U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

59–837 CC WASHINGTON : 1999

COMBATING TERRORISM: ROLE OF THE

NATIONAL GUARD RESPONSE TEAMS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY,

VETERANS AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

JUNE 23, 1999

Serial No. 106–32

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman

BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York

CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

STEPHEN HORN, California

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia

DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

MARSHALL ‘‘MARK’’ SANFORD, South

Carolina

BOB BARR, Georgia

DAN MILLER, Florida

ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas

LEE TERRY, Nebraska

JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois

GREG WALDEN, Oregon

DOUG OSE, California

PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin

JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California

HELEN CHENOWETH, Idaho

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

ROBERT E. WISE, JR., West Virginia

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,

DC

CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

JIM TURNER, Texas

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

HAROLD E. FORD, JR., Tennessee

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

KEVIN BINGER, Staff Director

DANIEL R. MOLL, Deputy Staff Director

DAVID A. KASS, Deputy Counsel and Parliamentarian

CARLA J. MARTIN, Chief Clerk

PHIL SCHILIRO, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, VETERANS AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut, Chairman

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana

MARSHALL ‘‘MARK’’ SANFORD, South

Carolina

LEE TERRY, Nebraska

JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois

HELEN CHENOWETH, Idaho

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

TOM LANTOS, California

ROBERT E. WISE, JR., West Virginia

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois

EX OFFICIO

DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

LAWRENCE J. HALLORAN, Staff Director and Counsel

MICHELE LANG, Professional Staff Member

JASON CHUNG, Clerk

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on June 23, 1999 ............................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Cragin, Charles, Acting Assistant Secretary for Reserve Affairs, Department of Defense, accompanied by Major General Roger Shultz, Director, Army National Guard; Brigadier General Bruce Lawlor, Deputy

Director for Military Support, Director, Consequence Management Program Integration Office, Department of the Army; and Major General

John H. Fenimore, Adjutant General, New York Air National Guard ..... 30

Gebicke, Mark, Director, National Security Preparedness Issues, National

Security and International Affairs Division, General Accounting Office,

accompanied by Ann Borseth, Senior Evaluator, National Security and

International Affairs Division, General Accounting Office; and Robert

Pelletier, Assistant Director, National Security and International Affairs Division, General Accounting Office ................................................... 4

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Cragin, Charles, Acting Assistant Secretary for Reserve Affairs, Department of Defense, prepared statement of ..................................................... 34

Fenimore, Major General John H., Adjutant General, New York Air National Guard, prepared statement of ........................................................... 46

Gebicke, Mark, Director, National Security Preparedness Issues, National

Security and International Affairs Division, General Accounting Office,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 7

(1)

COMBATING TERRORISM: ROLE OF THE

NATIONAL GUARD RESPONSE TEAMS

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1999

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, VETERANS

AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room

2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher Shays

(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Shays, Souder, Terry, Blagojevich,

Schakowsky, and Tierney.

Also present: Representative Skelton.

Staff present: Lawrence J. Halloran, staff director and counsel;

J. Vincent Chase, chief investigator; Michele Lang, Robert Newman, and Marcia Sayer, professional staff members; Jason Chung,

clerk; David Rapallo, minority counsel; and Earley Green, minority

staff assistant.

Mr. SHAYS. I’d like to call this hearing to order. Local and State

and Federal efforts to combat domestic terrorism are proliferating

rapidly. City and county first responders are being trained and

equipped to deal with incidents involving nuclear, biological, and

chemical weapons of mass destruction. More than 40 Federal departments, agencies, and programs have responsibilities to help detect, deter, and mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks. Next January, 10 National Guard Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection

teams, RAID teams, will join the arsenal available to States

against the terrorist threat.

So we asked the General Accounting Office [GAO], to assess the

proposed mission and operational role of the new RAID teams to

determine where they will fit in a coordinated, effective, and efficient response to a weapons of mass destruction incident. According

to the report released by GAO today, the answer remains disturbingly murky.

State and local officials expressed widely varying degrees of confidence that a RAID team would arrive in time to be of real use

in the critical early stages of situation assessment and lethal agent

detection. Some viewed the RAID team mission as duplicative of

growing State and local first-response capabilities.

Commenting on the report’s findings, the lead Federal agency for

consequence management, the Federal Emergency Management

Agency, commonly referred to as FEMA, agreed that ‘‘new chemical

capabilities for the Guard may not be necessary to support Federal

2

operations.’’ GAO recommends a basic reassessment of the RAID

team concept before the program is expanded. Others disagree. The

Department of Defense [DOD], sees a well-defined role for specially

trained National Guard units as an advance element of the overall

support the Pentagon will inevitably be called upon to provide.

DOD officials view the National Guard RAID teams as critical

State-controlled intermediaries between local first responders and

other Federal military support arriving later.

But we need to be more certain the RAID teams envisioned by

DOD do not disrupt the proven response scenarios or duplicate

local capabilities. An Oklahoma City council member recently described the confusing jumble of Federal help that arrived 15 hours

after the bomb blast as needlessly injecting arguments over bureaucratic turf into the city’s efforts to cope with human tragedy.

That can’t be allowed to happen again.

This subcommittee’s ongoing examination of Federal efforts

against terrorism takes a unique, governmentwide view. Our oversight mission is to help shape an evolving national strategy that

matches the response to the threat, coordinates crisis and consequence management at all levels and operates efficiently. Today,

we ask if the proposed National Guard RAID teams meet those

tests.

Our work in this area has been aided immeasurably by Representative Ike Skelton from Missouri, ranking member of the

House Armed Services Committee. His long-standing interest and

expertise in these issues transcends party and even transcends the

sometimes more impenetrable barriers of committee jurisdictions.

As the cosponsor of this GAO report and others on the Federal terrorism response, he joins us as a valued partner and ally. And he’s

welcome by the subcommittee.

And at this time I would say that we look forward to our witnesses. I’ll be calling them and swearing them in in a second and

with Representative Lee Terry’s permission, I’ll go to Ike Skelton

to see if he has a statement and then I’ll go to you. Thank you.

Mr. SKELTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I will make

only a brief comment. I welcome this opportunity to be here. I welcome the opportunity for this hearing. It certainly raises our level

of awareness about the problems of implementation for the RAID

teams. I personally agree with what we have established in the

RAID teams. We—these are new, relatively new concepts and the

implementation continues to evolve.

Of course, we can all hope against hope that we never have to

use them. The reality being what it is, they somewhere along the

line may sadly be forced to respond to these incidents, as we have

seen already occur in our country. So I look forward to this. I look

forward to the testimony of Mr. Cragin and the testimony of the

gentleman from the National Guard because that certainly does

mean a lot to us in the future safety of our fellow Americans.

Thank you so much for allowing me to be with you.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you very much for being here. I would now

call on a really valued member of this committee, Lee Terry. I

would just parenthetically say of all the people who ask questions

I find his the most insightful and it’s wonderful to have him here.

3

Mr. TERRY. I appreciate that, Mr. Chairman. I have no prepared

opening remarks. I spent 8 years on our Omaha City Council and

what a lot of you don’t know is that we were the bridesmaid to

Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh spent time in Omaha on videotape in our Federal courthouse of his presence so of course we’re

concerned.

But also just in the general sense of that our local fire and our

police are the first responders in any type of a tragedy and whether

natural or man made will count on support from the State and

from the Federal by way of National Guard involvement and what

roles they play is important.

Mr. Chairman, as you said, from citing the council member from

Oklahoma City, it’s our firemen and our police who are going to be

on the scene or involved in the investigations initially, and sometimes they could be there for hours. To have a new entity show up

no matter how benevolent their involvement could be very disruptive.

We need to look through the process and find out a way of enhancing everybody’s involvement as opposed to allowing a process

to decay in a time of emergency. So that’s why these types of hearings are extremely important for the local communities and just

the overall safety and well-being of our constituents. I appreciate

your holding this hearing.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you very much. Before calling on our witnesses, I just ask unanimous consent that all members of the subcommittee be permitted to place an opening statement in the

record and that the record remain open 3 days for that purpose and

without objection so ordered. I’d ask further unanimous consent

that all Members be permitted to include their written statement

in the record and without objection so ordered. We would also obviously include Mr. Skelton’s statement in the record.

Thank you. At this time I would recognize our first panel and it’s

Mark Gebicke, Director of National Security Preparedness Issues,

National Security and International Affairs Division, GAO, General

Accounting Office, accompanied by Ann Borseth, who is Senior

Evaluator for the GAO in the same division, and Robert Pelletier,

Assistant Director in the same division as well.

At this time what we do, as I think you know, we swear in all

our witnesses. I’d ask you to rise and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SHAYS. Note for the record that all have responded in the affirmative. I think we can have a pretty punctual hearing. This

doesn’t need to be a long hearing, but it is a truly important hearing; and I’m grateful to have our two panels and obviously our

guest of such distinction, Mr. Skelton. So I invite you, Mr. Gebicke,

to make a statement. I think you’re the only one with a statement

and then you’ll respond to questions.

4

STATEMENT OF MARK GEBICKE, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY PREPAREDNESS ISSUES, NATIONAL SECURITY AND

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY ANN BORSETH, SENIOR

EVALUATOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE; AND ROBERT PELLETIER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, GENERAL

ACCOUNTING OFFICE

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’re

very pleased to be here this morning to talk about the National

Guard RAID teams. We’ve worked very closely with this subcommittee along with Mr. Skelton and we’ve enjoyed that relationship providing a number of products over the last—over the last 3

years on the Federal structure and the programs that are available

to combat terrorism.

And we’ve seen a consistent theme emerge over just about all the

products that we’ve done, and that theme is that the number and

cost of programs that have been initiated to combat terrorism has

grown tremendously. And this has presented a very difficult management and coordination challenge in order to avoid duplication,

fragmentation, and gaps.

And my message here today is going to be somewhat similar to

the theme that we’ve given you over the past dealing with the— and that theme deals with the RAID teams obviously and the report that the subcommittee just released today and that is that

there’s a need for a more focussed and coordinated U.S. response

to weapons of mass destruction. We need an approach that capitalizes on the existing capability, minimizes the duplication, and at

the same time focuses our funding on the highest priorities.

Now, exactly what are the RAID teams? DOD is currently establishing RAID teams to assist local and State responders. They’re

really going to do three things. They’re going to help assess the situation when an incident does occur, advise the local and State authorities when necessary, and then facilitate requests for additional

resources from the State and Federal military assets.

This fiscal year, 10 RAID teams are to be established. They’re

going to be in States that also coincide with FEMA regions. Each

RAID team will consist of 22 full-time members. They’ll be on call

24 hours a day, 365 days a year and each team will have dedicated

equipment, ground transportation. They will not, however, have

dedicated air transportation.

As you mentioned in your opening remarks, when we went to the

Federal, State, and local officials to ask about how the RAID teams

have begun to and will eventually fit into the scheme that currently exists for responding to a weapon of mass destruction, we

found varying views, differing views.

At the Federal level, principally the players are the Army, the

FBI, and FEMA, the principal players. The Army takes the position

that the National Guard RAID teams are a very necessary element

of a Federal response and a State response picture and believe that

there are no obstacles that can’t be overcome; and I’m sure the witnesses after I and our panel finishes will confirm that.

5

The FBI and FEMA, on the other hand, express quite a different

view. They question the need for the teams. They are of the opinion

that we have an adequate Federal response capability and that

possibly this capability might be duplicative of what already exists.

They’re concerned about how the Federal Government—excuse me,

the National Guard RAID teams would be able to integrate themselves in the local and the State response that has already been established.

And I need to mention this too that every place we went, all

those officials that we spoke to were highly complimentary of the

National Guard in their more traditional role and that is coming

to an event where we need assistance and providing personnel,

equipment, supplies, and transportation in the event of a catastrophe.

So that’s really not at issue here, and what we’re really talking

about is whether or not the FBI, FEMA, and other officials that

we’ve talked to believe that we need that initial capability of detection and identification that has to take place very early in an incident. And I’ll talk more about that in just a second.

Now, at the State level, we also have varying views. It depends

on where you go. One State is getting ready to accept and implement a RAID team. It was very complimentary, felt that the RAID

team in their particular State was being integrated adequately and

it would provide them with additional, more robust capability.

They anticipated using the RAID team to help them in general

hazardous material incidents and to be the primary asset that

would be available to the State, should there be an incident involving a weapon of mass destruction.

We need to clarify that when we have an incident the very first

people that respond typically are your police department and then

probably followed very closely by your fire department and your

emergency medical personnel.

Most of the HAZMAT teams that are available throughout the

country have basic training in dealing specifically with chemical

agents and more specifically with toxic industrial chemicals because whenever they encounter an accident on a highway, they just

don’t know what confronts them so they have to have some basic

training to assure that they take adequate control of the situation.

Some officials told us that they believed the RAID teams could

be useful in locations that have little or no HAZMAT capability,

that this could be very helpful in those instances. We also talked

with local officials and also the International Association of Fire

Chiefs and we talked specifically about that first element that’s

very critical, the detection and identification of chemical agents

and there again emphasized that it’s really the first responders

that need to have that real robust capability. They are the people

that are going to be first on the scene and have to make a very,

very quick assessment, usually within the first hour, certainly no

more than the first 2 hours of when they’re confronted with.

The second question that you asked us to address was whether

or not there were other capabilities that exist at either the Federal

or the State or the local level and we did identify over 600

HAZMAT teams located throughout the United States that can respond and do respond to incidents.

6

The chart over here to my right and your left indicates the various categories of the response elements that are available to a locality. At the very top you see what’s readily available to the State

in terms of the RAID teams once implemented, the State HAZMAT

teams and the Air National Guard units, and then the lighter

shaded to the right of the chart would indicate the Reserve military

units, the active military units, and then the darker shaded to the

bottom and to the left would indicate the Federal civilian and military activities that would be available.

