EM Forum Presentation — January 11, 2012
Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8)
and the National Preparedness System
Donald M. Lumpkins, Esq.
Executive Director, PPD-8 Program Executive Office
Branch Chief, National Planning Coordination and Assistance
National Preparedness Directorate, FEMA/DHS
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
This transcript contains references to slides which can be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/FEMA/PPD-8.pdf
A video recording of the live session is available at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm120111.wmv
An audio podcast is available at http://www.emforum.org/pub/eiip/lm120111.mp3
[Welcome / Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone and welcome to EMForum.org for our first program for 2012. Happy New Year to all of you. We are looking forward to an exciting year. I am Amy Sebring and will serve as your Moderator today. We are very glad you could join us.
Our topic today is Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8) on National Preparedness which was issued during March of last year. Since that time a number of supporting documents have been issued, including the National Preparedness Goal in September, the National Preparedness System description in November, and most recently, the Strategic National Risk Assessment in December. All these documents, which our guest will discuss, and more are related from today’s Background Page.
[Slide 1]
Now it is my pleasure to introduce today’s guest: Donald "Doc" Lumpkins was responsible for establishing the PPD-8 Program Executive Office this year, and now serves as its Executive Director. He also serves as Branch Chief for National Planning Coordination and Assistance, National Preparedness Directorate (NPD), FEMA. Prior to joining the Federal government, Doc served as Assistant Director for Domestic Preparedness at the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. Please see today’s Background Page for additional biographical information and links to related documents and Websites.
Welcome back Doc, and thank you very much for joining us today. I now turn the floor over to you to start us off please.
[Presentation]
Donald Lumpkins: Thank you. Thanks, everyone on the call, for your time today. We’ll take a few minutes to give you an overview on Presidential Policy Directive 8, where we stand, and some existing opportunities to participate in the process. Then, we’ll open it up for questions. My goal is to split time between the presentation and the questions. Please be well-armed as we get into this.
[Slide 2]
We like to start with the bottom line up front for this briefing. We have been working with a lot of folks. We can always do better, but we have been working with a lot of folks to coordinate the implementation of this directive. That is the function of my office.
We don’t control the pen on every single product—on some we do, and we’ll talk to some of those. Our job is to ensure that everyone that wants to has an opportunity to engage in the process in some way, shape or form based on resources, their ability and what the law will allow us to do.
We continue to work on this and expand. We have ongoing engagement beyond the federal government to provide that participation in development and feedback to this effort. The first deliverable goal for the directive was the National Preparedness Goal. That was due by September 25. It has been provided to the President, accepted by the President, and is now public on the FEMA website.
The National Preparedness System—we provided a description of it in accordance with the timeline before Thanksgiving that has also been accepted by the President and has been posted. We are now working on both the Frameworks and the first post PPD-8 Preparedness Report. We will begin wrap-up here shortly on the operational plans and the campaign. We will talk through details of each of these.
[Slide 3]
First things first, a number of you who have heard me speak before or who have been to the website (FEMA.gov/ppd8) are familiar with this information. PPD-8 does build on the successes and lessons learned from Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8.
This directive looks to link together a number of activities: the ends we want to achieve which is the goal; the means to achieve it, the tools and processes available to us or the system; how we actually prepare and deliver those capabilities using the frameworks and the operational plans to convey that; how we report our progress through the preparedness report; and ultimately how we as a nation come together through a sustained effort to build and sustain preparedness through the campaign.
[Slide 4]
A couple of key principles in all of this—we must include everybody. The risks we talk about when we talk about PPD-8 are those greatest risks to our nation. Therefore no single level of government, not government by itself, can build the capacity necessary to have the capabilities needed to deal with these greatest risks.
Everybody has a role, whether that is individuals, communities, private sector, non-profits—it doesn’t matter. Everyone has a role. At a very basic level, the role in prevention—"See something, say something"—the current campaign that is going on right now is an example of an individual’s role in preventing a terrorist attack.
Whatever we do, we must use risk as a foundation. That seems obvious, but oftentimes we are driven to make policy decisions. Whenever practical, we want those decisions to be made based on risk, not fear—made on risk and not a lack of information. Through an effective risk methodology to a shared understanding of risk, we know what capabilities to build and to what level.
There is a set of Core Capabilities that will help us to confront any challenge. Our efforts must be integrated across all the things we do—whether preventing a terrorist incident, responding to a natural disaster, or mitigating future threats in that it is expected that we can measure our progress and our performance—so how do each of these play out?
