), Mo Gabr (NC State), Cary Caruso (NC State), Ward Lyles (UNCCH); front (left to right), Rick Luettich (UNCCH), Under Secretary Tara OToole, Dylan Sandler (UNCCH), Margery Overton (NC State), Tom Shay (UNCCH). University of North Carolina photo

When a security or emergency response agency encounters a new or pressing challenge in their work, they can turn to a COE focused on their subject matter area, soliciting a specific solution for their precise need. The Center for Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (ALERT), for example, develops methods for protecting against explosive threats, and the Coastal Hazards Center of Excellence (CHC) works on methods for safeguarding citizens, property and economies from natural disasters.

The goal, said Matt Clark, director of university of programs at S&T, is to create “a homeland security university network that anyone in the homeland security enterprise can access whenever they need it.”

Now, a decade after the COE initiative was called for in the Homeland Security Act, S&T and the centers are embracing new approaches for making the network more valuable to America’s security and emergency response professionals. Indeed, the COE initiative is transitioning from a start-up effort to a lasting part of America’s homeland security landscape.

Engage to Excel

For the COE network, government agencies, organizations and first responders are “customers,” and the way the centers work with their customers is changing.

“We took a page from [Under Secretary for Science & Technology] Dr. Tara O’Toole’s Apex projects, where you develop the project by building a relationship with the client – a real partnership,” said Clark. “What we’re doing is relationship building. Particularly when you have such disparate groups [of customers], getting them to work together is a heavy lift.”

The heart of this effort – Engage to Excel (E2E) – is getting end users (aka customers) involved in the research effort early on in the project. This is not the usual way research and scholastic institutions develop solutions.

“Typically in university research, you find that researchers go out, use the scientific method, gather data, come up with a conclusion, and then they go seeking a problem,” said Erroll Southers, associate director for the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California.

The Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California is developing partnerships with private companies, governmental agencies and non-profit organizations. University of Southern California graphic

Letting research results drive application may not always lead to the tools and processes that best resolve homeland challenges. E2E joins customers with researchers and scholars, letting their discussions and partnerships identify the specific challenges and ideal solutions.

“A lot of times,” said Clark, “we talk with people who say ‘I wish I had a widget or a piece of software’ for their challenge. But they might not need a widget or software. Maybe the solution is a process. It comes down to really examining more closely what they need.”

Working hand in hand with the customer provides results better tailored to the customer needs, engaged as they are throughout the span of the endeavor.

“When funding started, it was so frenetic,” said Gary LaFree, Director, Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), led by the University of Maryland. “Initially, there was some connection with customers but when we started, we got all our researchers together, looked at requests for proposals (from customers), offered our response, and there wasn’t all that much connection [with the customers] at that point.”

Now, however, START engages end users before a grant is even written. With customers, LaFree asks, how can the center produce something that will be useful and valuable, and what would that look like? Connecting the centers and customers and encouraging ongoing collaboration ensures projects and products are more precisely aligned with customer needs.

 

Win, Win, Win

While the CoE initiative was developed to provide security solutions for the nation’s homeland agencies, there has also always been an educational component to the initiative. Initially, said LaFree, there was reticence to offer “wholesale” degrees in terrorism research because there was concern that this would result in “watered down” homeland education. The better approach was to offer a certificate in homeland security, marrying a student’s scholastic work in various fields with an appreciation for how their knowledge can be applied to homeland security challenges.

Gary LaFree, Director, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland speaks at the National Institute of Justice 2011 Conference. National Institute of Justice photo

The result is America’s next generation of homeland security leaders, trained and educated early on in the kinds of specific challenges and needs homeland agencies and organizations face. At the University of Maryland, for example, the university offered an undergraduate minor in homeland security and made it highly competitive. As a result, of those who acquired the minor, 90 percent went on to work in homeland security-related organizations, from the Central Intelligence Agency to Fusion Centers.

“What’s fascinating,” said LaFree, “is you get some of these students, when they are properly motivated, they can set the world on fire. I once saw an open source research report from a student, and I knew as soon as an agency looked at him [and his work], he’d be snapped up. When you get these kids that are really motivated, it’s a wonder to see them take off.”

The new interest surfaced in a recent sources sought announcement issued by the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Command in cooperation with Program Executive Office Soldier / PM-Soldier Protection Equipment.

Under Natick Broad Agency Announcement 11-13-3, the organization outlined an effort ”to investigate and study the parameters involved in addressing critical body armor interfaces with respect to system modularity, scalability and tailorability (example: ease of system use, range of motion, comfort, and marksmanship).”