So when you look at that you paint a very, very complicated picture of a number of different units that can respond, and we can

talk in more detail about that later if you’d like.

The third issue that I wanted to mention here this morning that

came up frequently in our discussions about the implementation of

the RAID teams again had to do with the timeliness of the arrival

of the RAID teams. Officials indicated the need for the team to arrive in that first hour to particularly be of help in the detection and

identification of a chemical. They feel that the HAZMAT teams

have that capability and with the RAID teams not arriving until

probably the 4th hour, that assistance in that particular mode of

dealing with the incident would not be of much value.

They also raised concerns about the team’s ability to both retain

and also to train their individuals, particularly those individuals

that are in relatively specialized occupations.

So in conclusion, Mr. Chairman, the fact that we’ve got, as you’ve

characterized it, murky views from the State and local and Federal

agencies about the RAID teams and how useful they could be and

how they’d fit into the Federal response and the State response

mode, we felt that greater clarification was needed before we proceeded.

The fact that there appears to be some similar organizations that

have functions very close to what the RAID team would bring to

an incident lead us to believe that there might be unnecessary duplication among the responders and finally the concern about the

timeliness of the response of the RAID teams coupled with issues

of potential retention problems and also training problems leads us

to believe that the RAID teams might have difficulty executing

their responsibilities diligently.

And as you mentioned, we made several recommendations in our

report for consideration. We felt it would probably be a good idea

at this point in time to pause, to see how the implementation goes

in these first few RAID teams to see if these issues that have been

raised at the State and local and Federal Government are indeed

issues that need to be resolved or whether or not we can move forward if we feel that the RAID teams are certainly necessary.

Mr. Chairman, I’ll stop right there. It’s a brief summary of our

report. We’ll be glad to respond to any questions that you may

have.

[NOTE.—The GAO report entitled, ‘‘Combating Terrorism, Use of

National Guard Response Teams Is Unclear,’’ GAO/NSIAD–99–110,

is retained in subcommittee files, and may be obtained from GAO

by calling (202) 512–6000.]

[The prepared statement of Mr. Gebicke follows:]

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Mr. SHAYS. First let me recognize the presence of Mr. Tierney.

Nice to have you here, and it’s my intention to call on Lee Terry

and have him go first and then with the permission of Congressman Tierney, we’ll go to Ike Skelton and then we’ll go to you.

You have the floor.

Mr. TERRY. Thank you. I appreciate hearing your remarks again,

and I really do feel this is one of the few hearings where I really

think we’re on the same page. I want to bring out a little bit of

your testimony here, some of the points that you raised and discuss

them in the context really of what I stated in my opening remark

and, that is, who should be in control and who should be helping

whom?

We in the Federal Government have this system of we’re supposed to be the ones that control and local governments are subordinate to States and States to us, but I think in an emergency response situation, it has to be the reverse.

You mentioned the word timeliness probably three or four times

in your remarks, and I think that’s the core of the issue here. In

any type of emergency, whether it’s detecting an emergency before

it happens or the disaster and the cleanup that’s necessary afterwards, it’s our local police officers and our fire department and in

a lot of these experiences it’s the fire truck that gets there before

the cops do. And then the EMS behind it.

They’re there for a certain amount of time. They’ve got at least

an uncontrollable situation, as much control as possible and then

come the RAID teams and FEMA and everybody else just to confuse the picture and, like I said in my opening statement, everyone

may have or possess benevolent means or desires but it just adds

to a confusing situation. So let’s talk about the timeliness for a second and let’s highlight that.

Your chart over here is great, and it shows all the entities and

right there in the middle is the first responders, the HAZMAT, the

fire, and the police. Now, one of the studies that we do yearly on

the city level with our fire department is response times.

Has there been a study that shows what the response times can

be for these RAID units when a situation occurs and whatever the

cities are in their territory?

Mr. GEBICKE. They’re using a standard of 4 hours. Now, obviously that would be—could be less if the incident happened to

occur closer to the proximity where the RAID team is situated. If

the incident is in another part of the State, it could take longer,

feasibly. But 4 hours is the assumption that we have on arrival of

the RAID team at an incident.

Mr. TERRY. Again with the assumption of 4 hours, let’s say that

response time is an average time in any type of a region; but I do

agree with you I think probably in a lot of these areas it could be

a lot longer than 4 hours. But have they shown any cost benefit

analysis of showing up 4 hours after the fact? And by the way, I

also want to highlight the first group that comes in in 4 hours may

be the minimal crew and others will follow once that first crew has

made an assessment.

So we heard from the city council person in Oklahoma City that

it was as long as 15 hours, and I think that’s probably very probable. But anyway, has there been a cost benefit of seeing that if

19

after 4 hours, even what type of impact they would have, the benefit of becoming involved versus the cost of the disruption?

Mr. GEBICKE. I’m not aware of any studies that have been done

along those lines.

Mr. TERRY. Do you think that’s necessary? Do you think that’s

important for us to understand?

Mr. GEBICKE. I don’t know. I’m not so sure. I think the most important thing for us to understand here today is that, as you mentioned in your remarks, it’s the center of our chart. Those are the

key people that need to arrive, and I’d like to think that within the

first hour or two the incident commander will be able to assess the

situation to figure out whether or not he or she has the assets

available right then and there to handle the situation, needs to

maybe call in some of these mutual aid agreements he or she might

have with other surrounding communities or counties to get those

assets in or whether or not there are closely located Federal assets

that can be called or whether the hotline—there is a hotline for oil

spills and chemical spills and there’s a hotline for chemical/biological incidents, whether that hotline—you see, I would think all of

that would have taken place before the 4th hour.

Mr. TERRY. Right. Well, in talking about that in more of a general sense seems to me that our dollars could be used more efficiently here by training our local officials, by joining with HAZMAT

and training them how to better deal with a biochemical situation

than spending the money to form these RAID teams. Has there

been a study on that, of spending our money up front to help participate in the education and training of first responders?

Mr. GEBICKE. You’re aware I’m sure of the Nunn/Lugar/Domenici

legislation where we’re actually providing both training and equipment to 120 of our most populated cities, and that program is

about 50 percent completed right now.

Last, I saw I believe about 58 of the 128 cities—of the 120 cities

had actually received the training and started to receive the equipment. So that program is aimed at the local community and the

State community, as you indicated, at a city level.

Mr. TERRY. And that’s one prong of it. I’m not too sure we

shouldn’t be putting all of our resources to the front end there

and—I’ve sat down and I’ve talked to our HAZMAT people in

Omaha, NE, and our firemen and our EMS folks; and they are so

confident in their abilities, but it’s a little bit different than cleaning up a truck spill outside the Van Waters and Rogers chemical

plant than it is dealing in this area and that’s where—their confidence isn’t as strong in that area, and we need to enhance that

and figure out ways that this RAID team then, if we keep that, enhances their ability.

What studies has there been then to show—I take it there really

hasn’t been any hands-on experience with these RAID teams yet?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct.

Mr. TERRY. What is the timetable or modeling that shows what

role they’ll play and where they can be most effective or is that the

process that we’re in now?

Mr. GEBICKE. I think it’s evolving. I mean, even as we were

doing our review and we were talking to officials, we were in close

20

contact with the Army and the National Guard; and the role of the

RAID teams has evolved over time. But you’re correct.

We’re planning to put 10 RAID teams in place by this year, and

our position is we’ll know a lot more once those 10 are in place and

we see how they’re able to fit into those particular regions.

Mr. TERRY. Thank you.

Mr. GEBICKE. Thank you.

Mr. TERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Skelton, you have the floor.

Mr. SKELTON. Thank you very much. Mr. Gebicke, nice to see you

once again. We appreciate your testimony and your work. As I

mentioned before, your efforts and the efforts of your associates

have certainly raised the level of awareness about problems of implementation of the RAID teams. I think it is very helpful and very

useful.

The purpose of a RAID team, as you testified, is to assess, to advise, and to help get Federal resources; am I correct?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct.

Mr. SKELTON. I’m reminded the reports that are often done are

people who are critical of something new outside of the GAO. I’m

reminded of the criticisms that lasted for a number of years against

the B–2 stealth bomber and yet performed magnificently in the recent conflict, carrying out 1 percent of the raids and 11 percent of

the targets. The proof was in the pudding.

Those critics today find themselves with a bit of egg on their

face. And I think we might find ourselves criticizing something that

might work, that might work well. I look forward to the National

Guard’s testimony, but it is, as I understand, Mr. Gebicke, and according to your report, that there were differing views among the

Federal and State officials on the role of the RAID teams. Is that

correct?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct.

Mr. SKELTON. The Army officials believe the teams can be valuable assets. Is that correct?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct.

Mr. SKELTON. And there were some State officials that felt this

very same way?

Mr. GEBICKE. Yes, sir.

Mr. SKELTON. It appears to me that all of the firemen, police,

first responders—and God bless them, they’re wonderful all across

our Nation—their main purpose of course is to respond to fires or

crime, as the case may be.

It appears to me that a specialized group such as the National

Guard RAID team in excellent training with those first responders

could bring about a great deal of positive results for an incident

that sadly might occur.

It seems to me that the bottom line in all of this is the caliber

of the National Guard, the caliber of the training that they have,

and the caliber of the training that they do with the first responders. I see that the figure of 4 hours is bandied about, but on the

other hand if they are fully aware of what the RAID teams can do

and the RAID teams in many instances will be there, as you acknowledge, well before any 4 hours to assess, to advise, and get

21

Federal resources, that this may be one of the most positive efforts

in our homeland defense that we’ve run into.

I thank you, Mr. Gebicke, for your efforts. You’re always thorough, and I always applaud your thoroughness and the gentleman

that you are in your work. We thank you for it, sir.

Mr. GEBICKE. Thank you, sir.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Tierney.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll be very brief because I think you’ve covered good ground here and I appreciate

your testimony, sir. Just for clarification, would you give me what

you anticipate would be the scenario in a hazardous situation

where there was a HAZMAT team in that community, just how

things might shape up in that situation when the RAID team

would show up and what their role would be if the HAZMAT had

already been there and performed their function.

Mr. GEBICKE. We’re going to talk not about a weapon of mass destruction incident but an accident?

Mr. TIERNEY. Whatever you’d like.

Mr. GEBICKE. So there’s an accident. Probably the police arrive

first, the fire department probably second. Can use the example

that occurred down here on 395 in northern Virginia with the black

powder just a couple of weeks ago that put us—inconvenienced a

lot in traffic.

People arrived there first recognized that the cargo was black

powder, potentially volatile, very dangerous, had to make an assessment of the situation, which individuals needed to be—needed

to be contacted. First, make a decision as to whether or not they

had the assets right there to deal with the situation, if you have

the assets to go ahead and deal with it.

If you’re not sure of your capabilities to deal with the situation,

then you might have some arrangements in the case of northern

Virginia with other counties, maybe Fairfax, Arlington, the city of

Alexandria would have. You’d have mutual aid agreements where

you can contact other close by proximities to assist you. If you feel

within that first hour or so or even more that this is bigger than

you thought it was and you need more help, you’ve got the EPA

hotline that you can contact right away and get Federal assistance

there.

There are over 300 coordinators located around the country, most

of them in EPA, but some of them in the Coast Guard, to protect

our waterways and then a whole host of other assets as depicted

on the chart. I mean, we could go through that chart but we’re

talking about hundreds, hundreds of units that are available.

If I could use this opportunity just to suggest what we really

don’t have—because we really don’t have—and I told my staff what

we need is a map of the United States, a real big map of the

United States, and we need a red pin for a Federal response asset,

a green pin for a State, and a yellow pin for a local; and then on

the head of each pin we need a capability for that response unit

from 1 at the lowest, minimal, to 10 at the highest.

And then you could look at that map and you very quickly could

see—overlay it with, say, your populated areas and say where does

the capability exist, where is it robust, where it’s not quite as robust, and where it’s minimal and then also take into consideration

22

what our threat and risk would be, particularly to a weapon of

mass destruction in areas of the country where we probably have

very few response assets or not as capable response assets.

I think only when you have that, can we figure out if we have

gaps and if we need to add more assets to the picture than we currently have.

Mr. TIERNEY. I guess I’m a little shocked to find out that nobody

can afford a map and a couple of colored pins to get us down that

path. Are you saying that doesn’t exist?

Mr. GEBICKE. It sure doesn’t. It’s finding out what the capability

is at the local level.

Mr. TIERNEY. I take it from your answer you’re thinking the

RAID might have an application but it would be better utilized if

we identified areas that were probably a lower response capability

at the present time and target and focus them?

Mr. GEBICKE. Exactly.

Mr. TIERNEY. Does that put it in a nutshell?

Mr. GEBICKE. The RAID teams are going to be very helpful when

they arrive in a more traditional role. If we need to cordon off an

area, if we need to evacuate people, if we need to bring supplies,

if we need to transport people, everybody we talked to said the National Guard performs that role very admirably.

Mr. TIERNEY. Who would the RAID team respond to when they

arrive on the scene in terms of authority?

Mr. GEBICKE. Well, there would be a State entity so they would

report to the incident commander who has charge of the incident

unless it was a weapon of mass destruction in which case the FBI

would be notified right away, and I assume the FBI would take

control.

Mr. TIERNEY. There are 10 of these teams now out there? Ten

RAID teams?

Mr. GEBICKE. Ten are being implemented right now.

Mr. TIERNEY. Is it your view they were targeted or located with

any theme in mind in terms of an assessment of their need as to

the area where they’re situated?

Mr. GEBICKE. From what I understand, there are a number of

criterion that were considered. One was interest on the part of the

State to have a team. Second was the more populated areas were

considered and also they wanted to get at least one RAID or at

least the way it turned out at least one team in each one of the

10 FEMA regions. In other words, there’s one State in each one of

the 10 FEMA regions.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you very much.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. I’d like to note for the record that Janice

Schakowsky from Illinois is with us. I’m going to ask some questions, and then I’ll go to you as well.