[Slide 5]
The National Preparedness Goal—right off the bat, if you look at the goal, it is informed by risk. We conducted a Strategic National Risk Assessment in order to drive that effort. Through that document, we identified a set of capabilities that we will talk about in a second that help us reduce or manage that risk.
Those capabilities are marked change from the Target Capabilities List, but what we have found is that all the prior work easily connects into this new rubric. We will explain the change in capabilities when we look at the list—the focus being that all of these pieces are integrated, layered and are working together to achieve our objectives.
[Slide 6]
What is our goal? This is the one slide I will read to you. It is "A secure and resilient Nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk." That we as a nation are working together to build and sustain and deliver the capabilities we need to deal with those risks.
That is a significant shift from what has previously been considered a very government-centric focus. Now every single one of us, all 300,000,000 plus, have a stake in the nation’s preparedness.
[Slide 7]
The elements of the goal are on this slide. You can read the content and there is greater detail on the website. One of the big things I would note in the goal, besides this emphasis on engaging the whole community, is that we want to begin to establish as a nation a target or the level of capability needed to deal with these greatest risks—not an easy thing to do.
In the first edition, you’ll see that we identified targets that we hope to refine and expand on as we go to the next version of the goal.
[Slide 8]
The other thing I would talk to are the capabilities identified in the goal. On the slide in front of you now, you’ll see a list of capabilities. There are more than 31 boxes, but I am here to tell you there are 31 distinct capabilities. Some of them repeat across these five areas.
Three of them in particular were identified as being so important that if we could not do those effectively it would negatively affect our ability to deliver the other 28 capabilities. Those are planning, public information and warning, and operational coordination.
If we cannot get the right plans in place and do the necessary planning, if we cannot coordinate those capabilities in a meaningful way, and if we can’t effectively educate and engage the public both before and during an event, then many of these other capabilities are really weakened. If people don’t understand what to do and aren’t educated on the front end about the threats and hazards they face, then the instructions we give may not make sense and there may be delays in following those instructions.
If we don’t work together ahead of time to coordinate the resources we use we may find the resources we need during a crisis are not available. Doing those three capabilities in particular is the reason they are focused to be for all five mission areas. That allows us to understand what is necessary for all 31 capabilities.
What is the big difference? A lot of people have concerns or questions about the transition from the prior list, the Target Capabilities List, to this. The Target Capabilities List did not account for mitigation. Right off the bat, that was a gap.
Two, the target capabilities were really operationally focused. The reality is that national preparedness is a combination of operations, steady state programs (such as physical protective measures) and programmatic activities. Threat and hazard identification is an example of that.
All of these taken together are needed to enhance our security and resilience.
[Slide 9]
The Goal was developed during the July-August timeframe. We got a lot of comments. A lot of you, judging from the attendee list, participated in that process. We received over 2,300 comments. We worked very aggressively to get those through, and the document is now out on the street.
[Slide 10]
With the goal in place and knowing the capabilities we needed, now we needed to explain how the tools we had at our disposal would help with that. The next requirement from the President to us was to describe very succinctly what a national preparedness system would look like. Why that terminology—why was it phrased that way? It was because it will take a while to put all these pieces in place.
It was recognized that we couldn’t build a national system in two months, but we should be able to explain, describe, and characterize it in a way that people understand how capabilities are built, sustained, and delivered. That is what we did.
We established a description of a system that lays out these requirements and expectations for planning, organization, equipment, training and exercises—in particular a planning piece, resource guidance requirements, the need for recommendation, and an approach to assessment.
[Slide 11]
Again, this first document is a description. It is not going to get into all the meat of those. That is going to be through a number of follow-on activities in the next many months, but we need to be able to explain to someone when you talk about national preparedness as a system—what are the pieces of that?
You’ll see on this slide that we talked to six particular items. We talked to identifying and assessing risk—that is at all levels of government. Risk needs to not only be developed and understood together, but that information needs to be shared. Communities and members of communities need to understand the risks they face.
I don’t know about you, but when I bought my house I went and looked at the flood plain maps. I looked at available information regarding events that had happened in that neighborhood. I looked at the crime rate. I made sure I understood the threats and hazards in that community before I joined that community. We all don’t do that. Even at that basic level all the way up to something as large as a national risk assessment, risk needs to drive the discussion and our preparedness.
The next piece is estimating capabilities requirements. We need a mechanism in place to understand not only what we have at our disposal, but what our requirements are and what the gap is, and then a good decision process about how we will address that gap. Not all gaps can be filled. There are resource constraints and priorities.
