Calling In The Cavalry

It was America's biggest disaster since Sept. 11, 2001. So where was the military after Katrina?

It will be months before official post-mortems detail the minutiae of how the federal government's response to a disaster became a disaster itself. But it's not premature to say that at least part of the horrific downward spiral in Hurricane Katrina's wake was due to how narrowly policymakers and the public have considered "homeland security" in the post-9/11 world. The phrase is applied almost exclusively to countering and responding to acts of terrorism perpetrated by humans. Low-probability, high-risk natural disasters became at best a secondary consideration-even though many of their effects and challenges in prevention and response aren't dissimilar from terrorist scenarios that have driven policy concerns during the past four years.

Hurricane Katrina was nothing if not a weapon of mass destruction. She obliterated 90,000 square miles of U.S. territory and forced more than 1 million people from their homes, hundreds of thousands of which are destroyed or uninhabitable. She took out the regional electrical grid, telephone lines and cellular communications systems, plunging a huge swath of the country into literal and figurative darkness. With wind and water as her primary weapons, she spewed toxic waste for miles, erased whole communities from Gulf Coast maps and drowned New Orleans in a flood of misery and criminality. And in a gut-punch to the economy, she took out 11 percent of the nation's oil-refining capacity, sending gas prices soaring from Maine to California.

So how is it that a nation whose security apparatus purportedly is focused significantly on unconventional, catastrophic events occurring here in the homeland seemed utterly unprepared to respond in the aftermath of a hurricane? Why weren't active-duty troops called upon sooner to stem the tide of despair in what might be the most devastating natural disaster to hit the United States? While much scrutiny rightly has focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Homeland Security Department, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Katrina-related role and relationships of the only federal department that has the experience, equipment and structure appropriate for responding to a disaster, man-made or natural, on such a massive scale: the U.S. military-in particular, its Northern Command, created after 9/11. NORTHCOM's stated mission includes supporting natural disaster response.

In his Sept. 15 address to the nation about Katrina response, President Bush said he would seek a larger role for the military in future disasters: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces-the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

In the days after Katrina's wrath, both civilian and uniformed leadership defended the military's response as swift, anticipatory and proper. On Sept. 6, for example, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers noted that "not only was there no delay, I think we anticipated, in most cases, the support that was required and we were pushing support before we were formally asked for it." This was, to some extent, true. Under the 1984 Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act, amended in 1988, active-duty soldiers can be deployed under the direction of FEMA once a state governor requests a presidential declaration of a state of emergency. President Bush did just that on Aug. 27 as Katrina was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico, two days before making landfall east of New Orleans. The military was proactively operating before the storm hit, and once given the green light to actually respond, the resources brought to bear were both formidable and indispensable.

Some military comments and actions, leave room for questions, however, particularly about how serious the Pentagon, lawmakers and policymakers take the natural disaster part of NORTHCOM's and the Pentagon's portfolio. All the parties seem to have missed many lessons learned from similar military operations at home and abroad. What's more, although the Defense Department does not, as Myers, noted, "have lead responsibility with respect to natural disasters," in certain instances, it's the only agency capable of effective response.

"There are two fundamental things at issue here," says a retired senior Defense official turned contractor who, per contract requirements, can't be quoted by name. "First is the apparent inability of the people who drafted the National Response Plan to both understand what the military, and only the military, can do in certain situations and to have written it and designed an actual system in such a way that they could have done it. The other is just how serious NORTHCOM, or how serious the Pentagon or anyone else is, about NORTHCOM handling these kind of things."

Late last year, the Homeland Security Department issued a mammoth National Response Plan, 426 pages that in theory provide a reliable road map for inter-agency cooperation in every kind of emergency. To those in military circles with disaster operations experience, at first blush the plan seemed to embrace and encompass insights and recommendations by the military from more than a decade ago. Back in 1992, for example, Army Forces Command (FORSCOM), now NORTHCOM's land component, stated in one of its Hurricane Andrew after-action reports that while the response plan's predecessor, the Federal Response Plan, had Defense as a support agency to FEMA and other civilian agencies, Andrew's scale was so far beyond what the FRP conceived that the military had no choice but to take the de facto lead in almost every area. "DoD has the organization and ability to provide rapid, massive initial relief, but it does not now have a mission to do so," the report stated. "If DoD and FORSCOM are expected to provide the initial response in a catastrophic disaster, ours and FEMA's plans need to reflect DoD's initial response requirements."