Clarifying that the government is not soliciting for the development of any specific system or hardware, the announcement identifies the desired final outcome of this effort as the advancement of existing technology and addressing “scientific and technical problems associated with the development of single product architecture for modular, scalable, tailorable body armor.”

“The next generation of body armor development will be focused on the need for a multi-functional, modular, scalable protection system that improves soldier physiological performance while reducing system/component redundancy and logistic footprint,” it states.

Noting that “current state of the art provides multiple systems to address modularity and scalability for protecting the torso, extremities and pelvic region,” it says that the study effort will contribute to the development of “a single product architecture that addresses the following tiers of protection while addressing load redistribution (reduces point loads on the shoulders and reduces soldier fatigue while wearing typical combat equipment including an assault pack and/or a rucksack).”

“The concept architectures developed under this effort shall consist of a baseline area of coverage for small arms protection [should] not be less than that of the current Soldier Plate Carrier System and scale up to a final system not to exceed that of the Improved Outer Tactical Vest for full fragmentation protection,” it notes.

Industry concept papers are to be submitted in response to the announcement no later than March 9, 2012.

Planners currently envision a main effort lasting no more than one calendar year, with subsequent option year phases “to conduct further investigation of key technical discoveries from the main effort.”

First, some basic blocking and tackling about the movie. Act of Valor is a feature-length film about a team of Navy SEALs who are charged with finding a kidnapped CIA agent, which in turn leads them on a mission to stop terrorists planning a series of suicide bombings in cities across the United States. The way that the SEALs take bits and pieces of intelligence and piece it together to support their operations closely mirrors the way SEALs – as well as other U.S. Special Operations Forces – conduct their missions today.

The genesis of the project was perhaps best explained in an article by John Jurgensen in the Aug. 26, 2011 edition of The Wall Street Journal. According to Jurgensen, “The goals of the production were to bolster recruiting efforts, honor fallen team members, and correct past movie productions that did not represent the SEALs accurately.” The movie accomplishes all this, and more.

A Navy SEAL is engaged in a personnel recovery mission in Relativity Media's upcoming release, "Act of Valor." Photo courtesy of IATM LLC Copyright 2011 Relativity Media, LLC

Importantly, Act of Valor did not cost American taxpayers a cent. As the Navy’s Chief of Information explained, “All evolutions you see in the movie involving ranges, vessels, aircraft, and submarines were part of regularly scheduled training and were at no cost to the Navy or American taxpayers.” Uniquely – and unprecedented for the SEAL community, which prides itself on being “the silent warriors” – Bandito Brothers was given access to Navy SEAL training evolutions and allowed to shoot training operations – many of them live-fire events – in a way that did not interfere with the training ops. While not “invisible,” the Bandito Brothers’ cameramen were an unobtrusive presence.

And while Act of Valor is not a recruiting film, per se, as Navy SEAL Capt. Duncan Smith explained at a screening of Act of Valor for the San Diego Cinema Society on Feb. 13, 2012, “Some people will see this film and just be glad that someone else is performing these challenging and often dangerous missions. But others will see not only SEALs, but other U.S. military professionals, doing their job and be motivated to explore that as a career option.”

Bandito Brothers’ director, Mike “Mouse” McCoy, has spoken with the media on numerous occasions and has pointed out that Act of Valor is “Rated ‘A’ for Authentic.” A Feb. 17, 2012 article by Ward Carroll and Jim Barber on Military.com confirms this. As Carroll and Barber point out:

“Every SEAL mission area is featured in luxurious visual detail – from HALO to high value boarding search and seizure to SEAL delivery vehicle ops. And veteran special operations bloggers who’ve attended pre-opening screenings have unanimously gone on the record saying that AOV ‘gets it right’ from a technical and operational point of view.”

The Bandito Brothers spent two years filming these actual SEAL training events and emerged with 1,800 hours of film footage.  Working in close coordination with the Naval Special Warfare Command, the Bandito Brothers were careful not to film any evolutions that would reveal matters of a classified nature. Additionally, once this massive amount of film was “in the can,” SEALs at the Naval Special Warfare Command carefully reviewed the footage to be absolutely certain no SEAL tactics, techniques or procedures were revealed that would in any way compromise current or future operations.