There is a discussion about if I can’t address a gap, can I work with my neighbors to address it? Is it a risk I have to accept? If so, how do I account for that in my planning efforts?
The next two are building, sustaining and delivering capabilities—not only building a sustaining piece, which gets into organization and equipment, resourcing, grants activities and those things, but the plans we need in place both at a strategic level and operational level to actually deliver the capabilities.
Additionally, validating capabilities—it is not enough to build them, we need to make sure they are the right capabilities and that they work effectively. If we have achieved the right levels of capabilities, we need to be able to sustain, and if we have it, we need to be able to adjust. Whether that is through assessments, or through exercises, or looking at real world events that have occurred and drawing lessons learned for us—those together allow us to validate the capabilities we have built.
Finally, much like everything, all of these things need a good refresh cycle of reviewing and updating, and looking at a couple of options going forward at how to do that at all levels of society.
[Slide 12]
The Preparedness System builds on a lot of existing things. My hope is that especially for those of you who have worked in this field for awhile that the list of six items on the last slide should not have surprised you. You probably looked at the list and said, "That is kind of what we do already." I would hope so. I would hope that is your process.
The intent with PPD-8 is that we are evolving, we are not revolutionizing. We are not throwing out things that work. What we want to do is tweak and expand them, make sure they work across the five missions—prevent, protect, mitigate, respond and recover.
We worked with a number of people. That writing team was about half and half—half fed, half non-fed. We got a lot of input from others and we drew from a lot of experience that many of you in the community had already provided—maybe you were on a task force that had issued a report, maybe you participated in an existing assessment effort, maybe you were involved in an article in a journal.
We looked at a lot of those pieces to very quickly build a small, concise description of what this system would look like.
[Slide 13]
As I mentioned, one piece of that system—we talked to a number of these elements already so I won’t repeat the slide. There are two points I would like to hit. One, we are using the National Incident Management System as a foundation for this. That means we will have to take a look at current resource typing and things like that to make sure we are effectively addressing the five mission areas.
The other piece of this puzzle is that this is a system description. We have to look at how to implement it. So over the next several weeks, we will be working with partners throughout the community to understand what already exists, what the impacts of the systems are, where we can say that we already have the tools in place and then put resources in areas we need to develop.
This is by no means a deliverable that is one and done. This is a deliverable that is a starting point that will be going on for months to come.
[Slide 14]
As I mentioned planning is a key element of the preparedness system, and planning frameworks are a crucial aspect of that. All of you are probably familiar with the National Response Framework as it currently exists. The National Response Framework as it is written right now is a combination of policy, doctrine, guidance and operational planning. It is what was needed at the time.
Under Presidential Policy Directive 8, frameworks are meant to be much more strategic documents. They lay the conceptual groundwork. They explain the coordinating structures with the response example—that would be the ESFs. They lay out the scope of the mission. Many of those operational elements will go into later documents. We’ll explain those in a second.
These frameworks are meant to be nice, concise, tight documents that a user can pick up and understand what a particular mission area is—for example, prevention—I could pick it up and understand what prevention is about, conceptually understand my role in prevention, and get a sense of the kinds of things I might do organizationally to support prevention activities.
They are really strategic level guidance and doctrine to help us conceptualize and understand a particular mission. The other thing they do is help us understand how that activity connects with others. What are the connection points between prevention and protection, or prevention and response? Each one of these five frameworks will do that.
Whenever possible, it will build and use existing material. This is not to throw out a national strategy or the National Infrastructure Protection Plan. The list goes on. It is rather to take information from those and incorporate them into a single document that explains the scope of that particular mission.
[Slide 15]
Right now those frameworks are under their initial development. The Disaster Framework, however, was complete. That started a number of years ago. A number of you are familiar with that already. It did not make sense to delay that effort. That product is consistent with PPD-8, so they finished.
We now need to revise the National Response Framework and develop the three remaining frameworks. We are working with those groups very closely and identifying a number of opportunities where you can provide input into that process. We’ll talk about that towards the end.
[Slide 16]
A couple of other things I want to bring to your attention that we’ve talked about previously on this forum—the Interagency Operational Plans for each of these frameworks—there will be an operation plan. All those things from the NRF won’t get lost—they stay true, but they’ll move over to the operational plans.
These are focused on how the federal government will support everybody. Everything I have said to you to this point—national frameworks, national system, national goal—these are federal documents. That is the span of our control. We will lay out how we will work together to support the rest of the nation, whether it is preventing an incident, mitigation, or whatever.
