Forward Observer: Suiting Up for the Next Katrina

You show your plastic building pass to the two guards flanking the new entrance path to the Pentagon, push through the tall, heavy entry doors into the cavernous lobby of the largest military office building in the world. Metro-like gates stiff-arm you from getting further inside the fortress until you swipe the building pass across a slot. Finally through the gates, you ask the guard sitting in a glass cubicle for a look at his Pentagon telephone directory to check the room number of your quarry, former Rep. Paul McHale, D-Pa., now the first assistant secretary of Defense for homeland security at the Pentagon.

"We don't put out those kinds of phone books anymore," says the guard, seeing no need to explain that somebody on high decided those books listing individual names and room numbers would make it too easy for terrorists to blow up a general, admiral or secretary of Defense in his Pentagon office. Luckily you remember that McHale, now and always an ardent Marine, has his command post on the Pentagon's highest ground, the fifth floor. Symbolically, his part of the D-ring was destroyed by the fire bomb the terrorists touched off on 9/11 by crashing their hijacked airliner into the side of the Pentagon.

You zigzag through corridors until you find McHale's office door. It is labeled but locked. You knock to gain entry, and soon are sitting in the small reception room, watching coatless aides rush among the offices allocated to assistant secretary. McHale leads you into his inner office festooned with Marine memorabilia, explaining why he and others feel the sense of urgency you detected.

"It's the sobering responsibility to make executive decisions that will ultimately impact upon the public safety and the physical security of so many American lives, that's the best part of the job," he said. "It makes it a challenge to come to work every morning. It makes it meaningful to be here.

"That's also the most difficult part of the job, in the sense that the very mission that is so important is a mission that cannot fail. And so there is a weight of responsibility within this office that is more immediate and more practical in its consequences than the shared responsibility that I was privileged to carry as one of 435 members of the U. S. House of Representatives," he said.

You entered McHale's office with the criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina ringing in your head. Even President Bush criticized it. And Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., really unloaded on the feds, declaring in a Sept. 8 speech on the Senate floor that "our national government failed in its greatest responsibility, and that is protecting the lives of Americans."

Landrieu added that she was "not saying the military failed, or the Coast Guard failed, and most certainly not the National Guard." So, unlike his counterparts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Homeland Security Department, McHale has Congress asking him and others in the military establishment, especially the commander of the National Guard, what it can do for them rather than to them.

To this, McHale -- who speaks in carefully crafted paragraphs -- says: "The legal authorities supporting homeland defense and civil support missions are generally appropriate. The statutes and subordinate legal authorities provide a comprehensive and generally sound framework for the kinds of operational missions likely to be undertaken by the Department of Defense to either prevent or respond to a catastrophic event, whether man-made or natural disaster. There are incremental changes in the law that might be made in a few areas. But by and large the statutory framework is a good one."

So if the laws do not need fixing to improve the Pentagon's response to future homeland disasters, what does? McHale has strong feelings here and works 12-hour days to make fixes. He tells you he is working toward "a better coordinated search and rescue effort," especially by the helicopters under various commands, "in the immediate aftermath" of a disaster; better "damage assessment immediately after" the catastrophic event by employing drones, and space vehicles.

He characterizes the damage assessment made right after Katrina as "poor." Also key, according to the Pentagon's point man for homeland defense, is mapping out detailed plans ahead of time to coordinate the responses and equipment of military and civilian agencies.

McHale also envisions the active duty military forming a fast response outfit like the existing 82nd Airborne Division but equipped and trained to handle the consequences of sudden disasters on the homeland, with rubber bullets and loudspeakers for crowd control among its weapons.

Nothing McHale is doing or thinking about, however, threatens the National Guard's homeland defense role. He, in expressing a sentiment shared by lawmakers who will heap big bucks on the Guard for new radios and other disaster equipment in coming months, tells you "the Guard's response to Hurricane Katrina may well have been its finest hour in the 300-year history of the National Guard."

The long war between the active duty Army and National Guard is over, or at least on hold.

They can thank Katrina.