Navy SEALs train on a high altitude low opening (HALO) jump in a scene from "Act of Valor." The film is earning high marks for getting SEAL tactics right. Photo courtesy of IATM LLC Copyright 2011 Relativity Media, LLC

The Navy and the Naval Special Warfare Command have also taken great pains to ensure that the identities of the SEALs starring in this movie are protected to the greatest extent possible. While their faces appear in the movie, their names are not featured in the credits of the movie nor are their current duty stations revealed. Navy officials do point out that subsequent to the filming of Act of Valor all of the SEALs featured in the movie have returned to their normal duties and most have had additional tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the movie features SEALs as the primary protagonists, one cannot watch the movie and not come away with the strong impression that there are a host of “enablers” who support SEALs on their missions and are often “in the fight” with them. Naval Special Warfare Command representatives have made that point repeatedly at early screenings of the film because, not surprisingly, most of the general public is unaware of these enabling professionals. Now they won’t be any longer.

The Naval Special Warfare Community professionals who work most closely with the SEALs are the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen, commonly called SWCCs. The SWCCs work closely with SEALs in combat missions, providing their surface mobility support, primarily in coastal and river areas where larger craft can’t go. The SWCC community traces its heritage to the U.S. PT boats of World War II as well as the combatant craft such as Swift boats during the Vietnam conflict.

But the enablers go beyond the SWCCs, to the intelligence and communications specialists who support the SEALs on all their missions and who are also part of the Naval Special Warfare Community. This “team effort” comes through loud and clear in Act of Valor, and the movie provides the viewer with a full and well-nuanced understanding of how these other Naval Special Warfare Community professionals support the SEALs.

While her remarks were meant to reinforce the Obama Administration’s stewardship of DHS as he prepares for a tough reelection fight, the phrase, “put your money where your mouth is” has a loud ring if you want to know the real priorities in homeland security. Words are simply that, and none of them can pay a bill or make an investment unless there are real dollars behind them. In terms of this year’s budget submission, the Obama Administration is requesting $39.5 billion for its net discretionary funding for DHS.

Compared to a number of federal departments, that’s still a sizable amount of money, but it does not come close to the biggest of requestors – the Department of Defense, which is requesting $614 billion in for the next fiscal year.

Fortunately for Napolitano she does not have to defend the big “ask” of the Pentagon or its considerable “cuts,” but what she is requesting tells you a lot about her Department’s priorities. If you ignore the various expenditures for aviation and border security, FEMA, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Coast Guard and other operational components, the greatest investment that DHS is making is in cybersecurity.

In their FY2013 submission, Napolitano and the Obama Administration are requesting $769 million from Congress for DHS’ National Cyber Security Division (NCSD). Its charge is to “protect federal networks and coordinate with the private sector on safeguarding critical infrastructure systems such as utility grids.”

NCSD’s and DHS’ challenge in the cyber arena may be even more daunting than the threats the nation faced from terrorists following 9/11. Instead of being on the lookout for suspicious persons with box-cutters or concealed explosives, the cyber threat is far more amorphous. In this arena, the enemy can attack any and all infrastructures with malware, vicious code and keystrokes without ever leaving the comfort of wherever in the country (or the world) they happen to be located.

Furthermore, they can magnify their impact, costs and consequences far beyond any of the traditional means of terrorism. From novice hacker to criminal mastermind to nation-state actor, these threats and capacities expand faster than any Al Qaeda franchise anywhere in the world. If a cyber threat wants to send a message or hurt you, it can. Unfortunately, you might not know of the assault until after the cyber threat has bored into your systems and it’s too late.

The administration’s investments in cyber security are the right ones, but it’s not enough money. The truth is, there will never be enough money to deal with the cyber threat or any of the threats the department is charged with protecting us against.

That was true when Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff led DHS and the department was shoveled money by Congress it never even requested. It’s also true under Napolitano, but her task is a bit tougher because she has to manage a department in far more austere times. The times of spending with abandon have come to an end. Persons on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill are crying for far more fiscally sane expenditures. That’s hard for any elected official to do in an election year, and it is what makes another part of the fiscal year 2013 submission so interesting.

Since its creation, DHS and other federal departments and agencies (i.e., Justice, HHS, CDC, etc.) have distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funds. These monies have bought new fire engines, radios and public safety equipment; trained countless first responders and emergency managers about the range of hazards and threats that are out there; paid millions of dollars in spending and overtime to support events such as political conventions, Super Bowls and disaster areas; and been spread over every community in the United States. While originally intended to go to state, local and tribal governments to offset many of the post 9/11 costs that each would have to bear, the eligibility for grant funds has expanded over the years to include a wide array of NGOs, citizen groups and more through new grant programs.