You make the point GAO finds in its report that numerous local,

State, and Federal organizations can provide similar functions as

the National Guard, and I want to know how GAO distinguishes

between similar and duplicative capabilities. When is similar duplicative?

Mr. GEBICKE. Well, we talk about similar, what we were really

trying to determine, if you look at weapons of mass destruction,

was principally—let’s focus on chemicals. Most of the intelligence

23

experts have told us that the weapon of choice by most terrorists

will first be conventional explosives and then second would be

chemical agents, possibly more specifically toxic industrial chemicals because they’re more readily available.

So what we—and we could talk about biological but that’s a different issue and we can talk about nuclear and that’s a different

issue. So what we focused on was different units that had the capability to detect and/or identify a chemical agent, so that basically

took us to the individuals who had knowledge of the HAZMAT capabilities and others in both the Federal military and the Federal

civilian sectors.

Mr. SHAYS. But, can I interchange duplicative and similar?

Mr. GEBICKE. No, because we haven’t drilled down to that level

of depth to be here today to tell you that there’s an exact duplication, so we picked that word similar very carefully. We do have

work under way for you, I’m sure you’re aware of, that will give

you the answer to that information—that question. We will be looking very closely at Federal responders and to determine where it

is duplicative and where there are gaps.

Mr. SHAYS. If a fire department and HAZMAT team perform

similar functions, would it be GAO’s position that HAZMAT teams

are not required?

Mr. GEBICKE. No, it wouldn’t. I think your HAZMAT teams

would have more equipment. They’d have better training and be

able to perform some functions that probably the fire department

would not be able to perform.

Mr. SHAYS. When you went to ask the Army, the FBI, and FEMA

their view of the RAID teams, your report suggests quite strongly

that the Army is supportive and the FBI and FEMA have some

reservations. And yet in earlier reviews they did, they did not raise

those concerns. Am I seeing this correctly?

Mr. GEBICKE. No, I think some of those concerns were raised earlier.

Mr. SHAYS. Did the FBI state their reservations in writing or

would these just have been through interviews?

Mr. GEBICKE. The FBI stated their views orally. We have written

comments from FEMA.

Mr. SHAYS. But not written from FBI? Would there be a reason

why they wouldn’t put it in writing?

Mr. GEBICKE. Not that I’m aware of. We give our commenters an

option to either respond in writing or orally. Either way is acceptable to us as long as we get the proper level of response.

Mr. SHAYS. Is it possible that if it’s in writing it would take too

long to be approved? The process would take longer? In other

words, someone is able to say something verbally; but if it’s in writing, it has to be checked by more than one person? I’m just trying

to understand. It seems to me there is value to have certain things

in writing.

Mr. GEBICKE. I can’t dispute that. I guess that’s a possibility. It

might take longer to get somebody to sign it if they’re not readily

available. We got no indication from the FBI that there was any

reluctance for them to state their opinion to us.

24

Mr. SHAYS. What State officials did GAO—I believe there are five

States so I don’t need to know the official, but there are five States

that you chose to get comment from.

Mr. GEBICKE. We actually went to three States.

Mr. SHAYS. You went to three States. In your report there are

five. What are the three States?

Mr. GEBICKE. We went to Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Utah at

the State level.

Mr. SHAYS. But then I thought there was reference to two other

States as well.

Mr. GEBICKE. We went to Montgomery County, MD.

Mr. SHAYS. The county, but you didn’t ask the State there. The

other two States, they were county or local governments you looked

at and Chicago for instance?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s right.

Mr. SHAYS. Chicago is almost a State. Why did you pick Virginia,

Utah, and Pennsylvania?

Mr. GEBICKE. We were trying to get a diverse picture. Pennsylvania happens to be a State that is implementing a RAID team,

so we thought that they might be more pro-RAID teams than they

were. Virginia was a very populated State with also some urban

areas and also in the same region, same FEMA region, as the

Pennsylvania RAID team; and then we picked Utah primarily because it’s a more urban State with just a few populated locations.

Mr. SHAYS. More rural State?

Mr. GEBICKE. Utah. Less densely populated State.

Mr. SHAYS. In all three instances, the States had significant reservations.

Mr. GEBICKE. No, Pennsylvania was very impressed with the National Guard RAID team. They thought it was working acceptably

in the State, and they planned to use this.

Mr. SHAYS. Is that, though, in part because Pennsylvania has a

RAID team? In other words, if I had the RAID team in my State,

I think I might like it better than if it was next door.

Mr. GEBICKE. It’s possible. Obviously we felt our study would

have been flawed if we didn’t go to a State——

Mr. SHAYS. I understand. So I’m not overly moved by the fact

that Pennsylvania likes the fact that it has a RAID team because

then you don’t have a coordination problem. So let me do the last

question and that is tell me how the State of Connecticut controls

Massachusetts? We would love to do that.

Mr. TIERNEY. Not a prayer.

Mr. SHAYS. The system, the RAID team, is located in Massachusetts. It is their National Guard; but if they, heaven forbid—but if

Hartford were dealing with a serious crisis that required a RAID

team, it wouldn’t take 4 hours to assemble them, I hope, from Massachusetts because they’re there. Are they under the authority of

the Governor of Connecticut?

Mr. GEBICKE. I’m going to ask Mr. Pelletier to respond to that.

Mr. PELLETIER. The National Guard are under the authority of

the State Governors that they’re located in. Some States have compacts to share assets such as National Guard. I don’t know what

the situation is with Connecticut and Massachusetts, whether

25

there is a compact. I know that there’s a southern Governors compact for sharing of assets.

Mr. SHAYS. I would have thought—maybe it was and I didn’t

catch it that one of your recommendations would be that whenever

they entered a State, it would be a given that they would be under

the jurisdiction, unless there’s a constitutional challenge. In other

words, without—obviously they can be under Federal control if the

President so determines. I don’t see the logic of having the Governor of Massachusetts be in charge of a team that’s in Hartford,

CT, when it’s obviously—— Mr. PELLETIER. I believe until federalized, they are an asset of

the State they are located in.

Mr. SHAYS. There would have to be some type of pact unless

there was a constitutional restriction, which leads me to believe

that I would think that the selection of what National Guard in

each FEMA area is chosen, in this case the 10, that they would be

those States that have the most flexibility in allowing wherever

State they’re located for them to be under the control of the Governor of that State.

I think that’s a gigantic challenge, an issue that ultimately has

to be resolved and not resolved when the crisis occurs and we learn

from it, unless you all make the assumption that whenever they go

in another State, they’re going to be called by up by the Federal

Government and then they’re going to be under Federal control.

But I sure want if I were Governor of the State to know that this

National Guard unit was under our jurisdiction.

Mr. TIERNEY. Is that the same, Mr. Chairman, that first you

want our football team and now you want our National Guard? He

uses the same on both of them.

Mr. SKELTON. Would the gentleman yield at that point?

Mr. SHAYS. I try to think of a funny response, and there is no

funny response to that very serious question, that attack on the

State of Connecticut.

Mr. SKELTON. Let the record show that I have not attacked the

State of Connecticut.

As I understand it, there are 10 RAID teams now being established; is that correct?

Mr. GEBICKE. That’s correct.

Mr. SKELTON. As I also understand it, there are 44 light RAID

teams throughout our States and territory and it’s also my understanding that the Senate is proceeding to add to the 10 RAID

teams that already exist; is that correct?

Mr. GEBICKE. It’s my understanding too.

Mr. SKELTON. So eventually, Mr. Chairman, you will have your

wish that every State have its very own RAID team, but we are

starting out now, as you know, with those that are contiguous with

the FEMA regions; am I correct?

Mr. SHAYS. If the gentleman would yield for a question. My sense

is we’ve chosen the 10 FEMA areas, 10 FEMA regions, but I don’t

know what the process was to determine the National Guard within each FEMA region and like I look at—in your own State, Missouri has responsibility for Montana and so—pardon me? Oh, I’m

sorry, no. I apologize. That’s not—Missouri only has a four-State

region. Is it Colorado?

26

The bottom line, though, to the question—maybe I should direct

the question to you all. How were the 10 National Guards selected?

Were they selected based on their compatibility with the other

States or that they were—had a head start on the other States? Do

we know? If we don’t know, that’s all right.

Mr. GEBICKE. Maybe Mr. Pelletier can shed a little light on it.

Mr. PELLETIER. I think Mr. Gebicke mentioned the factors that

would consider the transportation, the receptivity of the State and

some other factors. We’re not aware of any agreement among the

States or receptivity of the States in that particular region to share

assets as a factor to consider.

Mr. SHAYS. I would just conclude. My concern about this would

be that this almost requires then that the President determine that

there is a national interest to federalize the National Guard and

I—and so maybe that’s just a given and therefore my question is

not all that significant. But I would like to think, though, that if

they weren’t and they were in the presence of another State, that

they would not be under jurisdiction and authority of—that they

would be under the authority of the Governor of that State, and I

would think that would be a question that you all would need to

look at and we need to look at.

Mr. GEBICKE. It might be a question you want to pose to the next

panel. They might be able to respond to that. They might be aware

of discussions that have taken place.

Mr. SHAYS. I think we’ll do that. I note present is the ranking

member of this committee, Mr. Blagojevich. It’s nice to have you

here. With your permission, I’ll go to Ms. Schakowsky.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m glad that Mr.

Blagojevich has arrived because I know that Illinois in large part

because of his efforts does have one of those RAID teams. I was curious why it is that team is placed in Peoria, how the selection of

the place was made.

Mr. GEBICKE. Can’t help you. Probably the next panel could help

you with that.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. And looking at the region, the FEMA region,

that Illinois is in, I wanted to followup a bit on the chairman’s

questions. What is, then, the responsibility of our RAID team, for

example, for the northern peninsula in Michigan? Is there the possibility because it’s in the region that our National Guard would be

deployed in some way in an emergency situation there?

Mr. GEBICKE. Our understanding is that possibility would exist,

yes.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. So the chain of command, though, is unclear

then in terms of the Governor of the State of Illinois’ role in that?

Mr. GEBICKE. It’s unclear to us at this point in time.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. How will that be determined? This seems like

a major area of confusion here or unclarity that could in a real situation be a problem.

Ms. BORSETH. Mr. Pelletier mentioned that there is—one of the

big compacts is the southern Governors compact that was established—there is a southern Governors compact that, I think, exists

between, I think, 10 southern States that lays out a lot of these

kinds of issues between the States if one State is going to share

it’s assets with another State.

27

There are chain of command issues. There are liability issues

when a RAID team from one State goes to another State not only

the harm that they could incur for themselves but also harm that

could be incurred because of their decisions.

Those kinds of compacts exist beyond the southern Governors

compact, and it’s my understanding that they’re working on a national compact; but those kinds of issues are exactly the kinds of

issues that have to be spelled out in those compacts, and we’re not

sure where either the southern compact or any other compact

comes out as far as chain of command.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Are there cases where the RAID team is

viewed as the first responder? Are we always looking at local fire

departments, et cetera?

Mr. GEBICKE. You’re looking at local fire departments as a first

responder.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. And so in every case, then, the RAID team is

called in by somebody and then the question is under whose authority is that somebody that calls them? These are the questions

that are unanswered.

Mr. GEBICKE. The authority would be there would be a local incident commander established, probably a fire chief or whatever at

the incident site. He usually would make the decision to call a

RAID team because it’s a State asset, so that RAID team could be

called; but again we have this issue of now—they’re not going to

arrive right away. Depending upon where the incident is and

where the RAID team is located, it might take some time to get

there. There might be some other assets that are more closely located that the incident commander could use at his or her disposal

depending upon where it is.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. And the local commander is determined by

where it is and who the local authority is but in all cases that is

who remains in charge?

Mr. GEBICKE. Yes, of an accident. If it becomes obvious that

there’s a weapon of mass destruction or a terrorist, the FBI would

get the phone call and the Federal Government would be involved,

because it’s a violation of a Federal law would get involved much

sooner.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. What’s the timeline for working out all these

questions of chain of command, et cetera, jurisdiction?

Ms. BORSETH. The teams won’t be operational until January

2000. Once they become a part of the State, there’s already a procedure for an incident to unfold, the incident commander would go

to a State if they run out of assets or the local jurisdictions around

them don’t have enough assets. Those kinds of things are pretty

well established.

The RAID teams are just being integrated into the State emergency plans, and it would be up to the State to deploy them whenever a local incident commander would see them as a necessary

part of their response. So those things are not too much in question. There’s a pretty defined process for notifying all of those assets.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you very much.

Mr. TERRY [presiding]. Mr. Blagojevich.

28

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. I’ll be very brief. I just want to make a short

statement and that is that—I think what you’re doing obviously is

very, very important and my question to you regarding my own city

of Chicago is the chief of hazardous materials for the Chicago fire

department testified before the Research and Development Subcommittee of the House National Security Committee in March

1998 and he said, ‘‘We learned that the National Guard will take

on a larger role in preparedness and response.’’

We in Chicago applaud that decision because we have had nothing but eager cooperation and great success in dealing with the

local Illinois National Guard. They have responded to our call and

shown us that they can produce if just given a chance. As a first

responder, we must work closely with the Guard to determine how

they can best assist us. We need a conduit which will bring the

Federal Government a regular support system to ensure that we

are always prepared.

Can you talk about that idea of a conduit and how they would

be able to work in a corresponding fashion, the State National

Guard to the Federal aspect and the city of Chicago’s fire department?

Mr. GEBICKE. You mean how they would work together is your

question? How they’d work?

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Yes.

Mr. GEBICKE. Basically, it would be the local fire chief in this

case. He’d try to take control of the situation. If he felt he had the

capabilities to control the situation and to take any assets available, then he would do it on his own. If he felt that he needed more

assistance, then he could call the RAID team.

He could call other Federal responders to assist. That would be

a decision he would have to make depending upon the incident and

the assets that he has available to him. It would be the same decision process that any incident commander would make. It would

probably be an easier decision maybe in a less populated area because the assets possibly wouldn’t be as robust as they would be

in Chicago.

