Next DHS Center Competition Announced

The University of MD team (see related story) will no doubt have much in common with whoever wins the next center competition. As Secretary Ridge noted in his remarks at the College Park Campus in January, “We should point out that today we are also announcing that we are seeking proposals for another Center of Excellence. This next center will study high-consequence event preparedness and response - yet another layer of integration, communication and protection added to the great work being done by so many citizens in every field of study and walk of life in our country.” The BAA for the Center for the Study of High Consequence Event Preparedness and Response was released on January 14 with proposals due April 22. The full announcement is available here.

According to the BAA, the new Center’s emphasis will be research and education focused on high consequence events. Its studies should address a range of issues across 5 general themes, all of them within the province of psychology:

Preparedness. Studies will investigate the various categories of preparedness-government and first responder preparedness, community preparedness, national preparedness, and private sector preparedness-and how those categories can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively. How do these categories contribute to national net capacity? How do we prepare for threats to our homeland and their national security implications in our system of federalism and overlapping government responsibilities? How do we know when our country is prepared when conceptually preparedness is about more than the numbers of gas masks possessed and response plans drafted? How do we balance preparedness for both adaptive terrorist threats and non-adaptive natural disasters and emergencies? How much preparedness is enough in an ever-shifting threat environment? How do we assess it for citizens, governments, communities, businesses, information technology systems, and the various combinations of these entities? How do we balance the costs of preparedness against its presumed benefits, particularly for events that may or may not happen in a generation? How can we sustain preparedness for attacks or disasters that have a low probability but extremely high costs in loss of life and economic impact (the 9/11 attacks), or conversely high frequency, smaller scale attacks (the Israeli experience)? What relationship does preparedness bear to threat and vulnerability? How can innovatively designed response structures effectively unify incident command, and what types of unified command are truly desirable in an emergency? An understanding of human factors, especially including how responders interact with systems and technologies, should inform the design of an effective emergency response infrastructure.

Prevention and deterrence. What are the best ways of preventing and deterring a catastrophic terrorist attack or disaster? What combinations of vigilance, sensing, hardening, situational awareness, and information operations will best prevent or dissuade terrorists from attacking? Can terrorists be deterred? Are different threats susceptible to different forms of deterrence? What new technologies are particularly suited to preventing or deterring events involving weapons of mass destruction?

Decision-making. We need to better understand how we make decisions before, during, and after high consequence events. What is the impact of such decisions? How do we make them, and will they accomplish what we want? The answers to these and similar questions require an understanding of what constitutes a high consequence event, and especially of the distinctive features of events involving weapons of mass destruction.

Effective response networks. Responding to major emergencies requires formation of networks often working outside traditional lines of communication. How will individuals and organizations come together to solve a large-scale homeland security crisis? What mix of traditional organizations and self-organizing networks will prove optimal? All such structures must be organic and resilient; they must facilitate surge capacity. Understanding how ephemeral response networks are generated and what makes them successful will help promote their formation and enhance their performance.

Modeling and Simulation. All emergencies are difficult to rehearse; catastrophes are impossible to rehearse. Prevention forms part of an overall preparedness strategy. How can modeling and simulation help us prepare in the absence of real life rehearsal? Hazard, economic, transportation and other modeling tools can help us better conduct cause-and-effect analyses, identify and select courses of actions, and apply appropriate resources. Our preparation for high consequence events necessarily depends upon reliable, accurate models. Training similarly depends upon realistic simulations. How do we know when and how a building will collapse? What can we predict about the behavior of contamination plumes? Our emergency responders will only find answers to these and similar questions through robust, validated models and simulations.

Back to SPIN January 2005