February 2013

The Long Beach Police Department dive team adopts new homeland security equipment.

The Long Beach, California, police department dive team is now using a newly acquired search and recovery system to help protect the local port, shipping lanes and critical infrastructure.

The Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) dive team has an atypical and varied mission along the port and in the city waterways. “We have the law enforcement responsibility as well as the homeland security mission, mostly dealing with the Port of Long Beach and protecting the port against any type of terrorist threat or action,” says Sgt. Steve Smock, LBPD dive team supervisor. “Everything that the police do on land, we do underwater.”

The mission can include body recovery after a shipping accident or searching for underwater mines attached to ships or piers. The LBPD works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to search for and confiscate narcotics or other contraband being smuggled into the country. Additionally, the port is a potential terrorist target for several reasons, including the shipping lanes and some of the cargo coming into port.

“We have all these different wharfs and piers that these ships come up to and tie to. A good example is the oil exchange terminals where the oil container ships come in and offload their oil. These are, for obvious reasons, very sensitive. We do a lot to make sure that nobody gets in there to tamper with anything,” the sergeant states.

One day after unveiling a long-awaited executive order concerning a wide-range of cybersecurity concerns, President Barack Obama’s top cybersecurity advisers admit that the order only goes so far in dealing with pressing Internet security needs. They say that the order is only a “down payment” and no substitute for permanent congressional legislation on the matter.

“We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and economy,” President Obama said in reference to his executive order and the urgency to act during his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.

Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and White House cybersecurity adviser, told reporters and congressional staffers at a Commerce Department briefing on Wednesday that the executive order, and a companion Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-21), “rest on three pillars”:

• Information sharing
• Privacy
• A framework of standards

Both documents build on numerous cybersecurity measures already in use within the government, dating back to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7 (HSPD-7) signed during the previous Bush administration. Daniel describes the philosophy behind the most recent order as a “whole of government” approach designed to engage all agencies in a stepped-up effort to secure the nation’s digital infrastructure. In addition, Daniels says, the executive order reflects the work of “a number of other stakeholders,” primarily during last fall’s push to gain passage of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation on Capitol Hill.

The U.S. agency responsible for customs and border protection has suffered from an unreliable infrastructure and network downtimes but already is seeing benefits from a fledgling move to cloud computing. Those benefits include greater reliability and efficiency and lower costs.

Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) priorities include moving the agency to cloud computing and adopting greater use of mobile devices. The CBP Cloud Computing Environment (C3E) moves the agency away from a number of stovepipe platforms. “In the past, we’ve run about every kind of platform that’s out there. We are a large IBM mainframe legacy shop. We use a lot of AIX Unix and also Solaris Unix, so we’ve even got different flavors of Unix out there, and then obviously, big Windows farms,” reveals Charlie Armstrong, CBP chief information officer and assistant commissioner for the office of information and technology. “This new environment that we’re moving to collapses a lot of that down into a single environment and loses all of the mainframe, and it gets us out of building environments from scratch.”

Armstrong describes CBP as being in the early stages of its move to the cloud, but the agency already is seeing benefits, he says. He compares creating a computing environment to building cars. “Building an environment with yesterday’s approach was like going to the car dealership, buying all the parts and having to put the car together yourself. Now, what we’re trying to do is to buy a fully integrated product that allows us to stand up environments quicker and also improve performance,” he explains.

Emergency responders working under U.S. Air Forces Europe are preparing to receive an advanced simulation trainer that they expect will greatly improve the realism and efficacy of their training. Though procured mainly for firefighters, the system can be employed to exercise many types of crisis situations. Other organizations around the world already are using it for different purposes while benefitting from one another’s efforts. Anytime one user makes an improvement, that knowledge is shared with everyone, creating a constantly evolving capability.

The Advanced Disaster Management Simulator (ADMS) will allow U.S. Air Forces Europe (USAFE) the opportunity to train more realistically on the task of putting out aircraft fires than current or previous tools, according to Master Sgt. Joey R. Meininger, USAF, the fire emergency services program manager for USAFE and Air Forces Africa. He explains that the system will allow personnel to see what happens when an aircraft goes ablaze, training them for events that planners cannot reproduce. With the ADMS, users can simulate all forms of response from the minute emergency personnel receive the call about the problem through the end of the programmed event, including simulating the experience of driving to the emergency location. Incident commanders can immediately see the various effects their decisions have on situations. Once the commander assigns tasks, personnel will perform their actions in the simulated environment, giving everyone a chance to observe how choices influence events. The system will record each piece of input to help determine whether or not decisions were correct.

The march of digitization has changed the mission of a longtime U.S. Army maintenance and repair depot from fixing broken radio systems in a warehouse to supporting troops using the newest software-driven communications devices in the field. This support ranges from testing or even manufacturing new gear in partnership with industry to integrating new information systems in combat zones.

The Tobyhanna Army Depot, Pennsylvania, has had to evolve with the changes in command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C⁴ISR) systems in the information age. Changes in technologies and capabilities have been matched by the increasingly rapid pace of technology insertion into the force. The servicing of digital technology has expanded into new fields of operation.

Test facilities evaluate communications security, range threat testing, fire detection radars and satellite communications terminals for the Army as well as for other services. A rapid prototyping machine allows small additive manufacturing on plastics for prototyping. And, an Army language lab that can be deployed overseas helps military personnel in various countries around the world learn English so that they can train on U.S. systems and interoperate with their U.S. counterparts.