For all of the eligibility, purchasing power and flexibility that these grant programs have created, the state of homeland security now has one of its biggest challenges. Those eligible to apply for grant funds have never been wider or more diverse, but the actual pool of funds is shrinking as the Obama Administration looks for ways to cut spending at DHS and other federal departments and agencies.

For the past few years, DHS and others have tried in vain to consolidate a number of grant programs and their funds. For example, in this year’s budget submission, the Obama Administration is working to consolidate as many grant programs as possible. For the coming fiscal year, that includes eliminating FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Fund, which got $36 million last year. DHS has stated that these efforts can be covered under other grant programs.

Additionally, DHS/FEMA explained in its recently announced Grant Guidance for Fiscal Year 2012 that preparedness grants would be reduced by nearly $1 billion from the FY 2011 enacted level and $1.5 billion below the president’s FY 2012 request.

The Democratic leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee branded these cuts as “rash and shortsighted” and placed the blame squarely in the laps of their Republican counterparts.

With just over $1.3 billion to spend on grants for FY2012, House Democrats have estimated grant reductions that are fairly significant, including:

• State Homeland Security Program by 44 percent;
• Urban Areas Security Initiative by 26 percent;
• Port Security Grant Program by 59 percent; and,
• Transit Security Grant Program by 56 percent

With reductions as steep as this, it will mean that more and more citizen-based groups, such as those in Citizen Corps as well as state, local, and tribal governments, ports, and NGOs are going to have to find ways other than federal grant funds to be sustainable.

There have already been warnings from a couple of different studies about the consequences of what budget cuts will do to federal, state and local communities’ ability to respond to some of the threats we face.

Consolidation in any program is never a bad idea when it improves efficiency and output, but efforts by the Obama Administration and its predecessor, the Bush Administration, to consolidate any grant programs have often run into the road block of all road blocks – Congress.

With anywhere from 88 to 120 congressional committees providing oversight to DHS and homeland security matters, the youngest of the Cabinet departments is like a ping pong ball volleyed between competing jurisdictions and political gamesmanship. With powerful political patrons on both sides of the aisle steering funds to projects back home and ensuring that no grant program ever goes away, any effort to streamline grant programs by the administration is tossed aside by Congress.

For as much as the Framers wanted “checks and balances,” they would be mortified at the complete foolishness that exemplifies Congressional oversight of homeland security matters. Leaders of both political parties in Congress have failed to correct this situation and fulfill the one recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that has never been addressed. Congress would do well to take a stroll through a house of mirrors to see one of the homeland’s most significant trouble makers.

Although the nation is smarter and better prepared in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, the state of homeland security is not getting any easier. It’s getting tougher. While there have been no successful attacks by terrorists since 9/11, the threats remain ever-present and dynamic. The rage of Mother Nature and all of the other regular homeland assignments should also not be ignored, because they too can leave permanent scars that take years, if not decades, to heal. In battling all of these conditions, budget funds on every public and private sector level are going to be getting tougher to come by while competition for every dollar becomes even more cutthroat.

No one ever said this job was going to get easier with more time or even better with more money. The state of homeland security will always be a condition that will have to balance risk, liberties, costs and consequences. Its greatest challenge will be discussing and executing on each of those points with skill, honesty and candor. On some levels that is occurring, but on others, it’s painfully obvious that we have so much further to go – and that will always be the measure of the state of homeland security.

US-VISIT is a component of – or more accurately, it is a system that will soon make use of – the largest fingerprint repository and biometric-matching system in the world, DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT.  By the end of 2012, according to US-VISIT Director Bob Mocny, the program will become fully integrated with this fingerprint database, enabling real-time “rapid response” capability – instead of checking against the current US-VISIT watch list of about 6 million identities, the fingerprints of incoming travelers will be checked against the DHS’s entire database of 67 million.  Anyone who has ever been arrested in the United States will be flagged by the newly expanded system.  While its merits may be debatable in terms of the burden it might impose on the border protection system, or in terms of the fairness of flagging arrests rather than convictions, the new US-VISIT will make it much more difficult for a person to lie his or her way into the United States at a legal entry point.

