Gilmore Commission - Minutes

Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction

Arlington, Virginia
Monday, November 27, 2000

Present:
The Honorable James Gilmore, Chairman
James Clapper, Vice Chairman
L. Paul Bremer
Raymond Downey
Richard Falkenrath
George Foresman
William Garrison
Ellen Gordon
James Greenleaf
Dallas Jones
Jack Marsh
M. Patricia Quinlisk
Patrick Ralston
Kenneth Shine

Also present:
Ellen Embrey, Department of Defense Representative
Michael Wermuth, RAND project director

Members Absent:
William Jenaway
Paul Maniscalco
Kathleen O’Brien
William Reno
Joseph Samuels
Hubert Williams

Chairman: Introductory remarks.  One of the primary goals is draft a document, and we’ll hopefully get through that today.  I expect us to cover three issues: use of the DoD (domestically), Federal interagency review and the structure of the report.

Vice Chairman:  I would like to suggest that we at least get through the Introduction and Chapter 1 by the end of today.  I also suggest that we consider having two volumes, especially since the appendices are quite long. 

Jones:  I’m confused.  The first full report had a nine-page introduction and a two-page chapter one, but the new Executive Summary is 11 pages and I actually liked the original draft much better than this new Executive Summary.  Will we be choosing between the two approaches?  Or are we locked into this format now?

Chairman:  No, I do not think that we are locked into any one or the other. 

Chairman:  Mike, do you have a proposal for where we should go now?  Does anyone object to sending this to the Hill before the interagency process?

Shine:  So procedurally we are briefing the Hill and President at the same time?

Embrey:  But it should be briefed as a draft. 

Chairman:  Concurrence by the Panel? 

Marsh:  I would tell the Chairman of the Congressional committee what we are going to do.

Embrey: I think the Secretary is wise to recommend a briefing to Congress and the particular sponsors of the legislation.

Chairman:  Let me make it very clear that the DoD must be subjected to a clearly civilian entity; I disagree that the DoD is a clear civilian agency.  So if the military must be used, you use them under the auspices of a civilian entity.

Bremer:  I disagree with this recommendation.  It is quite appropriate that the lead agency should be FEMA or another civilian agency.  I think it is clear that ALL military officials are ALWAYS under civilian direction.  It is quite imaginable that you may have a circumstance with catastrophic terrorism that will outrun the capabilities of State and local entities and the President WILL put DoD in charge.  This should be planned and exercised ahead of time.  If not, then civil liberties will be harmed more, and this is the only effective and responsible way to make sure that civil liberties are guarded.  I think we should not say DoD SHOULD be lead, but that it may happen and we should say that DoD should think about this and at least exercise and plan for the possibility.

Chairman:  I think our disagreement is subtle rather than head-on.  I think our role should be to recognize that the policy should be that under NO circumstances should this occur.  Even under the post catastrophic circumstances, characterize it as a civilian response and put the DoD under them.

Falkenrath:  If we take small pox as seriously the worse case.  I am at least struck by the conclusion that we do not have the civilian capacity to keep law and order.  Under this circumstance, the President will HAVE to use the military and this will be a terrible dilemma.  I think that as long as we are in this situation, the military needs to quietly plan for this circumstance.

Chairman:  I am talking about the activation of a process, of interjecting a CIVILIAN entity in between the military and the public.  This is an essential safeguard. 

Vice Chairman:  You need substantive appearance that civilians are in control.  The larger issue is that in any case, I do not believe that the DoD is prepared to deal with such a scenario in the United States. 

Shine:  I presume that the President has to call the DoD to do something.

Wermuth:  Two statutes allow the Attorney General to seek support from the Secretary of Defense, with or without direction from the President. 

Shine:  At that point there is a mission and a chain of responsibility.  Will DoD assets report to FEMA?  Is the organization within the DoD such that they would function well if they were reporting to FEMA?

Embrey:  The Federal Response Plan is the current construct.  If there are multiple events, there are multiple coordinating officials.  It will be under DOJ if it is crisis management, FEMA if consequence management.  Military assets are responding to military command and control under tasking from a civilian official.  That structure and that content can work in this environment as well as other environments.

