Q & A with Rear Adm. Kendall L. Card Director, Command Control Systems NORAD-USNORTHCOM J6

CHIPS, Jan-March, 2008

Our interagency coordination group also works with the commercial sector to provide additional assistance. We can work with churches and nongovernmental organizations that are able to respond to these crises, but it takes a lot of time and effort to coordinate.

Before Katrina, we didn't have all the telephone numbers and know all the people. Now people are trained in all these areas so that everybody knows where all the emergency operations centers are; there are coordinating groups in all the emergency operations centers. It's not perfect. It's not all automatic through portals like I would like it to be, but it is light-years ahead of where we were.

CHIPS: Do you think there should be a federal mandate on data tagging? I have heard military leadership say that one of the problems with communications between agencies is that local first responders use different terms than DoD would use, which causes confusion in information sharing.

Rear Adm. Card: I don't know how that would translate to the state level, but from the federal level, having standard databases; standard ways of tagging data; and standard ways of registering and authorizing users across a net-centric system would make our communications efforts much more efficient and effective.

Once the federal standards are set, if there is a way that folks in local municipalities could be incentivized through dollars or other means to go to those standardized databases and systems, it would make a tremendous difference.

But we still would have to worry about how that would be implemented at the state and local level since those are the folks that we support, and those are the folks that are the true heroes.

We are trying to make sure that they get every piece of equipment that they need and are Johnny-on-the-spot when they need it. That is the most important piece of the link.

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CHIPS: Is that what you referred to when you talked about a centrally managed and funded system of systems that is survivable?

Rear Adm. Card: There are some natural points where we are going to need to bridge large systems together. When I talked about a centrally managed and funded system, I think DoD is as large as we are going to be for a centrally managed and funded system. Our mission partners for defense support of civil authorities are mostly on the Internet. It would be difficult to centrally manage and fund that network.

For DoD services, we can link up DoD services to the Internet from a centrally managed and funded facility. The Internet is global and that is where our DSCA mission partners are. The Internet is essential to reach to those nongovernmental organizations, state and local as well.

In terms of SIPRNET and NIPRNET, which are DoD-centric systems, it makes sense to centrally manage and fund those to conduct business on a day-to-day basis and focus on interoperability with all of my mission partners.

CHIPS: Sometimes it seems as if DoD and DHS jump from good idea to good idea without following through.