Global Entry is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States. President Obama took action in January 2012 to increase travel and tourism and expand Global Entry, which utilizes fingertip scanners to verify the identity of travelers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection photo by Anthony Bucci

It will not make it impossible, however. Digital fingerprint scanners are not infallible – the crew of the television show Mythbusters famously tricked a door lock scanner in 2006 with nothing more than a licked photocopy of a fingerprint – and once a fraudster has obtained another person’s fingerprint, the victim will most likely never be able again to use his or her fingerprint as an ID authenticator.

A more promising, but not yet mature, biometric technology is iris recognition.  The intricate and detailed structures of the thin circular structure that controls pupil diameter are every bit as distinct as the fingerprint, and much more difficult to fake; so far, the only people to have defrauded iris scanners are fictional movie characters – either clones (Ewan McGregor in The Island) or those with gruesome schemes for acquiring the eyes of others (Tom Cruise in Minority Report; Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man).  Of course, this is because the technology has not matured enough to be rolled out large-scale; there are still concerns about whether scanners will be able to accurately verify the presence of living tissue.

DHS began pilot-testing iris recognition scanners – which obtained images from subjects at distances of 3 to 4 feet, some from cameras that recorded subjects as they were walking past – at the border entry station at McAllen, Texas some time in early 2011.  At the same facility, it has also experimented with generally less mature facial recognition technology.  While results of the tests haven’t been documented, there is at least anecdotal evidence that they’ve shown promise: On Dec. 22, 2011, DHS announced that the lead contractor for US-VISIT technology, Accenture Federal Services, would be awarded a $71 contract to increase the number and types of biometric technologies used to determine the status of visitors entering the United States.  The contract will include both facial and iris identification scanners, to be used on a voluntary basis by those enrolled in the program.

US-VISIT uses biometrics in order to help strengthen U.S. immigration and border security. U.S. Department of Homeland Security photo

We’re probably not that close to having iris scanners planted at every border entry station, and the newness of the technology still makes it seem perhaps too futuristic – probably much like the video conferences between Star Trek characters used to seem before the age of Skype and FaceTime.  But when biometric technologies such as iris recognition begin to impact the daily lives of Americans, the debates about the issues they present – from the intrusive iris-triggered personalized advertisements imagined in Minority Report to the real-life objections of Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union – will heat up.

“If you can identify any individual at a distance and without their knowledge,” Calabrese said, “you literally allow the physical tracking of a person anywhere there’s a camera and access to the Internet.”  The argument advanced by supporters of the technology – that those who want to can simply “opt out” of a scan by closing their eyes – doesn’t hold up when you consider that systems are designed to scan subjects involuntarily, at a distance.

Still, the advantages of something as potentially failsafe as iris recognition go beyond the prevention of fraud.  The technology may, someday, completely transform the experience of entering and leaving a country – perhaps rendering the passport obsolete.

Will Americans be willing to trade greater security and ease of travel for a perceived threat to privacy and civil liberty?  Will they be allowed to make this choice?  Those questions will probably be answered sooner than most of us are ready to imagine.

—Vice Adm. Otto Ciliax, commenting about the attack on his ships by obsolete Swordfish torpedo bombers

In February 1942 British, and Royal Navy, pride suffered an embarrassing blow when Vice Adm. Otto Ciliax of the Kriegsmarine successfully completed the Channel Dash.

Officially known as Operation Cerberus, it was the plan to bring the Kriegsmarine squadron consisting of battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugenfrom their exposed location in the west Brittany port of Brest to more protected harbors in Germany. The safer, and longer, route called for the squadron to transit the Denmark Strait and sail around Great Britain. Instead the decision was made to take a riskier high speed run through the English Channel, thus giving the effort its more popular name.

The German battlecruiser Gneisenau, shown in 1939 after her refit, the most obvious result of which was her clipper bow. Bundesarchive photo

Even with Luftwaffe support in the form of Operation Donnerkeil (Thunderbolt), to successfully pull off an operation of this scope right under the noses of the British Army, Royal Air Force, and Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine would also need an enormous amount of luck. Through a series of delays, blunders, mistakes, and missed opportunities spanning 36 hours that would have rendered a work of fiction unbelievable, the Kriegsmarine got it.

The litany of mistakes started with the unanimous belief held by the Admiralty, Air Ministry, chiefs of Coastal, Fighter, and Bomber Commands, and Vice Adm. Bertram Ramsay stationed in Dover that the squadron would time its departure during the day so that it would reach the most perilous part, the narrow Straits of Dover, at night. Instead, on Feb. 11, 1942, Ciliax’s squadron steamed out of Brest at 9:15 p.m., right after an RAF air raid had ended. From that point on, British miscues started falling like dominoes.