Greenleaf:  Operation TOPOFF was the first time when the FBI asked DoD to become the lead federal agency to neutralize a site where terrorists and nuclear weapons were stored.  This was the first time it was exercised, but it seemed to me that the leadership was sensitive to the problem. 

Vice Chairman:  I thought they were under the FBI?

Jones:  But that seems like a "mission" to me?

Gordon:  I support your opinion on this, Governor.  I think the civilian agency should be in charge. 

Falkenrath:  We should emphasize that the "capacity" is important, but as a subsidiary to the concern over civilian authority.

Vice Chairman:  I’m not sure if, now, we have enough information to explain this.  We do not have enough information on the adequacy of the military response.

Jones:  I would say that the military is prepared in some instances and not in others.  It is almost the cart before the horse, because there is not a strategic plan, so how can we say whether or not the military is prepared.  The proper role of the military is what in what areas?

Marsh:  I share your view on the civilian control.  We should clearly indicate that the civilian lead agency should conduct these exercises using military resources.  We should also avoid language that could be construed to restrict Presidential powers.

Chairman:  Does the President have the authority to do this?

Wermuth:  Absolutely.  The President has the authority to put the military in charge of enforcing the law. 

Bremer:  I will dissent on this…

Ralston:  All four state directors are going to agree with you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman:  If you want to avoid the word "never" I could accommodate this in my concerns.

Falkenrath:  I’d like to see revised text, before we decide if we want to go into dissent or not.

Chairman:  How do you want to proceed?

Shine:  I’d like to start with the Executive Summary.  I think the Executive Summary should be intelligible by itself.  I also think the "findings" are unnecessarily pejorative.  They use counter-productive language.  I would like to look carefully at how the recommendations should reflect reality. 

I liked the 3 components of a national strategy.  What we want is a functional, comprehensive, coherent national strategy and then go on to provide the findings. 

Quinlisk:  Yes, the draft on the November 22 had problems, but I liked the tone of it better.  The other one tries to find out who we can blame for things.

Gordon:  I liked the November 2 document.  I thought the tone was better; it got right to the point and it was easily read.

Vice Chairman:  We could move the introduction and made that the first part of the Executive Summary and then simply move to the recommendations as they are now drafted, without the findings.

Bremer:  It think it is important to have findings.  I think the last 2 chapters of the full report need a more in-depth discussion of the problems.  I, frankly, am not offended by the tone.  We are not here to make friends.  If the tone is critical, that’s because we are critical.

Falkenrath:  The Executive Summary is what is going to be read by most people; we cannot postpone the criticism to the full document.

Shine:  We could say, that the national has loosely coupled structures to achieve specific purposes, but the Executive Branch has failed to articulate a coherent strategy.

Ralston:  As far as the tone, if we bash Congress and the Executive Branch, they may take a defensive stance.  I do not want them to come back and criticize us.

Jones:  I was going through the 22^nd Executive Summary.  I was reading through the "conclusions" and it seems to mirror the other executive summary without the tone.  Why can’t we reach the conclusion to use this original executive summary?

Downey:  We should make that the topic of this discussion.

Vice Chairman:  I will take responsibility for the second Executive Summary.  It seemed to me that this presentation was more succinct.  I would ask if we could use this format and adjust the tone of the language. 

Greenleaf:  Rather than telling people what they don’t have, we should explain what they do have, a lot of different agencies going in different directions. 

Garrison:  What kind of response do we want to invoke?

Shine:  I’m not sure if the language has been changed or not.  But saying things like "the lack of a strategy is no surprise" is not an effective statement.

Vice Chairman:  Well, if other panelists want to go back to an earlier document that is fine with me.

Bremer:  One way to proceed would be to see if panelists feel anything has been omitted.  If we can get the substance right, then we can move on.  Are there things that are left out?

Gordon:  I don’t know that we went through enough discussion on the "performance measures" as a panel.

Falkenrath:  The one thing we did talk about a lot was an "end state" and we never really operationalized what that means.  I was trying to say that this would be a valuable model.

Gordon:  I’m just suggesting that we did not talk about this fully.

Quinlisk:  It seems that by putting this detail in, I do not think we should weight it this much.

Gordon:  Can the Congress establish a National Office?

Wermuth:  It will have to be legislation.