Ms. BLAGOJEVICH. How do you make sure they’re doing what

they’re supposed to be doing at a local level like a big place like

Chicago? How, for example, would we keep an eye on the Chicago

fire department doing the sorts of things we’d like them to do?

Mr. GEBICKE. We know that the—I don’t know this for a fact, but

you’d like to think that they’ve received the training that they

need, that they have the equipment, that they have protective

suits—and I don’t know what the situation is in Chicago, but they

probably have a special hazardous materials group that would even

have more advanced training and equipment than just the fire department itself.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. But there is no mandate from us to require

that of them?

Mr. GEBICKE. Not that I am aware of. You are aware that the

Federal Government under DOD’s auspices right now is training

120 of our major State teams to train them to deal with hazardous

materials as well as provide equipment to improve their training

for hazardous materials.

29

Ms. BORSETH. First of all, we spoke with your chief of hazardous

materials in Chicago, and I am sure that he could handle anything.

Chicago is one of the Nunn-Lugar cities, and it has received a lot

of training. They had a robust capability before they received that

training.

Chief Eversole is really aware of what could occur in a weapons

of mass destruction event and is very—has taken a very proactive

role in training his people to be well aware of the capabilities and

the possibilities that exist in those situations. There are a lot of

other HAZMAT chiefs across the country that are trying to do the

same thing.

There are other smaller, usually HAZMAT, capabilities that

aren’t anywhere near where Chicago is or Fairfax County. But that

is what we don’t know. We don’t know the range of capabilities

that exist in the local communities. So you have Chicago on one

end, but you have the example that a friend of mine likes to use,

Howling Dog, WY, on the other end and somewhere in the middle

is the majority of the HAZMAT teams.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Thank you very much.

Mr. TERRY. One last question. GAO expresses a concern that

RAID teams will have difficulty in maintaining their proficiency

after they receive training because they won’t have opportunities to

practice under actual conditions. Comment further on that. How do

they maintain proficiency, if you could quickly state?

Mr. GEBICKE. In the State of Pennsylvania—the State of Pennsylvania are going to use their National Guard RAID team to assist

them in all HAZMAT incidents. They would also use them as a primary asset if there is a weapon of mass destruction incident.

There are some specialized positions on the National Guard

RAID team, and one is called spectrometer and one who has to operate this relatively expensive piece of equipment. It takes daily

calibration, and it takes a lot of training.

I think it is those types of positions that might be more difficult

to maintain skills than the more generalist positions on a National

Guard RAID team.

Mr. TERRY. Thank you. This panel is dismissed with the committees’ appreciation. The next panel can organize while we break for

our vote recess.

[Recess.]

Mr. SHAYS. I would like to call this hearing to order and announce our second panel: Mr. Charles Cragin, Acting Assistant Secretary for Reserve Affairs, Department of Defense, accompanied by

Major General Roger Shultz, Director, Army National Guard and

Brigadier General Bruce Lawlor, Deputy Director for Military Support, Director, Consequence Management Program Integration Office, Department of the Army; and also we will hear testimony from

Major General John H. Fenimore, Adjutant General, New York Air

National Guard.

As you know, gentlemen, we swear our witnesses in so please

stand and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. Mr. Cragin. You have to be out of this

facility when?

Mr. CRAGIN. By noon.

30

Mr. SHAYS. You will be out at noon and so now you can relax.

I would invite you to testify. I am sorry that the other Members

are not here yet.

STATEMENTS OF CHARLES CRAGIN, ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR RESERVE AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, ACCOMPANIED BY MAJOR GENERAL ROGER SHULTZ,

DIRECTOR, ARMY NATIONAL GUARD; BRIGADIER GENERAL

BRUCE LAWLOR, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR MILITARY SUPPORT, DIRECTOR, CONSEQUENCE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

INTEGRATION OFFICE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY; AND

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN H. FENIMORE, ADJUTANT GENERAL,

NEW YORK AIR NATIONAL GUARD

Mr. CRAGIN. Thank you very much for inviting General Shultz,

General Lawlor, and me to participate in this very important hearing. We are also pleased to have Major General John Fenimore, the

Adjutant General of New York join us on this panel.

By way of background, I should also point out that Major General Shultz, prior to assuming his position, served as the Deputy

Adjutant General of the State of Iowa; and during that time he led

the tiger Team, which ultimately was responsible for preparing the

initial plan that was presented to Secretary Cohen, which really

was the base document for proposing the Reserve component integration, including the RAID teams.

Brigadier General Lawlor, the Director of the COMPIO today, is

also a National Guard officer from the State of Vermont. And I

should also point out that the Adjutant Generals of 23 States, including Connecticut, also serve as the directors of State emergency

management for their respective States. So you really have a great

deal of State representation when we are dealing with this issue.

In March 1998, Secretary Cohen announced an initiative to better prepare the Department to support the Nation in the face of the

growing potential for an unconventional terrorist attack at home.

This initiative is a time-phased multi-year effort to not only develop new RAID team capabilities, but more importantly to task,

equip, and train existing military units in 16 functional areas to

provide support to civil responders after a weapons of mass destruction attack.

This ongoing effort is one of the Department’s highest priorities.

Secretary Cohen has also made it clear that he wants the Guard

and Reserve front and center in DOD’s response plans for WMD

terrorism support here at home.

As a result, the U.S. Military Reserve components are now being

integrated into our overall national preparedness strategy. National Guard and Reserve members are uniquely suited for this initiative because not only are they a source of pretrained manpower

and expertise, they also are geographically prepositioned in nearly

4,000 communities across our Nation.

Given their proximity to likely centers of attack as well as their

familiarity with local emergency response plans and procedures,

the Guard and Reserve have an inherent response capability. They

have well-established links to first responders, to fire, police and

medical emergency personnel, who are always the first to arrive at

the scene of any incident. By tapping into and leveraging these inVerDate 11-MAY-2000 09:05 Mar 08, 2001 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00034 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59837 pfrm08 PsN: 59837
31

herent strengths, the DOD can improve its overall capabilities to

provide military support to civil authorities. To ensure the integration of the National Guard and other Reserve components into our

national WMD preparedness strategy, the Reserve Component Consequence Management Program Integration Office has been established within DOD and is under the direction of Brigadier General

Lawlor.

This office coordinates the identification, training, equipping and

exercising of Reserve component WMD assets, and manages their

integration in the national WMD response plans. The Office of the

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs provides program direction and oversight for the integration of Reserve Forces

in the military support for civil authorities.

The underlying premise of this initiative is that disaster relief is

and must remain primarily a State mission. Due to its historic role

in performing disaster response in relief missions in the State capacity, that is before a disaster situation has been federalized by

Presidential declaration, the National Guard will be called upon to

play a vital role in this initiative, but the other Reserve components will be equally engaged when Federal Reserve response assets are requested by State Governors.

Should a weapon of mass destruction actually be used, the resources and energies of local first responders along with those of

their counterparts at the State level may be very quickly overwhelmed or exhausted given the catastrophic consequences that

can be expected in such events.

And with all due respect to my colleagues from GAO, I find it

difficult to compare and contrast a catastrophic WMD event with

an industrial HAZMAT materials event. I would suggest that they

are not similar, but in many instances will be dissimilar based

upon the catastrophic nature of that event. Local and State officials

may urgently require the provision of additional Federal assets, including military support.

If or when it comes time for the DOD to lend a hand, the role

of the Department will be one of support and assistance and the

authority of the local incident commander will not be undermined.

By incorporating and leveraging existing forces into current WMD

response planning, while creating only one type of new unit, the

RAID teams, this initiative is highly cost effective.

RAID teams will help to fill some of the technical gaps in the civilian first responders’ WMD response tool box. Given the press of

day-to-day local emergency response, the majority of our Nation’s

first responders will have limited time and resources to acquire and

sustain the expertise needed to precisely identify the nature of the

WMD attack and to determine the latest protocols for safely responding to it.

RAID teams can help because they will be dedicated to having

just such expertise. Without such capabilities, mass confusion and

lethal delays would very likely result. The DOD, as you have

heard, is in the process of standing up 10 Rapid Assessment and

Initial Detection teams comprised of 22 highly skilled full-time and

well-trained and equipped National Guard personnel.

Let me emphasize one point—and I think the chart from the

GAO makes the point as well—if you see the white balloons or

32

clouds, those are characterized as State resources. And you will notice that the RAID teams are located in the State resources because that is what they are first and foremost, a novel partnership

albeit but truly first and foremost a State resource. They are only

secondarily a Federal resource.

And as you know, one RAID team will be stationed within each

of the 10 FEMA regions; and I think it is important to call your

attention, Mr. Chairman, to the comments of the Federal Emergency Management Agency contained in the GAO report on page

45 where Ms. Light, my colleague who I communicate with on a

regular basis, made the observation, she said in the last concluding

sentence of the major paragraph, ‘‘on these last two points, the report must distinguish carefully between the Guard in its State status and the Guard when federalized.’’

She is making the point that the RAID teams are not contemplated to be initially part of the Federal response plan. The

RAID teams are contemplated to be a State asset and a State resource to be utilized by Governors before they come to the Federal

Government and ask for additional assistance. I think a very important point is being made by the FEMA.

RAID teams are being established with State and local responder

needs in mind. Specifically, the RAID teams will provide advice to

incident commanders, they will assess and advise on the requirements for follow-on forces needed to supplement the response operation, and they will help the incident commander make accurate

expedited requests for that assistance through the emergency response system, local, State and Federal.

Each team member is now in the process of completing more

than 600 hours of extensive technical training. The teams will also

be equipped with state-of-the-art communications, detection, and

analysis equipment, as well as computer models to help assess and

project the affected areas for various types of attacks.

We expect that these teams will be available for deployment by

January of the year 2000 if needed by a State’s Governor who can

deploy them to assist local agencies quickly before national disaster

declarations or Federal assets can be deployed to the scene. The existence of interstate compacts facilitates Governors in adjoining

States to deploy their National Guard members to surrounding

States as needed before Presidential declaration occurs.

And as you observed, who would have operational control of

these National Guard personnel when they migrated to another

State, say for example from Massachusetts to Connecticut? The National Guard shares resources on a regular and continuing basis

around the United States. And generally speaking, when National

Guard personnel go from Georgia to Florida, for example, they fall

under the operational control and command of the resident commander, which would be the Adjutant General of the State in

which they are operating.

Our RAID teams sustainment training will involve at a minimum quarterly exercises, two of which must be conducted outside

the State in which they are located. Additionally, at least two exercises annually will be conducted in conjunction with FEMA regional personnel.

33

The teams are also available for use as a Federal asset secondarily to respond as needed through the Federal response plan.

Complementing and supporting these RAID teams will be units

specially trained and equipped to perform reconnaissance and decontamination missions. These units will be drawn from existing

Reserve component force structure and capabilities. Sixty-five reconnaissance and 127 decontamination teams will receive additional training and equipment in fiscal year 1999 and fiscal year

2000 to perform these missions. General Lawlor’s office, the——

Mr. SHAYS. Let me suggest that you conclude. In making my

promise to you——

Mr. CRAGIN. Let me just say, Mr. Chairman, although we can

never be fully prepared to respond to all types of events in all locations and wish we had the fiscal resources so we could establish a

RAID team in every single firehouse in America with the advanced

technology that it brings to bear but we know that we can’t. We

have, however, begun to lay the foundation for an integrated

across-the-board response. And the continued partnership for a

WMD preparation among local, State and Federal agencies will be

critical to our success.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Cragin follows:]

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. General Fenimore, thank you very much

for being here. I think it is important to have you put your statement on the record before we ask questions.

General FENIMORE. Thank you for inviting me here today. I will

be speaking to you not from a DOD perspective but more importantly from my standpoint, the perspective of someone who runs

the National Guard in one of the States and perhaps more importantly, someone who is responsible for emergency management.

Mr. SHAYS. That is important that you do it from that perspective.

General FENIMORE. I will quickly answer the questions that you

put to me in your letter of invitation and just summarize why we

think it is that the RAID team is so critical for our responsibility

in New York State.

You asked, first, about the current status of implementation of

our RAID team. As of this date, we are a little more than 50 percent trained; most of the technical training has been done, and we

are beginning in July the combined training out in Missouri which

will be completed. That is the operational training. That should be

completed in December so the team can be operational in January.

Training is going very well, in part, I think, because we along

with other States have advertised nationwide for the best people

we can get on this team. We in New York have been able to attract

two former members of the Marine CBIRF Bird team. We have a

Navy nuclear technician from their nuclear sub program. We have

medical people and a host of people who have impressive credentials in their own fields; and perhaps because of that, they have

done extremely well in the training.

Morale couldn’t be higher. It is the most energized people that

I think I have ever worked with. You asked about the role and mission of the RAID team, and I think that has been articulated by

secretary Cragin.

I would add only an emphasis that this RAID team is going to

be an integral part of our State response plan. It will be written

into all of our protocols with not just New York City, which has robust capability, but with the State police and with the State Office

of Fire Prevention and Control, which is responsible for training all

of the fire fighters in New York State, of which there are many.

Threshold for employment of the RAID teams. We are still working that out, but I can say generally speaking what will trigger the

response of a RAID team will be notification from any emergency

manager, be that person city, county or State or from law enforcement, State police or local law enforcement, from EMTs, volunteer

firemen, whoever is on the scene that sees anything that looks like

a HAZMAT or something that they don’t understand that has happened.

We are developing protocols that will, with cooperation of these

other State agencies, bring the RAID team to the scene as soon as

possible. In terms of the legal status of these teams while they are

responding, it won’t be any different than the legal status of other

National Guardsmen responding to any kind of emergency.

Finally, you asked how we are going to be employed with regard

to the weapons of mass destruction, including command and control

structures. As you know, they will be on alert 24 hours a day. We

44

will run it in three shifts, and they will be employed by ground vehicle or by helicopter or by C–130, depending on how far away the

incident happens to be.