Scharnhorst shown under way after her refit in 1939. Intended as commerce raiders, the Scharnhorst-class battlecruisers were inferior to battleships, with only 11-inch guns, but outgunned any Allied heavy cruiser, and could lay waste to any convoy they caught. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo

Three Coastal Command night reconnaissance airplanes assigned to patrol the French coast from Brest to Boulogne failed to detect the squadron, the first two because of radar failure and the third because its patrol had to be aborted early as a result of incoming fog at its West Sussex base.

Visual sighting did not occur until 10:42 a.m. Feb.12 when two Spitfires, after flying through thick cloud cover, spotted the squadron. But, obeying the strict orders of Fighter Command, which required its pilots to maintain radio silence regardless of circumstances, they did not report their spectacular finding until after they had landed at 11:09 a.m. Additional delays dogged the news as it went up the chain of command. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill was informed of the squadron’s presence shortly after 11:30 a.m., he ordered, “At all costs the ships must be intercepted and made to pay dearly for their audacity.”

825 Squadron air crew decorated for helping sink the Bismarck. L-R: Lt. P. D. Gick, RN, (awarded DSC); Lt. Cmdr. Eugene Esmonde, RN, (DSO); Sub Lt. V. K. Norfolk, RN, (DSC); A/PO Air L. D. Sayer (DSM); A/Ldg Air A L. Johnson (DSM). Esmonde was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions during the Channel Dash. Imperial War Museum

But, instead of a powerful and coordinated attack using ships, aircraft, and coastal artillery, British response was slow and disjointed. The first to attack were six obsolete Fairey Swordfish led by Lt. Cmdr. Eugene Esmonde, a veteran of the Bismarck battle. The Swordfish biplanes, affectionately called “Stringbags” by their crews,  were hardly able to make 90 knots, and had been training for a night attack should the German squadron break out. Instead they were going in during broad daylight. They had no illusions about what lay ahead. Certainly Esmonde knew from experience how poor their chances were. In John Deane Potter’s Fiasco: The Break-out of the German Battleships  Wing Commander Tom Gleave recalled his last sight of Esmonde at RAF Manston, where the Swordfish were temporarily based:

“Although his mouth twitched automatically into the semblance of a grin and his arm lifted in a vague salute, he barely recognized me. He knew what he was going into. But it was his duty. His face was tense and white. It was the face of a man already dead. It shocked me as nothing has ever done since.”

Despite not having the fighter support they were told to expect, with only 10 Spitfires instead of five squadrons to protect them, they valiantly pressed their torpedo attack into the teeth of the German fleet’s flak and fighter escort. All were shot down. Esmonde was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Capt. Kurt Hoffmann on the Scharnhorstsaid in admiration, “Poor fellows. They are so very slow. It is nothing but suicide for them to fly against these big ships.”

Another shot of Gneisenau and Scharnhorst during the Channel Dash. While a tactical victory for the Germans, it was a strategic defeat, as the ships were much less of an immediate threat while based in Norway rather than Brest. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo

Other air attacks were attempted, but of 242 bombers dispatched, only 39 were reported to have attacked the ships, scoring no hits. Coastal Command artillery fired just 33 shells, all falling short. Six Royal Navy destroyers assigned intercept duty were off station, conducting gunnery practice in the North Sea. When they finally arrived, they had time to only fire one salvo of torpedoes, to no effect, and HMS Worcester, which moved in even closer than the other destroyers to launch, was smothered beneath a rain of heavy German shells that left her a drifting wreck and very nearly sank her. It was the last gasp of the British. Thirteen of the 18 Swordfish crew sent against the German battle fleet were dead, along with 27 sailors aboard the Worcester, with another 18 seriously wounded. The British lost 42 aircraft and a total of 40 crew dead and missing, which included RAF casualties.

The only damage suffered by the German ships was made by mines, two of which seriously damaged the Scharnhorst, leaving her dead in the water for a time, and a third that damaged Gneisenau. Nevertheless, shortly before noon on Feb. 13, Vice Adm. Ciliax was able to send the message to his superior, Adm. Alfred Saalwächter: “It is my duty to inform you that Operation Cerberus has been successfully completed.”

