Subscribe to the DPJ Weekly Brief newsletter:
Subscribe
Updates
Washington, DCTactical Interoperable Communications ConferenceMay 8, 2006
Secretary Chertoff: Well, thank you, Tracy, and thanks to all of you for a warm welcome and also for coming to join us here as we talk about probably one of the most elements of preparedness, which is the issue of critical communication and how we strengthen that communication among our first responders.
I also want to thank Tracy's team at the Office of Grants and Training for coordinating this conference and bringing everybody together from all over the country.
There's no doubt that achieving interoperable communications for those on the front lines of dealing with terrorism or natural disasters is critical to enhancing our country's preparedness and response capabilities. And the fact of the matter is, although the issue of interoperability is one that was well known and discussed in the law enforcement and emergency management communities for some time, September 11th, I think vividly raised it to the public consciousness.
We all recall the loss of hundreds of brave first responders in the Twin Towers on September 11th, and the communications challenges that they faced spurred a great deal of awareness and interest on the issue of interoperability on the part of both the public and Congress.
And of course, communications was an issue last year during Hurricane Katrina, although it wasn't an issue of interoperability, it was an issue of operability, because obviously if the stuff doesn't work in the first place, there's no point in talking about whether it's going to work together.
But the fact of the matter is, whether it's operability or interoperability, one thing that Katrina, 9/11 and in fact every emergency that occurs every day across this country vividly demonstrates, is that the critical foundation for an effective response is the ability to talk to one another. And that's particularly true in our country where we are often dealing with first responders who come from multiple different jurisdictions, even within a single jurisdiction, who have much different chains of command, and then of course, also have to integrate with state and federal officials.
The fact of the matter is, we cannot effectively manage an incident if we do not and if we cannot talk to one another. And it is still the case that too many emergency responders are not able to talk to parts of their own organization or to companion organizations, let alone communicate with agencies in neighboring cities, counties or states during a crisis.
And this problem is particularly acute in large incidents when we are trying to bring together not only respondents from various local jurisdictions, but also those from the state and federal level as well.
So how do we all work together to solve this problem, to develop true interoperability? Well, let me begin by saying something that you all know. This is a very difficult challenge. If it was easy, frankly, it's something we would have done within six months after September 11th.
And the reason it hasn't been completed in that period of time is not because anybody lacks a sense of the urgency of the task, or not because people didn't want to look to see if there was a simple, magic bullet solution, but simply because it is a task that is very formidable, and requires not only a technological element, but also an element of governance, an element of how we deal with each other in terms of very different organizations and very different chains of command.
I will also tell you that the issue of interoperability is one that I probably hear about as much as any issue when I go before Congress or when I speak to the media, because everybody does remember that
September 11 Commission report that talked about the lack of interoperability as a critical deficiency.
So let me talk about, very candidly about where we are right now. Because I'm going to tell you right now, we are better than the public thinks. We are better than the press thinks, but we are not where we should be.
And let me first of all clear up a very common misconception about what the barrier to interoperability is. I think most people think there's some kind of technological problem, that we just need to invent or buy something and that's going to cure the problem. That somehow the issue has been that we've been unwilling or unable to do that.
But I'm going to tell you that the biggest barrier to interoperability is not technology. Here is a simple fact. The equipment and technology that is required to be interoperable at this very moment exists today. I have seen it. Most of you have seen it. Anybody who says we don't have the technological ability to be interoperable at this very moment is simply wrong. And we can actually bring in the stuff and show you. You can plug into it. You can speak across jurisdictional lines. Firefighters can talk to law enforcement people. People from communities can talk to one another.
So I have to say from the very beginning that those who say we've made no progress from the lack of interoperability in September 11th are just wrong, because this equipment and this technology is here, and it does reflect a substantial amount of progress.
But the second point, which I think people aren't aware of is, that the challenge we have is not a technological challenge. It has to do with, rather, human beings. It has to do with how do we get people to be able to use this equipment in a way that makes interoperability not just a theoretical possibility, or a technological possibility, but an actual, workable, day-to-day solution.
And this question of how do we get human beings to be able to use interoperability, to be able to use this technology, is a matter of developing real standard operating procedures, proper governance, agreements in training, all of which will define how this equipment that we now have can actually be used and shared in the real world. And that's what the purpose of today's conference is; to cut through some of the clutter and get this job done once and for all. And I want to see us get a lot of this done this year, in 2006.
Therefore, I want to commend you and I want to thank you for all taking the time to be here, to come to us with your thoughts andeas, to help us work through what I think is the final stage of moving to true interoperability. We have been listening to you. We will continue to listen to you, and your input will be an important part of the final stages of getting to a solution on this issue.
Now let me talk a little bit about the ground we've already covered. We have deployed this technology I've talked about, this interoperable technology, at the command level through a program we call SAFECOM, which was first established after September 11th, to tackle the range of safety communications challenges.
And through an element of this program which we call RapidCom, incident managers in ten of the country's highest threat urban areas now actually can communicate with each other and their respective command centers using the basic equipment, which as I've told you, can be deployed at this very minute anywhere in the country.
So we've now expanded this RapidCom concept with our tactical interoperable communications plans, which are basically communications plans that would allow the 75 largest urban and multi-jurisdictional metropolitan areas to use this equipment to develop true interoperability.