That gives us a tremendous advantage over other Federal responders in that sometimes weather doesn’t permit takeoffs or

landings. Airplanes can break, and our team is here. That is very

important to the people of New York State.

In terms of the command and control, as you have heard today,

they report to the incident commander and they are a tool of the

incident commander. And even if our team responds to your State,

which it may well do, when our team goes into Connecticut, that

team will work for whoever the incident commander is onsite in

Connecticut.

Quickly, if I might go to the fundamental reasons why we think

in New York this RAID team is so critical to our ability to respond,

principally to weapons of mass destruction, but also to serious

HAZMAT and biological incidents, and the first reason is response

time. We use as a guide 48 to 72 hours for the arrival of the first

Federal response of any magnitude.

I understand—I heard for the first time this morning that they

got to Oklahoma in 15 hours. That is breathtakingly fast, and I

commend them; but that is not normally the way it works, and that

is not a criticism. It just takes longer getting your request up

through the State system up to the Federal Government and getting a response.

So our practical experience tells us that the Federal responders

just won’t be there in the kind of time that we need. The RAID

teams will be there much more quickly. They are not first responders, but they are—in a tiered-response situation, they are the second level of response and they will, along with other State responders, be there well in advance of any Federal responders. And time

in these kinds of situations equates to lives saved and property

saved, less importantly.

The second reason is capability. I keep hearing that this is a redundant capability. Absolutely not so. They will have sensing

equipment that can sense not only standard industrial chemicals,

but the full spectrum of weaponized chemicals. And I haven’t heard

a whole lot about biological sensing, and they will have the capability to do that.

Yes, I understand if there is no warning; you may not know for

days what the bioagent is that has been used on you, but sometimes terrorists, at the time that they disburse something, will announce to the media to create panic and confusion. In those cases,

the biological sensing abilities of the RAID teams is very important

to the State of New York. New York City is getting a similar capability. I have seen the modeling they are doing. It is pretty sophisticated. That is only in New York City. The rest of the State

doesn’t have that capability.

An additional capability that the RAID teams have is a communication capability that we do not have in the States, specifically

an ability to communicate with anyone, to take anyone’s transmission and relay it on whatever frequency they want, to whoever

they need to relay it to. I don’t know if New York City has that

capability but the rest of the State certainly does not and that will

45

be a very, very useful tool. I can remember the confusion and chaos

surrounding the response to TWA 800, which happened on our

watch. Had we had that capability, it certainly would have made

things work a little more smoothly.

Finally, force protection. These people will be able to tell the first

responders what they have got, where they ought to be standing.

And they can act as force protection, not only for our State responders and ultimately Federal responders, but hopefully for the

people who get there first, even though understanding that they

are not there in the first couple of hours at least.

Finally—maybe this is one of the most important things—they

are going to be part of an integrated State response team. As I am

sure many of you can remember, the attempted rescue in the

desert in 1981 where we tried to get the hostages out of Iran. It

didn’t work in large measure because the people conducting that

rescue had not exercised together. They had not worked together.

This is so important, and we have seen this over and over again

at the State level. I can speak only for our own State, but where

you have responders working together who have done so routinely,

things work incredibly smoothly. When you bring another group of

responders in who have not been playing with the others before,

there is confusion.

These RAID teams are going to be part of our integrated State

response. They will be helping to develop the exercises, and they

will be exercising with these other first reponders all over the State

to include New York City, who we are working with; and it is going

to make a dramatic impact on our ability to respond to these kinds

of incidents.

Originally, the people in the State, senior responding officials,

were not sure that they needed this RAID team. Once they realized

it was a tool for them, all of a sudden they thought it was a pretty

good idea. Our Office of Fire Prevention and Control and the State

police in the city of New York, they are enthusiastic about these

teams. The city of New York is less enthusiastic perhaps because

they have their own capability, but we are working with Mr. Jerry

Hauer and his operations people and there are cases, there are scenarios where they will be using our assets.

Since I am probably about out of time, I would just like to add

that people have not understood what this is all about and that has

probably brought on some of the initial confusion and just a lack

of understanding of how these teams can be helpful.

As recently as 2 or 3 months ago, most of the Adjutant Generals

in the country did not fully understand what these teams were all

about. But Friday of last week at our spring meeting out in Indianapolis, all of the Adjutant Generals talked about the RAID teams,

and we passed a resolution unanimously urging the Congress of the

United States to fund a full-time RAID team in each of the States

and territories because we understand now how important these

will be for our overall State response. Thank you very much.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. I have a lot of questions and we probably

will not get through all of them.

[The prepared statement of Major General Fenimore follows:]

46

47

48

49

Mr. SHAYS. Let me start with you, Mr. Cragin, and say why

shouldn’t Congress take the conservative approach and wait until

we have these 10 RAID teams in operation and thoroughly test and

evaluate their contribution before we look to expand them?

Mr. CRAGIN. Mr. Chairman, I can tell you that Secretary Cohen

asked the same question when the Tiger Team report with its recommendations to field a RAID team in each of the 50 States and

four jurisdictions, territorial jurisdictions, was provided to him. His

response was we need to walk before we run. And we need to—— Mr. SHAYS. You are just repeating my question. What is the answer to it?

Mr. CRAGIN. We are doing exactly that. We have fielded 10

teams. We have proposed in the President’s budget for this year

the fielding of an additional five teams.

Mr. SHAYS. But the point that I am asking is why wouldn’t it

make sense to see—we have not yet seen them in operational status, and why wouldn’t we want to see them in operational status

before we decide to make more of them? That is the bottom line

question.

Mr. CRAGIN. Well, I think, Mr. Chairman, it is because we have

been persuaded of the efficacy of these teams. We have been persuaded that they will work, and they will work as planned. Obviously, we will evolve as we move through this process. But as I say,

we are fielding it on a fairly programmatic basis, recognizing that

it takes time to get these teams hired, and then an additional year

to get them up to speed.

Mr. SHAYS. So the answer to the question is that you have confidence in the—conceptually, you have confidence in these teams

and you have decided to bring more into operation and not wait for

operational evaluation? That is really the answer. And your answer, I think, is that you have such confidence that you don’t want

to wait.

Mr. CRAGIN. I don’t think that I can disagree with any of the

words that you have put in my mouth, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. Aside from the 10 States that are receiving the RAID

team money, how many more States have requested them? And by

the way, I have no problem with either generals jumping in.

Mr. CRAGIN. To date we have had requests from 24 State jurisdictions. As I indicated, Secretary Cohen and President Clinton

have requested authority for an additional five RAID teams.

Mr. SHAYS. As they are added, what happens to the so-called

RAID light teams?

Mr. CRAGIN. They would essentially go away as a, RAID light

team. As you know, Mr. Chairman, the DOD did not request the

RAID light teams. They were provided to us through the largess

of Congress, and we were directed to implement them.

Mr. SHAYS. I basically, conceptually say you can have—we can

have five crack RAID teams, spend all of the resources necessary,

have them be full time—I make an assumption that the National

Guard teams are not full time.

Mr. CRAGIN. You are making a fallacious assumption then, sir.

They are full-time military personnel.

Mr. SHAYS. OK, that is important to know. That still notwithstanding, one logic would be to have crack teams, those who are

50

the most qualified to take these positions, then you could dilute it

a bit and have 10 and dilute it more and have 20, and I don’t mean

that in a derogatory way.

The more you expand—conceptually you might agree that you

may not have the best and brightest, but still very capable people.

My point in asking the question, given that they are going to have

to travel to get there, why wouldn’t it be better—if I were in Hartford or in Bridgeport where I live now, and I knew that you were

bringing in a team, I would want the best and the brightest there.

And I wouldn’t care if they came from Kansas City or Seattle; I

want the best.

How does that—the bottom line. You get the gist of my question.

How do you evaluate that you would have more rather than just

have a few and have them be top notch? That is the question.

Mr. CRAGIN. I don’t accept the premise. I don’t know because we

have more than five teams that we somehow dilute the expertise

of the total universe of teams. I think we are confident that we can

deploy the best and the brightest in every single one of the teams

that we field. Obviously to the extent you have fewer teams, as the

GAO correctly pointed out, you have a much longer response requirement.

Mr. SHAYS. To some measure that is true, but with airplanes it

is not as true. Where is your RAID team located?

General FENIMORE. Our RAID team is located in Schenectady,

NY, because we have the intersections of the north-south and eastwest interstates right near there, and we also have helicopter and

C–130 access.

Mr. SHAYS. And your largest airport is where?

General FENIMORE. They would leave from the Schenectady airport which is 9 nautical miles from the Albany airport, and between the two airports we have C–130’s and helicopters.

Mr. SHAYS. For instance, they could get to Chicago pretty quickly.

Mr. CRAGIN. We deploy from Peoria to get to Chicago. Every

minute—I don’t think that anybody disagrees that ideally if you

can get a RAID team on the scene working for the incident commander at the git-go, you are obviously in a better position because

you can do that initial assessment even more rapidly. So the more

you dilute the proximity of the teams by reducing the number, the

more you increase the normal response time for those teams to get

to the scene of an incident.

Mr. SHAYS. I want to go to Mr. Blagojevich, but I want to say

conceptually we have these tradeoffs, and they are clear tradeoffs.

And one is to have truly crack teams and then give a little on time.

The other is to have teams in all 50 States, have the local control

or State control a little more obvious.

But I simply can’t believe that they would be as good as a few

that are just totally focused, and your ability to be part of this

team is very difficult. I mean, you are like a SEAL. You have to

have proven yourself time and again. And I am not passing judgment on which I prefer, I am just trying to understand the logic

that you all are going through. And it seems to me that you have

decided that a presence in every State makes sense, even before we

know operationally how these are going to work.

51

Mr. CRAGIN. Mr. Chairman, the Secretary of Defense has not decided that we need a presence in every State. That has not been

the position of the Department. The position of the Department is

we have requested five additional RAID teams for deployment in

fiscal year 2000. There was a Tiger Team report that I mentioned

that General Shultz was the director of that made a recommendation to the Secretary for 54 teams. The Secretary did not accept the

report. He received the report. And that is a very important word.

He received the report and then he directed the Department of Defense through a budget decision to implement.

Mr. SHAYS. Congress is doing this with the red light. We have

25 States that have made requests. I conceptually can argue that

being near is better than being a little further away. Yet as I sat

down, I am reevaluating how I came down on this. You made in

your statement two comments which I will come back later on.

I wanted to give you a sense that I would love to know your concept of the issue of—you made this analogy that dealing with one

kind of a disaster in an industrial chemical exposure is much different than dealing with a chemical exposure by a terrorist. I am

not quite sure that I agree with that. They are different, but I

think there are tremendous similarities. The advantage it seems to

me is that the local people have practical experience dealing with

them. The disadvantage that we have in the chemical is that most

of it is theoretical rather than practical. General Shultz.

General SHULTZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As we develop the

concept of the RAID idea in the first place, we went to first responders. We talked to Chief John Eversole from Chicago. He said

if you are going to create this capability and you want to back us

up, do at least a chem-bio detection and help us in those areas

where we are not skilled today, chemical and biological on the high

end of the releases we are talking about. So the idea of the RAID

design came from first responders, in this case Chief Eversole.

Mr. SHAYS. I am sure that he said that is a skill that you add,

but I am sure that he didn’t say that they were radically different.

General SHULTZ. What he said, in his department today, he does

not have the ability to detect and respond to the extreme chemicals

that we have in terms of weaponized or chemical biologic agents.

Mr. SHAYS. You are on, Mr. Blagojevich.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. I am making an assumption that General Lawlor and

General Shultz, you can stay past noon; and we have no problem

with you, Mr. Cragin, leaving before noon. I also have no problem

with you summarizing how you feel on this issue so that we do not

leave something hanging before you leave, and we will give you

time to do that.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The old saying,

will it play in Peoria—evidently the RAID teams think that it does

because that is why they are in Peoria. Many of us from Chicago

think you ought to give us some of the RAID teams because we

have a much bigger population. The Chicago metropolitan area is

the third largest in the country.

Having said that, let me ask you a question about the local aspect and the first responders. There are about 600 HAZMAT teams

active as first responders. Is that fair to say?

52

Mr. CRAGIN. I will take GAO at its word on that.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. So the question is why shouldn’t we use some

of the RAID team funding to enhance the capabilities of those 600

HAZMAT teams? And how do you respond to the opinion that this

money would be better spent enhancing the capabilities of those

local responders?

Mr. CRAGIN. I think if we had unlimited resources, we should put

a RAID team in every firehouse in America that would have that

specific expertise and that specific equipment. We don’t have those

resources.

What we do and what you do every day in your decisionmaking

is you compromise. The Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program, a program funded by Congress, does in fact provide

training to first responders in the 120 largest cities in America. As

General Shultz said, when we talk to these first responders and

ask them to identify capabilities that they did not have, the capabilities that were not in existence were the ones that we designed

into these RAID teams as a State resource, not as a Federal resource that could in fact serve at the behest of the Governor to respond within his jurisdiction and in the jurisdiction surrounding it.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. General Fenimore, do you have any thoughts

on that?

General FENIMORE. Yes. There are 600 HAZMAT teams, I will

give you that. But how well are they actually trained? Most of

them are trained reasonably well. But I am reminded of the 32,000

or 33,000 fire departments in the United States, about 27,000 are

volunteer fire departments, and I am familiar with their training,

including their HAZMAT training because I spent many years as

a volunteer fire fighter myself. And while they are trained to deal

with basic HAZMAT situations, they don’t have the expertise to

deal with some of the more exotic chemicals that are used by terrorists, and they are certainly not trained and have no equipment

to deal with any potential biological incident. So we don’t see the

RAID team as being redundant or duplicative.

