CIAO DATE: 01/02

The Problems of Preparedness: Challenges Facing the U.S. Domestic Preparedness Program

The U.S. government is now actively engaged in preparing the nation for highly destructive acts of terrorism, especially those involving chemical and biological weapons. This effort involves multiple federal agencies and a wide variety of programs. Collectively known as the "U.S. domestic preparedness program," these programs are a very recent innovation in American governance. The budget of federal weapons of mass destruction (WMD) preparedness programs has grown from effectively zero in 1995 to approximately $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2000. 1 This made the U.S. domestic preparedness program one of the fastest growing federal programs of the late 1990s.

The U.S. domestic preparedness program goes well beyond the modest goal of improving the physical security of particularly vulnerable or high-value targets that has always been a part of the traditional counterterrorism formula. Instead, the U.S. domestic preparedness program is motivated by the ambitious goal of broadly reducing the vulnerability of American society to large, destructive acts of terrorism by improving a wide range of operational response capabilities across the country, at all levels of government. This effort bears a superficial resemblance to the U.S. civil defense program of the 1950s-1960s, but is in fact unprecedented in scale and complexity. Because no other nation has embarked on a comparable terrorism preparedness program, the American experience is unique and instructive.

Although the U.S. domestic preparedness program is in its early stages, the great difficulty of designing and implementing the program has already become apparent. The purpose of this paper is to sketch the general contours and rationale of the U.S. domestic preparedness program, and to identify the most significant problems of domestic preparedness. The first section discusses the program's origins and evolution. While the basic motivation of the domestic preparedness program has been the perception of a rising threat, the specifics of the program have been determined not by any guiding strategic concept but by discrete, uncoordinated legislative appropriations and administrative initiatives. The second section elaborates on the basic rationale behind the domestic preparedness program, explaining how these highly specific domestic policy innovations relate to the national security objective of reducing the threat of WMD terrorism to America. The third section describes the major policy and management challenges facing the program.

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