Garrison:  Have we bumped this against PDD39 and PDD62?  Because they may say that these are a national strategy.

Chairman:  We could add that in "what the Executive Branch portrays as its strategy is, in fact, little more than a compilation of various programs already underway"

Shine:  I like the four points of a "national strategy" in the previous Executive Summary. 

Falkenrath:  I think "national" is redundant, "coordinated" is incorporated, "resourced" is obvious, and "focused" is also incorporated.

Vice Chairman:  I do not think that we have enough time to develop an "end state" strategy.  What we have done is state the needs and outline characteristics.

Vice Chairman:  I would recommend an appendix that is a list of all the recommendations that we have.

Quinlisk:  I think a list, as an appendix, is an excellent idea.

Falkenrath:  When you rigorously go through and look at the document, much of what we say is "way down in the weeds."  My thinking was that we needed a threshold of detail. 

Vice Chairman:  We could embellish some of the functional areas.  If there are others in those areas, then we can put a line or two in each one of those.

Embrey:  There was a recommendation to include elements of the introduction as part of the executive summary.  Is that still on the table?

Chairman:  I would like to go through the findings one-by-one.

Shine:  Recommendations 4 and 2 are confusing.  I think we need to be clear as to what the functions are for this Advisory Board.  Is it working with the National Office, or with a broader view over all terrorism?

Wermuth:  Yes it is an adjunct to the National Office.

Falkenrath:  I would delete, "appointed by President and confirmed by Senate."

Vice Chairman: I would leave it in to emphasize accountability.

Chairman:  Will this National Office have oversight over intelligence activities and information?  Can they direct the dissemination?

Marsh: Under recommendation #3, I would take away "ad hoc" because that gives it a temporary feel. And change it to "select;" we did this with intelligence.

Quinlisk:  When we talk about taking "ad hoc" out, we change our recommendations.  I just want to make sure we are changing our intent. 

Chairman:  What is the difference?

Wermuth:  An ad hoc is temporary.

Chairman:  Don’t we want this to be permanent?

Jones:  There is a sentence that does not seem to have a context.  We are saying that Congress is sharing responsibility, but then they tried and the Executive Branch would not let them.

Falkenrath:  The idea is that Congress has tried to re-organize the federal branch, but it has not been a serious effort.  And this is the problem.

Chairman:  Finding #5?

Downey:  With the Incident Command System, I thought everyone HAD to use it.

Foresman:  There are multiple Incident Command Systems out there.  The argument is that if you are a "purist" you only use one system.

Jones:  They are adopting it type-by-type, rather than all together.

Falkenrath:  I see a different problem.  One thing we absolutely DO NOT want is one for terrorism and one for other all hazards response.

Downey:  It won’t work unless it is just one system.

Jones:  On Training, Equipping and Exercising what does the last sentence mean?

Falkenrath:  Allocate resources based on a strategic view, so cities should get more money.

Shine:  Why not say, "federal resources should ultimately be allocated according to this national strategy."  We could also say that state resources should also be coordinated in consistent with this plan.

Chairman:  Do we need to get States more involved in the National Strategy?

Bremer: We put them on the Board of Advisors.

Chairman:  What else do we have on these specific recommendations?

Quinlisk:  We did not mention agricultural terrorism.  We need to say that that is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Chairman:  If we are done, let’s talk about the agenda.  We have all morning tomorrow; we could plow into chapter one or call it a day.

Wermuth:  There is a suggestion to put some introductory material into the ExecSum… but we also talked about combining the preface and introduction.

Chairman: We need to include weapons of mass destruction in the introduction.

Chairman:  We are now at Chapter 1, are you tired?

Shine:  In the original introduction, you have a whole variety of issues – deterrence, response, preparedness, international, domestic.

Chairman:  What we are discussing is that we have no harmonized the "threat" up with the means and resources.

Shine: Yes, we need an entrée into this national strategy.

Jones:  I’ve seen three references to the National Drug Control Strategy.  Are we tying ourselves to a failed program?  On the ground, we’ve lost the war on drugs.

Shine:  One reference is fine, but multiple references are not necessary.

Jones: Yes, they do not add a great deal.

Administrative Matters and Adjourn