It provides a capability that we do not possess, and even in New

York City where they have one of the most robust capabilities in

the Nation for dealing with these kinds of situations, even they

admit that there are situations where they would like to be able

to call on our RAID team to do assessments because we could have

combined chemical and bio situations. There could be multiple

chemical releases and in those cases they would definitely be calling on our RAID team to help them out. So we see it as a critical

middle-tier response as part of the State response.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Let me just—I have this idyllic vision of small

towns with the volunteer fire departments. Do you remember the

Frank Capra movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town? He was from a small

town, something Falls, and he had this thing about—he came to

the big city, and he wanted to see the fire trucks go by because he

was a volunteer fire department in a small town.

And I look at that character, and I think he is probably the personification of these small town fire departments. He would not be

trained to deal with something as technical and complicated as

this.

53

On the other hand in Chicago, particularly with our unique history with fires—and we lost our city in 1873 because of a big fire— it makes sense to me that the GAO and the Chicago fire department would take issue with the statements that have been made

regarding the HAZMAT teams, that they do not have the basic capability to detect and identify industrial chemicals and mitigate the

effects of a chemical emergency.

GAO claims this is exactly what they are trained to do, places

like the Chicago fire department. If that is true, shouldn’t we provide some funding to those HAZMAT first responders as opposed

to, for example, having RAID teams in Peoria?

General FENIMORE. I agree that they are trained to handle those

basic HAZMAT situations. I don’t believe that I said that they are

not. What they are not trained to do is handle those situations involving weaponized chemicals, specific chemicals used by terrorists

that are not standard industrial chemicals. They don’t have that

kind of training, and the people that I know in New York State,

to include the Office of Fire Prevention and Control, the individuals

that run that organization which is responsible for training all of

the fire fighters in New York recognize, while they can handle most

HAZMAT situations, there are some weaponized chemical situations that they are not qualified to detect and they need more

training to be able to deal with that and frankly they need the protective equipment.

General LAWLOR. May I respond to that?

I think it is really important for us to recap what the RAID team

brings to the scene of the incident. Really, when you strip away

what we have been discussing, it brings two things.

First, it brings a sophisticated communication system. One of the

things that we found all across the country—my office also runs

the domestic preparedness program, training in those 120 cities.

One of the things that we find is that these communities cannot

talk to each other. In some cases, the police cannot talk to the fire

department within the same community because of different communications systems that have been purchased over the years, different frequencies.

One of the things that we set out to do when we constructed this

team was to create a capability that would allow the first responders from multiple jurisdictions in the event of an intercity compact,

intercounty compact, to talk to each other and also to be able to

talk to our expertise, whether that expertise be resident at the

USAMRIID or CDC or the chemical school, and also enable them

to talk back to whatever follow-on forces might be needed on the

scene. That is a capability that does not exist today. I think I can

say that with a fair degree of confidence because we are building

it. The ability to create that interoperability at the local level is an

enormous asset, and I think General Fenimore alluded to it earlier;

but you cannot simply underemphasize the value of communications in this kind of an incident.

So the first thing I would suggest to you is that the RAID brings

to the table a very sophisticated communications capability, and

that is No. 1.

The second thing that RAID brings to the table is an analytical

capability and that is—to put a fine point on it, agent detection.

54

Whether that agent is biological, we are building in the capabilities

to detect biological agents, and people keep talking about chemical

threat, but we cannot dismiss the biological threat. We are building

in that capability. And I know of only one other unit in the entire

United States that has that capability.

And we are building in two types of sophisticated chemical detection capabilities and also radiological detection capabilities. Those

capabilities with all of these organizations probably do not exist except for a couple of highly specialized military units. So most of

these organizations do not have either of those two capabilities.

Were you to duplicate those capabilities for the 600 departments,

the cost would be enormous because you are now talking probably

approximately $5 million to purchase the equipment and to get the

necessary training on the equipment, multiply it by 600, and that

doesn’t address the issue of whether the coverage is there because

the 600 HAZMAT teams may not, and we have not run the statistics or the analysis to know, but may not have the same coverage

that you are now receiving with the RAID teams.

So we think this brings a unique capability to this particular

fight, and it is one that would be very, very difficult to duplicate

across the country throughout all of the HAZMAT communities.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Cragin, I want to be respectful of my commitment to you. Do you have anything you want to say before we continue this process?

Mr. CRAGIN. First, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you permitting

me to retire prematurely. I am well represented by my special assistant, Ellen Embrey, who works these issues day in and day out,

and I am sure if there is any critical question that my colleagues

can’t field, Ellen will be able to help out.

Mr. SHAYS. Do you want her to come to the table? She is shaking

her head and you are nodding your head. We are going to call you

up and swear you in.

Mr. CRAGIN. She is an excellent colleague of mine and works in

this field.

Let me just say, Mr. Chairman, that I think part of the confusion

that you’ve seen and heard—and we have had this discussion on

several occasions—is because of the real novel approach that the

Secretary has taken with respect to these RAID teams. This is the

Department of Defense, a Federal agency, developing a State resource that is going to be utilized primarily by the States. And I

think that has taken people some time to appreciate what is being

developed and how it is going to work.

Frankly, the more information that we get out throughout the

United States, the more people recognize and appreciate the utility

of this sort of expertise being available throughout America.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. Your statement was very helpful. I am

sorry that we needed to draw it to a conclusion, and we appreciate

your answers to the questions.

I think what we will do is invite your colleague to come to the

table.

Mr. CRAGIN. She always wanted this opportunity, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. Could you state for the record your title, and first let

me swear you in.

[Witness sworn.]

55

Mr. SHAYS. Note for the record that you have responded in the

affirmative. It may be that you don’t have anything that you want

to say, but it would be nice to take care of that business now and

have you be here. If you would state for the record your name and

title.

Ms. EMBREY. Ellen Embrey. E-M-B-R-E-Y. I am the Special Assistant to Mr. Cragin for Military Assistance to Civil Authorities.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. I am sorry, you have the floor back and

we will—did we go 10 minutes? So we will give you a few more

minutes and then we will go to Mr. Souder.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. I will be brief. It is my understanding that the

RAID teams, there is one RAID team for each State. Is that fair

to say?

General FENIMORE. One per FEMA region and there are 10

FEMA regions.

General SHULTZ. If I may clarify, the 44 light teams that were

referred to are not full time, less robust, and have less capability

but each State and territory and the District will have some chembio response as directed by the Congress last year this next year.

We are training the members, arranging for equipment; but it will

be less robust, as I talk about RAID lights, than the full-time

teams with the capabilities that we are discussing here with the

10.

Mr. SHAYS. Those are 22 individuals who are on active duty and

10 FEMA regions?

General SHULTZ. That is correct.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. But the goal is one per State?

General SHULTZ. The goal is that each State and territory would

have some capability. That was our original intent.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Does Missouri have one?

General SHULTZ. Yes.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Peoria, I think that it is closer to St. Louis

than it is to Chicago. Can’t you give us a RAID team closer to Chicago since Peoria is in the middle? Give it some thought.

General LAWLOR. I can respond to tell you how the decisions

were made, because that is an issue. I can provide you with some

insight as to how the decisions were made originally to station

these teams. We did an analysis that took in a number of factors,

the first of which was the population within the FEMA region of

the State itself, the total population.

The second factor we used was the standard metropolitan statistical area. This is an area that is identified through the census as

being a metropolitan area. We looked at the number throughout

any given State. We looked at the lift capability of the National

Guard within that particular State, helicopter, C–130, what kind of

air transport they had, which States had interstate compacts, so

that there was some basis for the States to cooperate.

We also looked at the level of the State interest; and finally, we

looked at the location of the FEMA regional headquarters in order

to facilitate cooperation with the FEMA.

Throughout this process we have tried to utilize existing procedures, and that is very important. There is a Federal response

plan, and that is the procedure that is used across the United

56

States to respond to large scale disaster, and we specifically adopted that procedure.

So once we had received all of this criteria and the analysis, we

then went to the State Governors and Adjutant Generals and requested their specific station recommendation because we believe

that they have the greatest knowledge on the ground of where this

team should be placed.

We got that input, and then we bounced it back against the criteria to make certain that it fit the criteria that we devised. And

if it did not, we made a recommendation that it be moved. But that

is how the decision was made.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. I thank the gentleman. I am sorry that

I interrupted twice here, and I appreciate your tolerance.

Mr. Souder, you have the floor for 5 minutes.

Mr. SOUDER. First, I want to agree with my friend from Illinois

that Indianapolis seems to make more sense because Peoria and

Missouri are very close together and Indianapolis could have covered both.

Also if he didn’t carry on so much about the nuclear waste going

through Chicago. Maybe he would have had a HAZMAT team

there, because he wouldn’t let anything go through.

I am not sure who would best answer this question, but, General

Fenimore, we have an Air Guard unit in Fort Wayne; and they are

training as part of their regular duties because they get assigned

into the—they have been in the Middle East and other places of

high risk.

Is that pretty standard, that these Air Guard units, and I would

also be interested in Army Guard units. Are they prepared because

of their deployments how to handle this if they were attacked while

they were overseas, and how does that differ from some of the

RAID training?

General FENIMORE. Well, it is very different. Most Air Guard

units have a mission that requires them to deploy, so most Air

Guard units do training in survival, in chemical and biological warfare situations. Many Army units do as well.

The difference is, whereas they have the capability to operate in

a chemical or biological environment, they don’t have the sophisticated sensing equipment to detect precisely what they have got in

all cases. The RAID team is the organization that has that equipment and can tell the people exactly what they have got. But it is

a different thing. The Air Guard and the Army Guard people on

deployment status are training to operate in an effort—and the

RAID team is a small cluster of people specifically trained to detect

what it is we are facing.

Mr. SOUDER. I went through a simulation and they certainly set

up the tents, and there were assumptions that they were going to

do that. Were they assuming that when they were in the zone of

combat that somebody would be there with that equipment?

General FENIMORE. In many cases that is true. Not all of them

have the integral equipment built in to make those kinds of chemical and biological detections.

General SHULTZ. Could I respond to a piece of your question. As

it relates to the Army, we have chemical defense teams, NCB defense teams, nuclear, chemical and biological defense teams, and

57

we train annually to operate in a contaminated environment, and

that would include chemical and biological kinds of releases.

The one thing that we don’t have in the military today is biological detection capability with any level of sophistication. That is

why that category always seems to stand out as a bit unique. But

we do train for releases of chemical and biological agents on an annual basis.

Mr. SOUDER. Are these 10 RAID teams in the FEMA intended to

be regional coverage?

General SHULTZ. The intent was that we would have some response capability in each of the FEMA regions, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. And I understood from General Lawlor’s comment

that one of the reasons a site is selected, they have the ability to

move by air?

General LAWLOR. That is correct.

Mr. SOUDER. For example, Peoria would cover Terre Haute and

Indianapolis. Who makes a decision whether to deploy out of State?

General LAWLOR. The request would come—I will defer to General Shultz. It is really a National Guard issue.

General SHULTZ. The Governor of a State or jurisdiction would

approve the release of that individual team that belonged to them

to go to another State.

Mr. SOUDER. So if the Governor of Indiana said we don’t have

the capability, who would he call to get it so that the Governor of

Illinois would release it?

General SHULTZ. They talk to their fellow Governors. We respond

routinely to these kinds of requests, across State lines and jurisdictional boundaries, and this kind of request would also fit that category. If we had a case where the Governor said you can’t have my

team, we have a Federal authority that we would have to apply.

Mr. SOUDER. If two incidents occurred at the same time and one

was in the State where the team was, what would happen to the

other State?

General SHULTZ. We would reach to another region and access

their team.

General FENIMORE. From a practical standpoint in terms of requesting help from other States, the Governors may do that; but

in fact it is more likely for people like myself or even some of the

operational people on my staff who know the operational people

from adjoining States to make that request directly so that the help

is on its way while all the blessings from higher levels are being

dealt with.

In the fall of 1995 when we had the worst forest fires in our history on Long Island and New York State, we simply called the—

we were in desperate need of heavy lift helicopters to drop water

on the fires. We called Connecticut National Guard, and they responded because we have an understanding. In some cases it is

memorandums of understanding, but in most cases it is just agreements among the members of the Guards that we will respond and

take care of the paperwork later where it is a life threatening situation. As a practical matter, that is not an impediment.

Mr. SOUDER. So in Burlington, VT, if something occurred, the

Guard would know to call New York.

58

General FENIMORE. They would indeed. Martha Rainville, the

Adjutant General of Vermont would probably call me if she knew

about it. If she were away on vacation or at some conference, her

operations people would call my operations people, and our team

would be on its way.

Mr. SOUDER. Is part of the assignment of the 10 RAID teams to

watch for incidents in their zones so they would call if these people—the HAZMAT teams, that Guard unit, there will be a

proactive in New York State, if you saw something happening in

Burlington, you would be contacting them and saying hey, we have

these resources if you need us?

General FENIMORE. Absolutely. We work out protocols with our

State police, with the Office of Fire Prevention and Control. We are

working on protocols with all first responders to include emergency

managers in cities, counties and the State so that anyone seeing

a problem which would potentially require the assistance of a

RAID team gets that word through their operation. Or more likely,

based on the emergencies in the last few years, someone in that

local community, knowing a member of the RAID team or of the

National Guard, will make that call even before you get it through

official channels.

And very often we have our people on the road well in advance

of the first official requests for help. That is one of the values of

a RAID team or other National Guard assets because we work with

these first responders around the State every day. We go to conferences with them and train with them. They know each other on

a first name basis so there is not the same kind of delay that you

will get going after other resources.

General LAWLOR. Also, there is an assumption here that there is

a necessity to deploy the entire team to any given incident, and

that is not necessarily true. Oftentimes you will see those folks deploy in teams of five or six folks to do sampling or testing. So there

is some split-base operations capability. You would not necessarily

have to deploy the entire team to a given incident.