Defense had the capabilities and exercised them in Andrew. But the report noted in language that eerily presages New Orleans 2005 that what could have been a faster reaction was hampered because "gridlock among local, county, state and federal governments delayed massive response two to three days." FORSCOM's proposed solution was a new massive-disaster policy that would allow the military to respond to the fullest as soon as the government realized a huge disaster was in the offing. "We need provisions for an automatic response to a catastrophic disaster," it concluded. "Based on pre-established criteria, we would begin automatically responding until directed otherwise. For example, any Category 4 or 5 hurricane hitting a populous area or any 7.0 earthquake in a populous area would trigger an automatic federal and DoD response."

A 1993 GAO report reached a similar conclusion, holding that the military "is the only organization capable of providing, transporting and distributing sufficient quantities of items needed" to combat Andrew-level natural disasters (RCED-93-186). While last year's DHS-authored National Response Plan kept DHS and FEMA firmly in the driver's seat for catastrophic responses, it also granted Defense "immediate response capability." Echoing the Hurricane Andrew after-action review, the NRP noted that "imminently serious conditions resulting from any civil emergency may require immediate action to save lives, prevent human suffering, or mitigate property damage," and, in such circumstances, gives Defense the green light to act.

But the IRC clause can be activated only in "response to requests of civil authorities." And, as Katrina demonstrated, if the communication systems of local and state civil authorities are wiped out, or if civil authorities at the federal level fail to assign Defense specifically, or if confusion or animosity-hallmarks of state-federal discussions about responsibility and resources-inhibit a request, technically, there's little the military can do.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander in chief of Central Command, is nothing short of appalled at how the NRP has-or rather, hasn't-worked in the case of Katrina. "Look, we have troops on standby alert at [Fort] Bragg, N.C., and [Camp] Pendleton, Calif., and within a handful of hours you can have planes that would be going anywhere in the world being turned in domestically; you can be loading up aircraft before, you can be moving helicopters nearby-none of that stuff is hard," Zinni says. "This is about what decision-makers did and didn't do in terms of figuring out how and when to call in the military. This is about the failure of a mechanism that should be designed to make judgments and assessments quickly to get the military elements in there.

"Having run a number of these types of operations around the world," he continues, "I can tell you the key is assessing immediate needs and responding immediately. To run across the Katrina situation is really surprising to me-you'd think after 9/11 that this would have been the major fix. The federal level has to create the command, control and communications not just in practicing with the states, but when a situation like this happens. And the military is particularly good at that, because we pretty much have everything we need and we know how to set up the logistics spine."

Posse Comitatus

But Zinni says he and most other commanders never have been particularly comfortable using troops domestically, where there's potential to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The 1878 Reconstruction-era law was designed to prevent soldiers from interfering with voting. It bars active-duty troops from enforcing the law on U.S. soil.

In the days after Katrina, Posse Comitatus seemed to be the pre-eminent concern in federal officials' minds. Once New Orleans descended into chaos, after the levees were breached in the wake of the storm and armed looters began roaming the streets and shooting at rescue workers, law enforcement became a central issue in the deployment of active-duty troops. While Bush could have federalized the response by invoking the Insurrection Act, administration officials were loath to do so for political reasons, according to a Pentagon official familiar with the deliberations. The prospect of a Republican president seizing control of a situation from a Democratic governor who explicitly resisted federalizing the military response was deemed politically unpalatable, the official says.

"The preference is always to use National Guard troops in state status, working for the governor. The general perception is that the state National Guard will be better received and [they] better understand the nature of the local situation," says the Pentagon official. "This is one of the things that makes us different from other nations-we don't send in the military when something goes wrong-but it also makes us inefficient."

The last president to invoke the Insurrection Act was President George H.W. Bush to quell rioting that broke out April 29, 1992, in Los Angeles after a jury there acquitted white police officers in the high-profile beating of Rodney King, an African-American. On May 1, at the request of the California governor, the president authorized the use of active-duty troops, along with National Guard troops under federal authority, to restore order. On May 3, a convoy of troops from the 7th Infantry Division, then stationed at Fort Ord, Calif., and Marines from Camp Pendleton rolled into the city to join federalized California National Guard troops in stemming the violence.

That operation hardly went smoothly. Col. Thomas R. Lujan, a military lawyer writing in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Army War College quarterly Parameters, describes in great detail many of the problems encountered. Soldiers and Marines were hastily (and ineffectively) trained in responding to civil disturbances, and rules of engagement were not uniformly understood. "There was a widespread misunderstanding of the role of the active-duty military and federalized National Guard in this kind of operation," Lujan wrote in "Legal Aspects of Domestic Employment of the Army." The military commander mistakenly believed he was constrained by Posse Comitatus. The county sheriff believed military forces were to be allocated to police units and follow orders in a "rent-a-soldier" fashion, Lujan found. Such misperceptions seriously degraded the effectiveness of the operation.