Now I'm not going to oversell this. This is not a perfect solution, even the current technology. But it is workable and it can be used and deployed today. At this very moment, we can plug in a host of separate systems, and I've witnessed this with my own eyes, and I made a point of doing that last week before I came here, because I wanted to be able to tell you that I've actually seen the stuff work and I've actually talked on it. At this moment, we can plug these separate systems together so that first responders can, from a technological standpoint, talk to one another.
So what is the challenge this leaves? Well, the problems associated with the lack of coordination in the public safety community stem throughout all of our jurisdictional boundaries. They include issues like turf fighting over the management and control of radio systems. They include lack of a shared and agreed-upon priority for achieving interoperability, and they also involve limited sharing of interoperability solutions.
What these various turf issues mean, or these lack of priority issues mean, is that first responders, even if they're given the tools, don't have the ability to use those tools to share vital information, and therefore, lives and property are put at risk.
So we have to work together with you toward sharing wireless communication systems in a way that allow us to span the different organizations and the different jurisdictional lines. That means we have to agree to undertake extensive coordination with an ongoing commitment and involvement and support at the highest levels of law enforcement and emergency management.
The first piece we need to have to make this work is training. This equipment I've talked about, it's good, but it's not perfect, and it's not as easy to work as your remote control at home with your VCR programmer. The fact of the matter is, the people, the responders who are going to have use this equipment, need the technical training to understand how to use it. And that means we have to devote the time and the energy to making sure they get that training.
There's also the issue of what we call governance. And to translate that into plain English out of bureaucratese, governance is a fancy word that means leadership has to be committed to the issue; meaning all the various leaders of the different organizations and jurisdictions have to be willing to put in the time to sit down and get together and work out certain arrangements about how you actually work this equipment in the real world. And without that commitment of leadership, no amount of equipment is going to solve this problem.
That means we've got to put to one side particularistic interest that relates to our own organizations, and we have to look at this from the standpoint of how do we benefit the customer? In this case, those are the people that we're trying to save, the citizens of our major cities.
And in particular, decisions have to be made with everybody coming to agreement to make sure that we know what the equipment is, we are going to have common training and exercising, the operators will agree upon the common language they speak, and that's of course related to the issue of the fact that some organizations use certain types of codes to describe certain incidents, and others do not.
And that means when we come together and talk, the equipment doesn't solve the problem if one organization is using 10-4 as a code and another organization is using 10-9 as a code to mean the same thing. So we're going to have to agree that when we talk to one another, there's a common language we're going to use in order to communicate.
We also have to agree upon common authorities and common standards in terms of who gets to talk to whom. Because after all, when you have command incident communication, it's not a debating society. It's an opportunity to have those with authority to manage the incident, talk to each other, and coordinate with each other.
So the questions we have to ask ourselves, and we ask to ask our leadership at the federal, state and local level is, what are the leaders themselves doing to promote interoperability as a culture? Do the various leaders in a particular metropolitan area or region have a willingness to sit down at the table and agree upon the best path forward with respect to training, language and set of authorities?
All of these issues have to be resolved if we're going to get this job of interoperability done. And it can be done this year. Now, we've already begun to test how we can successfully implement interoperable communications as a system, meaning technology, plus these issues of governance, training, exercising and actual agreement.
Through the Office of Grants and Training, in collaboration with SAFECOM, the Interoperable Communications Technical Assistance Program has provided onsite assistance to more than 75 states, urban areas and metropolitan areas. And this assistance has in fact improved the interoperable communications capabilities of these areas. It's been the primary driver in the tactical interoperable communications plan development process.
So, in addition to RapidCom in those ten major cities I talked about, we've published a statewide communications interoperability planning methodology to guide states in creating their own plans. What this means again in plain English is, we've given you a template or a recipe to use to devise plans. You have to tailor the plans, obviously, to your own local needs and your own state practices and policies, but this kind of gives you a sense of the types of things you have to be able to cover to get this interoperability system into effect.
We've also implemented two pilot programs, what we call the Regional Communications Interoperability Pilots in Nevada and Kentucky, so that we can actually test this template and make improvements to see how it works in the real world.
Now, what about money? Because obviously we've talked about the technology, we've talked about the training and the governance, but you also have to have money in order to get the equipment. Well, I'm pleased to say that since 2003, that's in a little less than three years, the Department of Homeland Security has allocated over $2.1 billion to states for interoperable communications; equipment, planning, training and exercises.
And later today, we're going to publish a report that summarizes the money that's gone to each state and how that money has been used.
You know, part of the approach we're trying to take in the Department these days is greater transparency. And part of this transparency is showing the public and showing Congress exactly what we're doing with the money so that they can track what our input is, and they can also match that, frankly, against our output.
The information contained in the report we're going to be putting out later today was actually submitted by the states themselves, and I think you're going to be able to see for yourself, it shows a wide range of investments of this over $2 billion by the states. Some states have focused on regional initiatives. Others have been more focused on locally based initiatives.
One thing this report will make clear is the effort we have put into interoperability and what we've achieved since September 11th.
Now let's talk a little bit more specifically about what we are hoping to achieve bringing you here today. Part of this transparency is not only what our input is, but what our output is. What are we actually producing for the resources we're putting into something. And so we've asked the 75 urban areas and metropolitan areas to submit a tactical interoperable communications plan.
We've got the plans, and now we're going to begin testing and evaluating them through full scale exercises and real world events. Because, you know, the plan on papers is only as good as it works in real life. And that's why we are going to push the issue of testing ourselves to make sure that the plan really works. And if it doesn't work, it's going to tell us what we have to fix.
These events, this testing and exercising, is not an end to the preparedness cycle, but it's rather a va