On the other side of the channel, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound had his own telephone call to make. At 1:00 AM he picked up the private telephone that connected him to Prime Minister Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street, according to Potter’s Fiasco:

Pound said, “I’m afraid, sir, I must report that the enemy battlecruisers should by now have reached the safety of their home waters.” Churchill growled, “Why?” and slammed the phone down.

An editorial in The Times of London ruefully noted, “Vice Adm. Ciliax has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia [of the Spanish Armada] failed. Nothing more mortifying to the pride of our seapower has happened since the seventeenth century. … It spelled the end of the Royal Navy legend that in wartime no enemy battle fleet could pass through what we proudly call the English Channel.”

Since 2007, more than 70 new buildings have been programmed for construction at Fort Carson. Those projects have resulted in 33 buildings achieving the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) certification: 15 have achieved LEED Gold certification and another 18 are LEED Silver certified. These 33 buildings make Fort Carson one of the highest concentrated areas of LEED certified buildings in the country.

An additional 40 buildings at various stages of the certification process, including design, are under construction and awaiting certification are pursuing LEED certification.

In 2006, as the Army began transitioning to the LEED rating system requiring all buildings built for the Army to be LEED Silver certifiable, Fort Carson was preparing to receive an entire combat brigade from Fort Hood, Texas.

Foreseeing the potential impacts of implementing LEED on several construction projects led Omaha District personnel to get LEED training to understand the philosophy and the processes associated with the requirements.

“The LEED process is something that requires a change of habit,” said Cambrey Torres, Omaha District project engineer. “It is a change in the overall mindset for designers, contractors, the military, and, ultimately, the end-user.”

To achieve LEED certification, contractors have new responsibilities that require focusing attention on recycling and using recycled materials as well as tracking and recording the source of project materials and the quantity of material diverted from landfills.

“We’ve all had a huge opportunity to think and be innovative,” said Matt Ellis, USACE resident engineer for the restationing workload surge. “We were challenged to develop solutions for waste disposal, lighting, building orientation, and how to measure and ensure we were meeting the standards for LEED certification.”

Pursuing LEED certification from a project’s start is less expensive than performing a review after completion, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to hire a third party to audit records, designs, and perform building commissioning to determine certification.

Identifying a project to pursue certification from the start includes reviews by USGBC throughout design and construction with documentation taking place along the way resulting in a cost of about $6,000.

With construction bidding during the last year beating cost estimates by 10 percent to 30 percent, the Army challenged project teams to reinvest the savings in further efficiencies by emphasizing energy conservation, sustainable design, and low-impact development as well as energy independence.

Director of Public Works for Fort Carson Hal Alguire said, “We need to credit the employees who encouraged focusing on sustainable construction by making sure that [everyone] knew decisions were made with the goals for LEED in mind.”

“When the people who are driving this initiative come to the project meetings, it is clear we are led by a generation that is latching on to these goals for environmental responsibility and running with it,” said Vince Guthrie, Directorate of Public Works Utility program manager. “We are benefiting from the return on investment, marketability, and the positive attention for implementing what is, essentially, the right thing to do.”

This article first appeared in the 2011-2012 edition of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces publication.

That idea was the central tenet of the 2006 Security and Accountability for Every (SAFE) Port Act. SAFE Port mandated that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) establish Interagency Operations Centers (IOCs) in key ports to improve security through multiagency communication and coordination. The Coast Guard was designated by DHS to establish IOCs. In response, the service is implementing an IOC concept of operations, which includes using a newly developed software system that will enable multiagency coordination and information sharing, and in some ports establishing an IOC facility.

The basic IOC framework is designed to enable a unified coalition of port agencies from local law enforcement to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the U.S. Navy to conduct and apply risk-based operational planning for efficient, collaborative use of their common resources for improved port security.

In the early stages of the IOC program, these multiagency coalitions in each port were envisioned as operating in dedicated bricks-and-mortar facilities where each would have personnel staffing a common watch floor. Indeed, the term “Interagency Operations Center” conjures images of 9-1-1-like call and monitoring centers wherein national and local authorities coordinate action and respond to threats face to face.