"The lesson is clear. By the stroke of a pen, within a single day, the underlying framework for the authorized use of military force within the United States can be completely changed," Lujan wrote. He advocated that senior government leaders must rethink the issue of domestic military force. It's an admonition that's likely to resonate today: "Given the scarcity of resources, our nation can ill afford to have the effectiveness of its military assets artificially constrained by a misunderstanding of the law."

Lt. Col. Craig T. Trebilcock, a judge advocate general lawyer specializing in Posse Comitatus, says misunderstanding the law is common in both military and civilian circles. After Katrina, that misunderstanding undeniably hampered military response.

According to Trebilcock, the law was not an impediment to immediately deploying military forces for rescue, humanitarian and other operations that would have helped stabilize the situation. And, he says, there was ample precedent for the Bush administration to push the envelope further. "If you take what they're saying at face value, it seems decision-makers were operating off myths, rather than the reality of what Posse Comitatus is," he says. "The other explanation is they fumbled the ball completely and are trying to use Posse Comitatus after the fact to explain why they were so ineffectual in the first 96 hours."

Unlearned Lessons

In examining the Katrina response, it's fair to ask how much attention military commanders and civilian officials paid to lessons learned from Los Angeles, Hurricane Andrew and other similar disasters, domestic or foreign. NORTHCOM made much, for example, of the deployment of the hospital ship USNS Comfort. But the Comfort wasn't given the order to get under way until Aug. 31, days after the storm, and didn't move out until Sept. 2. It didn't arrive in the Gulf Coast region until Sept. 9-12 days after Katrina. Yet as the 1992 FORSCOM Andrew review makes clear, resources such as the Comfort are best used in a fairly finite window. "The first 72 hours immediately following a catastrophic disaster is the most critical time for saving lives," the report said. "After 72 hours, survival rates of trapped victims go down dramatically . . . during this time period, we must rapidly assess the extent of the disaster, determine response requirement and provide critical life-support aid."

And while the closest ship already in the stricken region, the USS Bataan, quickly moved toward New Orleans and began helicopter and landing craft operations, it was almost immediately diverted to Mississippi. The Chicago Tribune reported that the Bataan's captain was unhappy that her crew and hospital facilities were being underused.

Response to two cyclones that hit Southeast Africa in 2000 causing damage comparable to that done by Katrina-thousands of square miles, including virtually all of Mozambique, were flooded, displacing hundreds of thousands of people-offer unheeded lessons. In that case, the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) quickly stood up Joint Task Force Atlas Response, a military-led interagency effort that coordinated a multi-national relief and rescue effort. It was founded on the understanding that rapid rescues had to be effected and could only be done with rotary air support. Within 48 hours, EUCOM cargo planes began loading and delivering scores of helicopters; ultimately, EUCOM pilots flew more than 600 rescue, relief and reconnaissance sorties, moving more than a million pounds of humanitarian equipment and tens of thousands of people ranging from victims to nongovernmental organization workers and military assistance teams.

Not unlike critics of the Katrina response, some involved in the 2000 operation considered it a case of too little too late. Critics charged that the Agency for International Development, the State Department and other lead agencies lost critical days as the situation went from bad to worst-case while interagency discussions focused on bureaucratic procedures set up to deal with smaller-scale disasters. And while Defense Department assessment teams were sent in well in advance of the worst of it, they too could have been quicker in anticipating a likely rapid deterioration in the situation.

"We did an excellent job once we were in there, but I and others believe we could and should have done better across the board," says a senior Defense official who worked on Atlas Response. "In many ways, it would have been a great case study to apply to domestic policy; the material is certainly there. But I don't think too many people noticed, and [I don't think] that those who did really gave it much thought after 9/11."

When it comes to dealing with the natural disaster part of its mission, NORTHCOM still seems of two minds. On the one hand, its Web site clearly notes its disaster and civil assistance duties, and the command on numerous occasions has proudly emphasized its role in monitoring hurricanes and preparing for them. Its uniformed leaders and civilian overseers repeatedly have mentioned its disaster role in congressional testimony.

Yet the majority of NORTHCOM training exercises across the country have been devoted to theoretical terrorist events. The natural disaster models usually get second billing as one of many unfolding situations in a worst-case scenario in which NORTHCOM must respond to a half-dozen simultaneous events. NORTHCOM's then-chief of operations, Air Force Maj. Gen. Lee McFann, seemed to leave little to the imagination last year when he told Armed Forces Journal, "Our mission is not to respond to fires and floods and hurricanes, although we do that. Our mission is to respond to terrorist attack."