Obviously, depending on what the incident was, if this was a

massive release, probably you would want to deploy it in its entirety. If it were an investigatory kind of inquiry, we have something here, we don’t know what it is, we are concerned about it,

there would not be the need to deploy the entire team. There would

be the capability to go forward with a piece, perhaps a survey

team, to provide the information that the local authorities need.

Mr. SOUDER. General Shultz, you said something about

weaponized chemicals. That sounds more like a delivery system.

Anthrax, is that something that you are saying is a weaponized

chemical?

Mr. SHULTZ. Anthrax in and of itself is not so dangerous. It is

when you weaponize it and release it into the atmosphere when it

becomes the critical agent. Weaponizing in terms of an enemy, perhaps a terrorist, makes it more risky and it is not so easy to do.

But those that have the willpower, the financial wherewithal, that

is where the risk comes from, primarily.

Mr. SOUDER. Hopefully this would not occur, but certainly we are

looking at these kinds of potentials. How do you see this overlapping with our potential threats in school violence, which clearly we

59

are seeing the pipe bombs? We are not very far from that being the

No. 1 place where they are real threats right now in this country.

We have all kinds of threats coming from Mr. Blitzer but we are

not really seeing very many executions of those threats. The mass

violence right now seems to be in our schools. Has that been calculated in any of the RAID teams?

General SHULTZ. It has not been a discussion in any of our discussions.

Mr. SOUDER. Would you respond if there was a school incident

where there was a chemical that was—I mean, disbursed in a bomb

of some sort?

General FENIMORE. Our plan is to not try to make an assessment

first as to whether or not this is a WMD incident. We will respond

for any chemical incident, whether we know it is WMD or not because very often we would not know what it is.

Frequently the local responders will assume that it is a standard

HAZMAT when in fact a sophisticated analysis will indicate that

it is something far more than that.

So we will respond to every one of these, whether in a school or

a truck rolling off the highway with chemicals or a railcar. Whatever it is, we will respond and then make the determination later.

We are not worried about whether the railcar containing chlorine

was derailed because of an accident or willful act. We just respond,

period.

Mr. SOUDER. I want to put this on record because I haven’t heard

it discussed much because as we have worked with the anti-terrorism question in the last few years, clearly the initial was international terrorists and fear of strikes by bin Laden or agents thereabouts.

Then we seem to have the boost up of agents in this country worried about internal domestic terrorism, which for the most part has

not happened. We hope what we saw was a lot of spring fever and

copy cat alarms this past spring, but this may be in fact the fastest

growing category in the United States if we are not careful, and

guns may only be a small portion of this.

I hope that there is some consideration in the long-term planning

here because handling a bunch of kids and the response time needed, how they are going to be impacted by that may be substantially

different than if you have some sort of supernationalist in Montana

who is threatening some incident at a courthouse.

General FENIMORE. I agree with you, and I am sure as we get

further into that there will be some training in that regard. However, that is principally the concern of the first responders. Our

RAID teams have a very, very narrow focus, and that is to detect

what kind of agent it is that we are dealing with to help the first

responder and help the incident commander and to provide communication and other links with other responding organizations from

the State first and then if necessary from the Federal Government.

We are going to have to factor that in.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. As I am listening to this, I am thinking

we are talking about extraordinary possibilities. And Oklahoma

City, for me, I thought that was a possibility; but I thought if it

happened, it would be an external force outside the United States

60

that would come in. It is very difficult for me to contemplate an

American citizen would have sought to do what he did with others.

And so it just points out to me the real possibility of something

really horrific, the use of explosives, the use of chemical and biological agents, and even a nuclear weapon exploded in the United

States.

And so what we are talking about is absolutely an unbelievable

topic, and we pray that it won’t happen and we certainly pray that

it won’t happen sooner. We pray if it does happen we will be able

to deal with it.

We all want to do the right thing on this issue, and I would love

to—General Shultz, just have you or General Lawlor just respond

to—I still seem to be a little focused in on the so-called crack team

versus giving everyone a capability. It may be that we are moving

in both directions.

First off General Shultz, what you said, seemed a little bit in

contradiction to what Mr. Cragin had said. I think we need to

make sure that the record is clear as to the distinction. You said

that it is the goal to have the capability in all 50 States, and Mr.

Cragin said we haven’t made a determination that we are going to

have that in all 50 States. He said we have 10, and we are going

to go 5 more. Help me sort those out.

General SHULTZ. Congress has said we will create a capability in

each State and territory and the District. I am responding to congressional direction here. I happen to agree that we need some capacity in each State and territory to respond.

Mr. SHAYS. And the congressional one is more—is not a definitive

law that says we will have 50. It is the recognition that Members

of Congress are concerned about the ability to respond quickly. We

have encouraged the RAID light approach. And I guess Ms.

Embrey, your boss, Mr. Cragin, is basically saying the policy of the

Department is we have 10 now. We are going to move forward and

we have 5 more to go. We may go beyond that, but we have not

locked into 50.

Ms. EMBREY. The establishment of RAID lights were dictated in

law. The difference between a RAID light and a full up RAID is

the way that it is staffed. The Department plans to implement 15

of the full-time RAID teams. Consequently, we are planning to implement 39 RAID light teams, comprised of part-time staffs.

Mr. SHAYS. Right.

Ms. EMBREY. Congress this last year mandated that we establish

these RAID lights with part-time traditional National Guard members serving these teams.

Mr. SHAYS. Not active duty?

Ms. EMBREY. Right. For every State that does not have a RAID

full time.

Mr. SHAYS. General Shultz, I think you are giving—a generally

accepted view is that there is this movement in that direction and

we call it RAID light; but before this hearing, I would have said

that I think you need to have one in all 50 States. I bet most Members of Congress would say that, and I think your response is that

there seems to be a will of Congress, some expressed in law, RAID

light—and some expressed verbally to you and others that that is

the direction that we are likely to move in.

61

So you have the GAO report saying let’s take a deep breath here,

and let’s analyze this in terms of where we head, and I think it

is an important thing that GAO is doing.

And one of the points that they seem to make is that they have

a concern that the RAID teams will have a difficulty maintaining

their proficiency without having opportunities to practice under actual conditions.

Mr. SHAYS. And that’s why I kind of reacted to Mr. Cragin’s comment about, you know, the industrial experience versus one bioterrorist chemical. The value that the locals have is that they are an

actual crisis experience. So maybe General Lawlor, General

Schultz, or General Fenimore can respond to that.

General SHULTZ. We share GAO’s concern on the sustainment of

the skills that are obviously perishable over time. If I could just respond to your point about the crack teams, the 10 teams will be

crack soldiers and airmen, indeed. And they’re on duty all the time,

at least in small cells for response in the times we discussed earlier.

As it relates to how many teams do we need, we’re taking this

actually a step at a time. The OSD recommendation was that we

add five times and that’s what you’ll see in the budget recommendations. So it is actually kind of a crawl-walk kind of approach with at least some capacity in the States that don’t have

full-time teams.

Mr. SHAYS. And yet, though, we still haven’t seen how they will

operate.

General SHULTZ. That’s true. We’re just standing these teams up.

This is work in progress.

Mr. SHAYS. You want to comment, General Lawlor?

General LAWLOR. Yes, I would, if I may. I would respond with

three thoughts. The first is that specifically with regard to the

RAIDS as opposed to the RAID lights, but specifically as regard to

the RAIDs, these are folks who are going to be focussed 100 percent of the time on weapons of mass destruction. This is not going

to be an additional duty. In other words, in many cases——

Mr. SHAYS. I understand. You made your point.

General LAWLOR. So we have that focus. The second thing I

would offer is that the training on the equipment and the skills

needed are no more complex than those needed to fly an F–16 or

drive an M1 tank or operate a Paladin or an MLRS, which we do

all the time.

So I think—and those soldiers who do that so magnificently don’t

always, thank God, have to train under actual circumstances. So

I think that there is an argument to be made that the sustainment

of these can be certainly kept alive.

Third is that we are together with the National Guard focussing

very carefully on the continued training of these teams through exercises, through—through updates as the technology improves, as

the understanding improves. We have here, which we can make

available to the committee if it wishes, this is the doctrine that we

are beginning to compile as to how these teams actually operate.

A lot of work has gone into it with a lot of folks, and I would say

most of the folks that are shown up on this chart have contributed

to this document.

62

So we’re refining these techniques, so I think that we’re going to

find that these teams will serve as the spirit—the tip of the spear

in this whole arena in developing how we respond to these incidents effectively. Very important.

General FENIMORE. Much of what I say here, although brief, it

will be a mirror image of what General Lawlor is saying. I was

very surprised to read in the GAO report that they had concerns

that would be—we might have difficulty operating this complex

equipment. I have a lot of difficulty understanding that because we

operate B1 bombers and many of the other things that general

Lawlor described—and this is test equipment. And we have people

that not only operate some pretty sophisticated avionics and other

equipment, but they maintain it and I think they just missed on

that one.

In terms of maintaining proficiency—— Mr. SHAYS. And I think that’s important for this to state on the

record so I’m happy you’re making that point. You’re reinforcing a

point that’s already been made.

General FENIMORE. Maintaining proficiency as was mentioned— this is all we do and they’re going to be doing it all the time. It’s

not like HAZMAT teams, although well trained. In those 20,000

volunteer fire departments, they just don’t do that full time.

One of the advantages we give to the first responder community

is—and this is one of the reasons that the first responders in New

York State are looking forward to the arrival of these teams—is

that they will have the time in between responding to whatever incidents occur from time to time—and we have them almost daily

in New York State, although not sufficiently serious enough to call

them more than once a week, I would predict—but in between responding to those things, we will be working.

We have already planned to start working with first responders

all over the State to export to them DOD expertise in what are the

most current potential weapons that could be used. So we’re going

to be providing unlike the program to train 120 cities, we come and

we help you and we do good things and you learn a lot but these

fire departments have turnover every year.

These RAID teams will help provide sustainment training for

first responders around the State and although they do get first—

they get sustainment training to some extent in standard and industrialized chemicals, they aren’t getting it in weapon-specific

chemicals; and they’re not getting it in the bio arena and we will

provide that and that’s why they’re so anxious to see this.

In terms of retention, that was another concern expressed, sure.

In DOD and all of the public sector, we have difficulty retaining

highly trained, highly skilled technicians. They’re jumping over to

private industry but that’s true for all of us. I think we have one

advantage and that is that most of the people we’ve been able to

attract to these RAID teams, have left the private sector because

they’re so excited about being on the first line of defense.

Mr. SHAYS. That was clearly a point made in the GAO report

that needed to be responded to, and I thank you for responding to

it.

The question that I just very quickly—I don’t need a big response. I’m not familiar with retention of active duty Guards perVerDate 11-MAY-2000 09:05 Mar 08, 2001 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00066 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59837 pfrm08 PsN: 59837
63

sonnel. They’re paid the standard salary that you would receive in

the general Army, general Air Force?

General FENIMORE. Yes, sir.

Mr. SHAYS. Do they sign up as general Guard personnel with the

knowledge they’ll be active duty or do you transfer them from——

General FENIMORE. The people that we have hired, we have

hired into active duty jobs. Some of them have come off active duty

from the armed forces. Some were in the private sector and were

traditional Guardsmen or reservists, the weekend people; but they

did sign up for a full-time active duty job.

Mr. SHAYS. General Shultz, I was about to get into this whole

issue when I talked about special training. You’re making the point

that all 10 and the 22 within each 10 of these units will be highly

trained and qualified. All of you have made that point. But I make

an assumption that they’re augmented in part by true specialists

in particular parts of chemical biological or nuclear response. For

instance, I make an assumption that we have trained personnel

that can dearm a nuclear weapon.

General SHULTZ. Correct.

Mr. SHAYS. But they wouldn’t be given this kind of training, I

would think, in these RAID units. These would be truly specialized

personnel.

General SHULTZ. That’s correct.

Mr. SHAYS. Do they exist in all three branches of government,

the ability to—picture a scenario. This is totally makeup—I want

to say this again—but possible. There is a warning that the truck

that is illegally parked in Times Square, a small panel truck, has

a nuclear weapon in it; that it’s set to go off in 10 hours or something or 3 hours. Is this a response that one of the RAID teams

is going to jump into or who would respond to that kind of——

General LAWLOR. The RAID teams would not respond to that,

sir. There is no render-safe capability built into the RAID teams.

Mr. SHAYS. That means something you render safe——

General LAWLOR. Render safe would be deactivate the nuclear

weapon, disarm an explosive device.

Mr. SHAYS. It may be an explosive device that has a chemical in

it.

General LAWLOR. Whatever. They do not have render-safe capability.

Mr. SHAYS. But the RAID teams are responding to a disaster

that’s already occurred, not a disaster in progress.

General LAWLOR. That’s correct, sir. I say that’s correct, but it

could be a situation where people have discovered a substance that

they don’t know what it is and they want to find out, but if there

is an explosive device involved, they do not have that capability.

Mr. SHAYS. But it would strike me that the teams would be

called because whatever may happen, whatever the threat may actually happen and they’re on their way.

General LAWLOR. They would—they certainly would be called to

monitor in the event that the device exploded.

Mr. SHAYS. Let’s just say it’s a Soviet nuclear backpack, one that

some of us wonder if the Soviets could—if they have knowledge of

where all of them are. So one of them got in the hands of an AfVerDate 11-MAY-2000 09:05 Mar 08, 2001 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00067 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59837 pfrm08 PsN: 59837
64

ghan terrorist organization and the next thing we know it’s in New

York City. What happens under that circumstance?

General LAWLOR. Sir, I think the best way to answer that is

there are capabilities to respond, but I believe they’re classified.

Mr. SHAYS. I don’t want to know details but I would want—I

would think that we would—just tell me in this sense is it a military response or is it a State, local, or national response?

General LAWLOR. There’s a Federal response capability.

Mr. SHAYS. And then just tell me how the RAID teams would

interface with whatever national response team we have.

