Critical Releases in Homeland Security: November 11, 2015

"A little more than 10 years ago, Hurricane Katrina caused an estimated $108 billion in damage, making it the largest, most destructive natural disaster in our nation's history. Following the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (Post-Katrina Act). The act contained over 300 provisions that are intended to enhance national preparedness, emergency response and recovery, and the management of select disaster programs. In October 2012, another catastrophic hurricane--Hurricane Sandy--caused $65 billion in damage and once again tested the nation's preparedness and emergency response and recovery functions. GAO [Government Accountability Office] has issued multiple reports that discuss a wide variety of emergency management issues reflecting the federal government and FEMA's efforts to implement provisions of the Post Katrina Act and address various aspects of emergency management. This statement discusses GAO's work on the progress FEMA has made and challenges that it still faces in three areas: (1) national preparedness, (2) disaster response and recovery, and (3) selected FEMA management areas. This statement is based on previously issued GAO reports from 2012 to 2015."

From the thesis abstract: "National preparedness doctrine has constantly evolved to address the pressing hazards and threats the country faces. Although arguably centered on terrorism, the current status of national policy attempts to have an all-hazards focus. While the contemporary version provides all tiers of government more guidance and structure than ever before, it still remains largely disjointed and lacks an effective overall operational response framework. Various components of catastrophe response have been identified, including threat/hazard identification, interoperability models, and other broad planning concepts. Absent from the federal doctrine is a comprehensive plan for the synchronization of vertical intergovernmental response planning. However, there are international frameworks and domestic catastrophe response plans developed at the Federal Emergency Management Agency regional level that comprehensively close the gap between federal strategy and state/local operational necessities. These are presented as a comparison and in case studies that are evaluated against the leading catastrophe-response planning criteria from government, professional, and academic standards. The conclusion includes recommendations for adapting current federal task force models to focus on catastrophe planning, improving national emergency-response capacity, and restructuring federal homeland security grant funding."

From the thesis abstract: "While scholars study the radicalization process that produces lone-wolf terrorists in America, news stories regularly report on Muslim Americans leaving their local communities to join terrorist organizations. Currently, radicalizing individuals to act as lone wolves is the most successful method of Islamist attack on the American homeland. A novel approach to analyzing radicalization is employment of the prisoner's dilemma, which examines the motivations behind individual decision-making. The prisoner's dilemma is used by game theorists and international-relations scholars to demonstrate how persons who might ordinarily be expected to cooperate may actually work against each other and defect from previous agreements or understandings. Because lone-wolf attacks will likely continue to pose the most frequent threat to the U.S. homeland, it is imperative to learn how potential homegrown terrorists can be encouraged to identify with their local communities rather than defect from the social bonds of church, school, neighborhood, and workplace. This thesis explores how the prisoner's dilemma may reveal ways to discourage radicalism in at-risk Muslim Americans."