But Coast Guard Cmdr. Carissa April said that limiting the vision for IOCs to building facilities or staffing watch floors misses an enormous opportunity to transform the way we protect the maritime domain.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) cuts the ribbon to officially mark the opening of the new Interagency Operations Center for maritime operations during a ceremony at the U.S. Coast Guard's Yerba Buena Island Base, Calif., June 28, 2011. Pelosi was the keynote speaker at the event, which was attended by dozens of federal, state, and local agency representatives along with other members of the maritime industry. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Sondra-Kay Kneen-Rivera

April is chief of the Interagency Operations Center Implementation Office, and she explained that the IOC at Charleston is perhaps most representative of the early idea of an interagency “center,” though its origins actually predate SAFE Port. Instead, Charleston’s IOC grew out of a 2003 initiative called Project SeaHawk, which called for establishment of a Charleston Harbor Operations Center, built to house “agencies responsible for maritime homeland security, and an interagency task force to jointly address intermodal transportation security issues in and around the port.”

Construction of the facility went forward with funding from the FY 2003 Omnibus Appropriations Bill. Today, it has been recast as an IOC, a common space where personnel from multiple local, state, and federal agencies work side by side and meet daily.

As compelling as the Charleston IOC model may be, April explained that attempting to collocate government agencies creates other hurdles, particularly in ports where the relevant authorities have existing investments in their own command centers and work spaces.

Additionally, the agencies may be spread over a multi-state area, as with the Port of New York and New Jersey. Moving office facilities and the jobs inside them to one central location does not work in all locales. As poor as the arguments against consolidation may seem, such entrenchment combined with funding issues has made standing up common IOC facilities largely impractical in many ports.

So, the Coast Guard focused its efforts on defining the process by which multiagency coalitions in each port would conduct integrated vessel targeting, operational planning, and operational monitoring. Achieving such effective integration of intelligence, communication, and resources, rather than simply constructing facilities, is the real goal of the DHS IOC concept of operations.

What the Coast Guard has really been focusing on is delivering a framework by which multiple agencies can effectively create an operational picture of the security situation in each port and collaboratively apply their resources and authorities. “The idea of just building a building and not really working on what was going to go on in that building wasn’t going to provide the kind of value we hope to deliver,” said April.

“We’re still going to have to get together once or twice a week. We’ll still have to work together to conduct integrated operational planning. It’s harder to do an interagency plan than it is to do a dozen single agency plans but the product is better so we believe the result is worth the extra effort.”

The Coast Guard and its partners will still look for opportunities to collocate agencies’ work spaces and share watch floors in ports where it is geographically, logistically, and financially feasible.

Since the early 1800s, Soldiers and civilians have developed and maintained the canals, roads, and river passages that helped an expanding nation on the move. When technology brought electricity to cities and towns in the 1880s, the increasing demand for power encouraged the search for new sources of electricity.

In 1925, the River and Harbor Act tasked USACE and the Federal Power Commission to research the costs of surveying navigable rivers where power generation could be feasible. The Columbia River, flowing between Washington and Oregon, was prominent among the 10 rivers identified in the report.

Construction began in 1934 on Bonneville, the first federal Columbia River dam authorized by Congress. President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially dedicated Bonneville Dam in 1937, less than four years after excavation began. Since Bonneville began operating, USACE has constructed 75 powerhouses at multipurpose dams in 15 districts in the northwest, southwest, and southeast regions of the country. The powerhouses generate 21,000 megawatts of generating capability.

“The USACE hydropower mission is one of the few significant federal capital investments to generate a revenue stream,” said Kamau Sadiki, USACE national hydropower business line manager. “Hydropower assets generate about $4 billion to $5 billion annually in gross revenue to the government.”

Four power-marketing administrations (PMAs) were created in the 1930s and 1940s to market and distribute power to nonprofit and public organizations such as rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities. While a small amount is sold to for-profit agencies, the mission of these PMAs is to provide low-cost energy to non-profit organizations, known as preference customers.

The four PMAs, Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), Southeastern Power Administration, Southwestern Power Administration, and the Western Area Power Administration, together with their regional partners, work with USACE to fund some of the infrastructure repair and replacements for the 353 generating units in powerhouses across the nation.

“Much of our infrastructure is nearing the end of its equipment life cycle,” Sadiki said. “The capital improvements programs undertaken by the PMAs are helping to improve and sustain reliability of a critical resource.”

The program allowed USACE to completely upgrade Bonneville’s original powerhouse; Wilmington District expects the major rehabilitation program at the John H. Kerr Powerhouse to be completed by summer 2012.

“Bonneville’s first powerhouse had been operating for 50 years and was showing cumulative effects of age,” said Don Erickson, Portland District’s Bonneville Powerhouse 1 major rehab project manager. “The new turbines are not only more efficient, [but] they were designed with new technology that decreased fish mortality.”