An interview with Victor E. Renuart, Jr

Joint Force Quarterly, Jan, 2008 by David H. Gurney, Jeffrey D. Smotherman

JFQ: A recent RAND Corporation study called for carving out 9,000 Army National Guard Soldiers to form 10 homeland security task forces, including training and equipping, ahead of the next major natural disaster or domestic terrorist attack. Although multiple command and control structures complicated the military response to Hurricane Katrina, how differently are we structured now to meet the next crisis?

General Renuart: Using last year's hurricane season as a good example, the Secretary of Defense signed an execute order, which authorizes me to have a force available so that we could respond leading up to, and response to, a hurricane that might occur along--I started to say the gulf, but really any the states that are affected. That, interestingly, gives me about 8,200 troops and a variety capabilities that I can have divided into what we call three tiers, some that would do preliminary work with an affected state, some that would do an immediate assessment process after landfall, and then a group of forces to help in recovery. I can use that force anywhere the country; it's available today. Forces are identified, but they are not sitting in their barracks waiting for me to call. As we see a storm begin to develop, I increase their readiness, their alert posture, such that should they be required--and we exercised a portion of these during the preparation for Hurricane Dean in Texas--I can move them into place.

Different from the RAND study, I believe this gives maximum flexibility. The RAND study, unfortunately, was not aware of or informed by some of the processes we had already put in place at NORTHCOM [U.S. Northern Command] since Katrina; it was also not informed by some of the relationships that we've built with the National Guard in the states and the National Guard Bureau since Katrina. And to a degree, the study did not acknowledge what has become one of NORTHCOM's principal roles: to study the gaps between what a state and the National Guard Bureau, through its emergency management compacts, can provide in the event of a disaster, and where the Federal Government, in terms of the military, may be asked to provide support.

We've done a lot of that work now in our 10 FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] regions, and we have defense coordinating officers assigned to each. They work closely with the FEMA region director as well as with us and the Department of Homeland Security, and we've built a pretty good matrix of what's there and what's needed. Our role, as we see a potential natural disaster coming, is to anticipate the places we think landfall might occur and to identify the gaps in that state or those states and then begin to posture support.

A bit of a long answer to a short question, but we proved that--during the preparations for Hurricane Dean, for example, which fortunately went to the south--we had teams in place in Texas well before landfall to begin to evacuate critical care patients, should that have been required. So that capability was already there on the ground before the potential for landfall. It's that kind of interaction and collaboration with the Federal agencies as well as understanding and having a relationship with the states that has brought us a long way and eliminated the need for the kind of capability that the RAND study called for.

JFQ: There are Civil Support Teams [CSTs] in almost every state and territory, and their specific mission is to quickly respond to a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] event, assess the situation, and request follow-on assets. Seventeen chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive enhanced response force packages [CERFPs] were to be certified by the end of 2007. Could you address your ability to respond to multiple near-simultaneous attacks on U.S. soil involving weapons of mass destruction?

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General Renuart: First, the CSTs do provide that quick look, first response, sort of "how big is the boom" assessment. They do have a limited ability to do some analytical work and certainly to help in consequence management to a degree, but mostly in the category of defining the size of the problem. The 17 CERFPs provide a more robust capability to come in and begin to assist the state in the consequence management portion of that. And for many events, that may be enough. If it is a chemical spill or an explosion at a chemical production facility that is relatively limited, those capabilities can and should be sufficient. In the event that we have a catastrophic event, or in the event that we have multiple events, albeit each of them may be slightly smaller, we need to have a capability to move a fairly robust response force into place that can certainly assist in the consequence management piece, can assist in the medical response, can assist with some engineering capability to help mitigate the site, and begin to isolate it from the general population as best you can.

Today, we have notionally filled one of these forces. We call it the CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMERF. We have notional sourcing to fill one of those. We do not have sourcing to fill the other two forces that we've been tasked to build, and as a result, multiple, near-simultaneous attacks today would be a challenge; we don't have the size of force necessary. The Department of Defense has made a commitment to build those, and so we hope that through fiscal 2008, we'll begin to see the funding and the identification of forces so we can do that. The key to this is that these forces cannot be on a 2-week recall. They have to be accessible because if the event occurs today, the American public will expect a response tomorrow. And so, these are forces that have unique skills, they have to be trained, they have to be mobile enough so that we can get them to the site, and they have to be ready enough to move on a relatively short notice so that they can come in to fill the void that will come from CST to CERFP to something larger. I think we're on a good track to have all the forces certified by the January 1 time period.