General LAWLOR. The RAID teams might not respond. It depends

on how the information flow occurs. In the event of that kind of an

incident, I’m assuming that the State emergency management authorities would be notified. If in fact General Fenimore was notified, then he would make the decision whether to deploy the RAID

teams in support of the Federal response.

Mr. SHAYS. I’ve had, obviously, briefings on this but in general

terms—it’s difficult to have a dialog about nuclear biological or

chemical without having some general ability to have dialog about

this. One of the things we’re talking about is the issue of the Federal Government injecting itself on a State or local level.

In the case of a very dangerous situation with a biological chemical or nuclear weapon, is it automatic that the Federal Government supersedes any activity in the State; and they can step in and

push away the police, push away—I mean, that’s—— General LAWLOR. I believe there is some statutory language, sir.

I would have to get the actual language, but I believe there is some

statutory language that provides what the responsibility is.

General FENIMORE. If I’m not mistaken, sir, even PDD 39 recognizes the fact that the State has jurisdiction. The Federal responders come in at the State’s request. We’re talking here about consequence management. Specifically in the case you’re talking about

where there’s a suspected nuclear device somewhere in the State

of New York. Although we have pretty good capability to deal with

the consequences of a nuclear mishap, because we have nuclear

power plants in the State and we routinely exercise for these kind

of scenarios, we have no capability to disarm a nuclear device.

So if we thought we might have one in that panel truck in Times

Square, we would then invite the Federal Government to please respond as quickly as they could with people who could assess what

it was in that truck and deal with it.

Mr. SHAYS. As someone who lives 30 miles away as the crow

flies—or now 50 miles away, as a crow flies from New York City,

I could care less that New York City or New York State has a

sense of jurisdiction. I would want to know whoever is most capable would be able to step in without any jurisdictional battle.

General FENIMORE. We would agree with you, sir. That’s why we

would call in whoever the most expert people are that can respond.

In the case of a nuclear situation, we flat out don’t have that expertise. We have no choice but to call in the Federal Government. We

would do that immediately.

For HAZMAT situations obviously where we do have capability,

we would look at those resources first but certainly would not hesitate to be notifying the Federal responders to get ready to come.

65

General LAWLOR. Mr. Chairman, I think I can answer your question, if I may.

Mr. SHAYS. Sure.

General LAWLOR. In the event of a crisis, the FBI has lead Federal agency jurisdiction. It would step in and then it would call

upon assistance to include assistance from the DOD to render the

device safe. That is very clear.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

That clearly isn’t top secret. Just a comfort level for all of us, including me.

General SHULTZ. Specifically in terms of a lead Federal agency,

Department of Energy actually has the nuke weapons response

mission. DOD is not the best answer, but that’s how it’s stated in

the plans today.

Mr. SHAYS. If a terrorist organization got into Millstone 1, 2, and

3 in Connecticut and gained control of it, that becomes a response

of the Federal, State, or local government?

General LAWLOR. It’s the same response, sir. The FBI has lead

Federal agency jurisdiction in crisis, and they will call upon other

Federal agencies as needed to assist them.

Mr. SHAYS. Do you have any questions you want to ask?

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. I just have one question. This is for General

Lawlor. An important element to the success of the RAID team is

the ability to coordinate and perform with the civilian emergency

responders. What training and exercises are planned to build confidence and experience between the civilian emergency responders

and the managers of the RAID team personnel?

General LAWLOR. There are numerous exercises that are being—

let me back up and start out by saying the—I’m sorry. The initial

operating capability of the RAID teams is January 2000. That’s

when we believe they’ll be certified by the Secretary of Defense and

ready to meet their missions.

There are a number of exercises to include the Domestic Preparedness City Training Program, whereby RAID teams have already been requested to participate; but we have deliberately asked

them not to until their training is farther along so that they can

make a reasonable contribution.

So I expect that in addition to cities that are undergoing domestic preparedness, that you will have annual training; for example,

there is mandated training every year for a chemical exercise and

a biological exercise. One this year is happening in September in

New York City. The RAID teams will be—they will be somewhat

observers in that particular exercise. At this point they’re observers

as opposed to participants because they haven’t been certified.

And there are exercises that will be planned throughout the year

as DOD continues its consequence management efforts. In addition

to that, the State authorities have their exercises that they participate in. I can’t give you specifics in terms of the dates except for

the one in New York City. That’s the one I’m most familiar with

right now.

General SHULTZ. If I could respond just to a couple of examples.

It’s our intent to have RAID teams conduct sustainment training

every quarter. Two of those quarterly exercises must be outside of

66

their own State that they’re currently assigned so they’ll move to

another jurisdiction and train for events.

On an annual basis, we will also train and exercise with the

FEMA leadership and their response cell, so we’re looking at both

a quarterly and an annual kind of refresher exposing ourselves to

the scenarios and exercises that we may well be called to respond

to.

General FENIMORE. In our State, the National Guard has already

worked up memorandums of understanding with the two main responders. We would be working with the Office of Fire Prevention

and Control and the State police. We will be developing exercises

before the year is out so that once these teams are operational in

January, we will begin a series of exercises and we will continue

these for the foreseeable future so that we’re accustomed to working with the local responder. We’ll be helping to train them.

We’ll actually be learning some things from them in this process,

but it will be part of an integrated package that will be exercised

routinely all over the State and we’ve already planned to do that,

and some of those plans are already well along to being complete.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Ms. Embrey.

Ms. EMBREY. Earlier you asked about the conduit between the

local, State, and Federal responders, and I think the RAID teams,

as we envision them, represent that very conduit. The program

that we have for training focuses on working with the local responders on at least a quarterly basis—well, much more often than

that—and working with other States’ responders on a quarterly

basis.

It also involves us working with the other Federal assets at least

twice a year in every FEMA region and how they might respond.

So it really is trying to get all the players together to work together

and anticipate how each will play what role to respond to an unthinkable incident.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. We’re going to get you out of here in 5 minutes.

When I view this—and tell me if I should think of it differently—

first I see dealing with a chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorist

attack. You have prevention; you have detection. You want to get

into their cells. You want to stop it before it starts. You want to

have a deterrence that this won’t happen.

You then—you get into the whole issue of crisis management and

consequence management, and we’re really in the issue of consequence management pretty much. And in crisis management—

and one, we’re trying to protect as many people as we can and then

we’re also trying to determine the extent of the damage.

We’re trying to determine also who did it. You’re going to have

the FBI step in here and say, OK, let’s find the individuals involved. You’re going to have specialists who are able to come in

who are going to augment obviously the State and local response

and our RAID teams, and we’re determining whether we want

more RAID teams, whether they should be full time, and this is

one of the decisions Congress has to make. And we don’t yet have

in operation these RAID teams.

How are you able to determine without an actual event their capability? This clearly happens to the military all the time. In other

67

words, we don’t always have wars and we don’t always have fighting but this is probably the—you are the best people to answer that

question.

General LAWLOR. I can address immediately the two capabilities

that the RAID teams have, the analytical capability and the communications capability. We’re in the process, as I indicated, of constructing the architecture that will enable us to test the communications capability. And we are planning a demonstration specifically designed around a scenario where it will require us to link

communities, multiple communities to the RAID communication

suite and through that communication suite back to the expertise

and reachback capabilities that we have in the Federal Government.

So the ability to test and demonstrate the communication system

is clearly there through exercises. The second capability that we’re

looking at is the analytical capability and that is strictly—that is

strictly an issue of taking the equipment to our testing facilities,

testing it on live agents, and it works or it doesn’t.

So we think we have the capability to demonstrate clearly that

what we are trying to provide with the RAID teams will work, and

that’s why we have such a degree of confidence in their value to

the communities because we don’t believe these capabilities exist

out there today.

Mr. SHAYS. General.

General SHULTZ. If I could also respond to that question. What

we want to do in terms of training realistically is use the combat

training center logic that we have in the Army at Fort Irwin, CA;

Fort Polk, LA. We take the Army to war without going there. We

meet the best opposing force in the world at those two training centers; and what we want to do in training and certifying the skills

of our response teams is create through a series of scenarios a very

demanding training environment, and that’s how, I believe, we

would begin to answer your interest in this question, how good can

we really be.

Mr. SHAYS. What difference, if any, exists between the RAID

teams and the FBI HAZMAT response units? Obviously there are

some differences; but, one, we decided to do the RAID teams which

are Federal—excuse me, State National Guard and HAZMAT

teams we mentioned close to 600 of them which means you’re coming in locally and training people on how to deal with HAZMAT

materials and so on.

I guess the question I’m asking, they are slightly different models. How do we integrate the two of them? Maybe that’s not the

question. I don’t think I asked the question—I look at confused

looks and I think I deserve—the question I’m really asking is we

decided to step forward—my understanding is that these are local

responders. Correct?

We have both local and Federal because the FBI has theirs as

well. But the Federal Government is providing grants—this is really the question. The Federal Government is providing money to

give expertise to the local level. We decided to give this expertise

in a sense to the National Guard. It’s a slightly different model and

I guess I’m asking the question why. I think that’s—it’s really an

important question for me to have a response to. Why did we deVerDate 11-MAY-2000 09:05 Mar 08, 2001 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00071 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59837 pfrm08 PsN: 59837
68

cide to go this route rather than just make sure that all local communities had the expertise that the RAID teams have?

General FENIMORE. Well, the—from our perspective, it’s good

that there are going to be grants to give them the expertise, but

what they will not have is that analytical capability that we cannot

afford to put with each one of these HAZMAT teams. The cost

would be astronomical. This is a more cost-effective way. You’re

getting a 95 percent solution for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Mr. SHAYS. I think the answer really—this is the question you

could have answered earlier because in a sense you’ve answered it;

but I would just like it in response to this question. I make an assumption, General Lawlor, that your point, the communication and

the analytical ability is better addressed—that can’t be—well,

you’ve answered the question, General, and you’re reinforcing it.

General LAWLOR. It could be addressed if the Congress was willing to spend the funds it would take to put that capability in every

community or every—even every HAZMAT team. It could be done.

It’s clearly a question of cost.

Mr. SHAYS. The tradeoff, it seems to me, is the events when they

occur will be horrific, but they will be infrequent but they will or

may occur.

General LAWLOR. The other issue I would raise for you, sir, is

that—and I haven’t done the analysis, but it should be done if

that’s the way that you choose to go—is I’m not sure what the coverage would be of those 660 HAZMAT teams. I don’t know if you

get the same coverage because they clearly have jurisdictional

issues attached to them that do not apply to the RAID teams.

We can take a RAID team, and we can move it anywhere within

the State. We can easily through cooperation move it anywhere

within the FEMA region. We can federalize it, move it anywhere

within the country. I’m not sure you can do that with a local

HAZMAT team from a local jurisdiction.

Mr. SHAYS. Fair enough. Ms. Embrey, do you want to make a response? My 5 minutes stretched to 10. Then we’ll be done.

Ms. EMBREY. Initially, I thought you were talking about the Federal FBI’s HAZMAT or HMRT.

Mr. SHAYS. That’s why my staff looked so concerned. They didn’t

know what I was talking about.

Ms. EMBREY. If you’re talking about the FBI’s assets, I think the

focus of their capability is to identify and detect for forensic purposes, for the crime scene, for evidence. I think that’s a very important capability that they have to have. But I think that the RAID

teams have a broader, more specific focus on weaponized chemicals

and biologics and that’s why they compliment each other. They

don’t conflict or duplicate.

Mr. SHAYS. You were reluctant to participate, and you have

made wonderful contributions. So I’m happy you did. I’m happy all

of you did. Any last word any of you would like to make before we

hit the gavel?

General LAWLOR. Sir, I’m sorry. At the risk of prolonging this, I

just want to make one point because we’ve talked about the time

of response. And that seems to be an important issue. I would invite the committee to look at the locations of the RAID teams in

the existing States, and you will find that in seven of the cases, I

69

think, they are virtually on top of the major population area in that

particular State.

So the local and the gubernatorial input has been to locate them

in the area of the greatest population concentration. In a couple of

areas where they have not, sir, I think it’s because—and I can’t

speak for them, but I know in the case of New York is that New

York City has a very robust capability and were they to locate it—

colocate it in New York City, it really would be duplicative. However, that’s my closing comment. I appreciate your patience.

Mr. SHAYS. I appreciate your making that comment. Any other

comments before we conclude? It’s important for you to make sure

we put things in the record that you would have liked us to ask

or want to emphasize.

General FENIMORE. Nothing specific, but just from the State’s

standpoint thank you all for having this level of interest on a subject that’s very, very important to us. We really believe this is a

serious threat. We know that today we do not have sufficient capability to deal with it. And we’ve been living on borrowed time.

We’ve been very fortunate, and we need to have a sense of urgency

about this and we thank you for your interest.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. General.

General SHULTZ. Thank you for your interest, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. We’re very interested. I’ll just use that—we’ll use

that as an excuse to say to you that this committee has by—the

subcommittee has been given the jurisdiction of all terrorist activities, whether they’re domestic or foreign, and we have capability to

draw on any department of government to look at this issue.

So we really do have the ability to have a kind of a comprehensive view of it, and we consider it our first and primary charge and

we’re really kind of just getting our feet wet as well; and we just

intend to develop that expertise and make a contribution. Thank

you for helping us.

Ms. EMBREY. I’d like to correct something for the record. The

GAO chart here shows the RAID teams as just Army National

Guard and yet they are mixed with Air National Guard personnel

as well.

Mr. SHAYS. But it is Army ultimately that has the primary responsibility. Correct?

Ms. EMBREY. The Department of Army is the Secretary of Defense’s executive agent for domestic response operations and support; so, therefore, the Army ultimately helps marshal the appropriate resources.

Mr. SHAYS. Do you have an Air Force background here?

Ms. EMBREY. I just wanted to make sure you knew there was Air

Guard personnel there.

Mr. SHAYS. Note for the record no answer to the question. With

that we adjourn this hearing.

[Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

Æ