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International Security 25.4 (2001) 147-186



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Problems of Preparedness
U.S. Readiness for a Domestic Terrorist Attack

Richard A. Falkenrath


Since the mid-1990s, the federal government has engaged in preparing the United States for highly destructive acts of terrorism, especially those involving chemical or biological weapons. Collectively known as the "U.S. domestic preparedness program," this effort involves multiple federal agencies and a variety of initiatives. The budget of the federal weapons of mass destruction (WMD) preparedness program grew from effectively zero in fiscal year 1995 to approximately $1.5 billion in FY 2000, 1 making this one of the fastest growing federal programs of the late 1990s.

The U.S. domestic preparedness program seeks to go beyond improving the physical security of particularly vulnerable or high-value targets, which has always been a part of the traditional counterterrorism formula. Instead it aims to reduce the vulnerability of American society to large, destructive acts of terrorism by improving operational response capabilities across the country, at all levels of government. 2 This effort bears a superficial resemblance to the U.S. [End Page 147] civil defense program of the 1950 and 1960s, but its scale and complexity are unmatched.

This article addresses five interrelated questions. First, what practical initiatives does the U.S. domestic preparedness program entail? Second, how do these initiatives relate to other U.S. government functions, particularly counterterrorism and disaster management? Third, how did the program originate, and how has it evolved? Fourth, how is the program organized within the federal government, and why? Fifth, what major problems face the United States as it seeks to prepare itself for WMD terrorism at home?

These primarily diagnostic questions are important for two reasons. First, the domestic preparedness program is unprecedented and highly complex, has grown very fast, and confronts a range of public management challenges. External analytic attention may therefore improve the odds that the U.S. program will succeed. Second, no other nation has embarked on a comparable terrorism preparedness program. 3 Because the U.S. experience is unparalleled, an analysis of it will be instructive for other governments that consider following suit.

The literature on domestic preparedness is dominated by the debate about the severity of the threat of WMD terrorism. The domestic preparedness program has been a target of pointed criticism by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and individuals representing special interests that have not benefited from it. Neither, however, has generally examined the initiative as a whole or made practical recommendations to improve it. 4 Several official commissions and individual analysts have made recommendations concerning the proper goals of the program, but have not addressed the details of either implementation or structure. 5 Scholars to date have paid [End Page 148] little attention to the origin, history, structure, and implementation of the program. 6

Fundamentally, the domestic preparedness program is one federal government response to assessing the terrorist threat to U.S. national interests. This article begins, therefore, with brief descriptions of the problem of terrorism and the recent U.S. debate about the severity of the threat it poses to the United States. This section seeks not to scrutinize the terrorism debate, but merely to provide context for the discussion of the domestic preparedness program.

The second section explains the general objectives, structure, and rationale of the program. Although it began as a counterterrorism initiative, in practice it is most closely related to the U.S. disaster management system. The location of the domestic preparedness program at the nexus of two distinct functional disciplines is one of its two sources of difficulty, the second being its origin in a series of discrete, uncoordinated legislative appropriations and administrative actions. A detailed history of the domestic preparedness program, presented in the article's third section, shows that the program is the result not of any guiding strategic concept but rather of ad hoc initiatives by individual policymakers. The fourth section describes six policy and management challenges facing the program and offers several recommendations.

Terrorism:
An Evolving Threat, an Ongoing Debate...

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