While the depot’s mission is defined as providing the overhaul, manufacturing and technology insertion services for C⁴ISR equipment, its activities extend into other areas that are increasing in importance in the digitized force.

“We keep the equipment going,” declares its commander, Col. Gerhard P.R. Schröter, USA.

Earthbound technologies and computer programming that make most popular video games possible are driving development of the remote-controlled robots now in use by NASA in the unmanned exploration of Mars and the solar system. Those improvements in both hardware and software also spur innovation in the next generation of robots envisioned for use by government and industry. That is important because NASA recently has proposed a new, multiyear program of sending robot explorers to Mars, culminating in the launch of another large scientific rover in the year 2020.

“The technologies and the software that the video game industry has developed for rendering data, scenes, terrain—many of the same visualization techniques and technologies are infiltrating into the kinds of software that we use for controlling spacecraft,” according to Jeff Norris, manager of the Planning and Execution Systems Section with NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. In a similar way, joysticks and gaming consoles such as the Microsoft XBox Kinect are examples of gaming technology hardware that have functional analogues in the systems used to control robotic spacecraft.

The Defense Department has a spending problem and must be reined in. The solution, however, goes far beyond simplistic budget cutting efforts such as across-the-board sequestration. It involves a fundamental cultural shift from both our appropriators and our subordinate-level commanders.

The past 10 years have been a financial boon for the military. This was true even as the rest of the U.S. economy was beset by recession and increasing unemployment. In 2001, the Defense Department base budget was $290.5 billion (in fiscal year 2012 dollars). By 2011, this amount had risen to $526.1 billion, excluding the funding required to sustain the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Beyond the rapid increase in the overall budget, a more pervasive and concerning trend exists: the incredible waste and inefficiency brought by established interests more concerned with keeping the spigot of money flowing than with winning wars.

Part of this is because of the ease with which the military has received unfettered access to our nation’s treasure. Because it is politically unpatriotic to question the military—and by extension, the appropriations it requests—Congress has acquiesced in pouring money into anything earmarked defense. Ironically, many of the same politicians who decry throwing money at education to improve schools hardly bat an eye when doing the same for defense.

Additionally, the constancy and security of military funding psychologically insulates the recipients of such largess from the realities of a constrained resource environment. This can lead to indifference when managing resources, especially those funded by “other people’s money”—in this case, the U.S. taxpayer.

A cyberspace operations facility grows with the burgeoning mission.

The U.S. Defense Department’s network operations training and education capabilities must continually evolve in the ever-shifting cyber realm. To meet that need, one of the department’s premier cyber ranges harnesses the power of simulation to support a full array of training, education, certification and military exercises for the warfighters.

The Joint Cyberspace Operations Range (JCOR) provides cyberspace operators and others the ability to train in realistic environments. The operators gain hands-on experience in protecting, defending and fighting in the networked arena without impacting real-world operational networks.

The JCOR allows users to connect disparately located cyber training systems from different services or agencies. The level of connections can vary depending on the users’ needs. “There are different ways of interfacing or integrating. We’re able to do, in many cases, both interfacing and integrating,” says Thomas May, technical project lead for the U.S. Air Force’s Simulator Training and Exercise (SIMTEX) range, which is the Air Force portion of JCOR. “If need be, we have been able to take the assets that other capabilities can provide and integrate them together so that they are actually components of our network.”

Homeland Security and the global effort against terrorism are incredibly complex activities. The organizations and individuals are just as complex. The homeland security establishment in the United States—as the collection of government agencies at the federal, state, local and tribal levels and the affected industries are referred to—numbers in the thousands of entities. There are 22 agencies in the Department of Homeland Security along with numerous others at the federal level, including the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and many others. Now add in the Homeland Security agencies, law enforcement agencies and other first responders at the state, local and tribal levels. Still more complex is the industrial base that supports the homeland security establishment and those in industry that own and/or operate the critical infrastructure in the United States.
 

In case those outside the United States are breathing a sigh of relief that they do not have to put up with such a structure, they should not be so hasty. Most other nations have similarly complex national structures, and Europe also has the security apparatus of the European Union.

So what hope is there that this complex structure could work to provide the necessary security? This truly is a team effort. The team is international, as countries necessarily share information on possible threats. A tremendous amount of information sharing and coordination takes place continuously. The many threat vectors require a multidisciplinary approach.

Public safety personnel are standing at the beginning of a new era in communications as plans unfurl to create a nationwide broadband network dedicated to their needs. With many questions yet to be resolved, organizations must contend with making the right choices for today even as they prepare to take advantage of advanced future offerings.

The Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network will be based on a single, national network architecture and is intended to help police, firefighters, emergency medical service professionals and other public safety officials perform their jobs better. The First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), an independent authority under the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will hold the spectrum license for the network along with responsibility to build, deploy and operate it, in consultation with federal, state, tribal and local public safety entities and other key stakeholders. “The burden is on FirstNet to bring public safety a robust and rich network that meets responders’ needs, and this must be done in a manner that’s very cost effective,” says Sam Ginn, chairman of the FirstNet Board. “That’s our goal and mission, and we intend to succeed for public safety.”