Former U.S. officials simulating the roles of U.S. leaders deflected an attack during the Silent Vector anti-terrorism exercise last month, but they were unsure how effective their strategies had been, Aviation Week and Space Technology reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 2).

Actual national security situations often play out in the same manner, with vague reports and a great deal of ambiguity, said former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which worked with the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security to organize the exercise.

The exercise, held at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, began when an intelligence report to a mock National Security Council indicated a threat to East Coast energy facilities.  The council identified air travel as the greatest potential threat — specifically pinpointing air cargo and general aviation flights in light of recently increased security on commercial passenger planes.

The council debated whether, and how, to inform the public of the threat.  Former Virginia Governor James Gilmore — portraying the governor of Virginia — said that he and other East Coast governors needed to know the information to coordinate local agencies.

The council disagreed, saying that not enough information was available and that governors would certainly leak the information to the press.  The U.S. government has warned governors of terrorist threats in nine situations since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and that information has taken an average of two hours to leak to the media, Hamre said.

The council alerted state and local law enforcement agencies and told the FBI to identify additional information.  The council planned a press conference for the following day, but by then a leak had occurred.  Panicked residents were already leaving their homes near a nuclear power plant.

The second day featured more precise information about the threat — terrorists were targeting chemical plants, one in particular — and the council grounded cargo and general air traffic.  No attack took place, but it was difficult to determine whether the threat had been false or whether preventive measures had been successful.

Organizers plan to present the lessons learned from the exercise to closed congressional committees in January or later, Hamre said.  The exercise participants identified several problem areas, according to Aviation Week.

One problem was that some local entities use alert systems that are different from the national color scheme.  For example, when the National Security Council raised the alert level for terrorist attacks on the chemical industry from yellow to red, the move caused some confusion.  A national code blue means a small increase in the threat, but in Maryland’s Montgomery County, blue denotes a significant emergency.

Gilmore also said that much of the discussion was focused on air travel, which the national government controls more directly.  Local agencies need to also be prepared for sea- or ground-based attacks, he said.  Air travel is the most potent terrorist weapon, however, because an airplane can travel hundreds of miles in a short period of time, Hamre said.

The former U.S. officials said they also learned that shutting down segments of society — such as cargo air travel — might achieve the terrorists’ own goals, by disrupting the economy.

Hamre and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn — who portrayed the U.S. president — said that the United States must not react zealously to an immediate threat when the real conflict is drawn out over many years.

“Right now, when we tend to respond to a crisis event, invariably what we do is take hasty emergency measures and everyone works overtime and we just wear ourselves out trying to do protective measures,” Hamre said.  “And, frankly when we respond, we become weaker at least for a while.  We need to reverse that,” he added.

Participants said that it is difficult to craft a public communications strategy during a crisis, but the media may provide some necessary coherence.

“You can’t fault them [the media] for that because it is exactly what they do,” Hamre said.  “But they are creating a lot more coherence than the government can possibly create at a time when it is in the middle of a crisis,” he added.

The council also had difficulty deciding when to remove the ban on some air travel — no one was sure when the threat ended.

The exercise was designed to examine how the government would deal with vague intelligence on terrorist threats, Hamre said.  The United States needs a central analysis and command center to deal with terrorist threats, in particular to deal with multiple threats simultaneously, ANSER head Randy Larsen said.

“If we had a major oil refinery fire in Houston, part of southern California’s electrical grid offline, a mysterious flu-like illness in Chicago, an aircraft hijacking in Cleveland and ATM machines on the blink all along the East Coast, would any single organization be looking at all of this information?  Not today,” Larsen said (David Hughes, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Nov. 11).

[EDITOR'S NOTE:  Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group.]

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