We will bring the capabilities to bear, to understand the needed tasks and resources in order to be successful—we will do that in a way that is consistent with the state and local planning guidance (CPG 101) and that way people can understand the process, follow it, and get a sense of how they better connect; and more to the point, how the federal government will better connect with their ongoing planning efforts.
[Slide 17]
The last two pieces—and then we’ll get to how you get to play—are building and sustaining preparedness. One of the requirements of PPD-8 is that we look at a number of issues that are ongoing issues to building and sustaining preparedness, whether that is many of the outreach campaigns we have, whether it is our preparedness as a federal government, the grants and technical assistance programs, or research and development.
We are beginning to wrap up these efforts now. We will be looking for ideas and input. You will see that through a number of our tools and outreach efforts. Potentially this is a separate briefing and discussion all by itself.
In particular we are focusing on the comprehensive campaign piece. How do we take a number of existing efforts like Ready.gov, "See Something Say Something", Citizen Corps and others, and link those together into a comprehensive campaign that allows us to be more efficient in our approach, allow us to find gaps in our preparedness and to take advantage of opportunities to make decisive advances in national preparedness.
For example, around the upcoming National Level Exercise—which components of this campaign should we provide greater resources to in order to see improvements in the national level preparedness? Being able to take advantage of those opportunities—be more flexible and adept in our actions. That is just now ramping up.
That is very early and ripe for opportunity for you to send an email and send an idea to give us your thoughts on that particular effort.
[Slide 18]
We are the government. We have to issue a report. It is just something we do. We are expected on an annual basis to report on our progress as a nation, not just the federal government, on building these capabilities. Wherever possible we already do a lot of data calls to the state and local community. Our intent is to continue to simply use those data processes.
Instead of creating something new or additional burdens leverage what you are already doing, meld that with federal data collection, bring in the opportunity for private sector and the public and others to provide their input, and bring that together in a report. That is currently under development and due to the White House at the end of March. There is very little time to do this.
[Slide 19]
How do you get involved? You probably identified at this point that PPD-8 operates under a very aggressive timeline. I was on a call earlier and someone asked earlier why that timeline. There are two reasons. There is the process reason, which is we will fill the time allotted. If you give us a year to do something, it will take a year. If you give us five years to do something, it will take five years.
A nice short timeline ensures that we get things done. That is a benefit or side effect of the timeline. The real benefit of this approach is that it allows us to move very quickly to a decision process. These are complex issues and we could spend a lot of time arguing and debating and dissecting the minutiae of each mission, of each capability.
Again, we would fill all the time allotted and probably then some. This approach allows us to move very quickly to get to a decision, to get pen to paper and capture people’s thoughts and get it out there for use, for validation and correction. You’ll note that a number of things we have put out already and things we will be putting out in the future will be marked as first editions.
Each of them will carry a timeline for review. We will come back during a certain period and take a look at it again. The reality is that these products will not be one 100% perfect because they will need to be used for us to truly understand what is working well and where we need to enhance the product.
While the timeline is challenging and forces us to get a little creative, it is probably one of the best aspects of this process because it forces us to move the ball down the field. To use football parlance, we are constantly in a two minute drill. I don’t know about you, but I have certainly noticed over the last 16 to 17 weeks, or certainly even last week, a number of teams perform better in the last two minutes of a football game than they do in the other 58 minutes.
I think that is because it is time to think, but it is not time to over-think. How do you get to play in that with that time constraint that doesn’t afford a lot of opportunities? Whenever possible, first off, we are trying to involve people directly in the writing teams. Resource-wise that is not always practical. For legal reasons it can be a challenge.
Wherever we can we are trying to have non-feds in the room. Even when we can’t there are a lot of opportunities to provide comment during development. One, there is information up at the PPD-8 website about what we have going on and what we are doing. You see the webpage link right there.
Take a look at the Goal. Take a look at the System. Take a look at the Directive. If you have an idea about how we might better include state and local or individuals, or how we identify roles and responsibilities, what some of the issues might be that we need to consider—shoot us an email, please.
Give us your ideas and input. My office is an executive office. We are coordinating this effort. We by no means claim to be the subject matter brain trust on any of these mission areas or topics. We need your ideas, your input and thoughts as to what we should be thinking about as we develop these products.
That is one way to go about it. If you like something a little bit more interactive, we have established a portal through Idea Scale (http://fema.ideascale.com) where we will be posting topics for discussion. Right now on Idea Scale we have a topic of discussion for the National Preparedness Report.
You’ll see on this page we have the link for the National Preparedness Report discussion and a link for the Mitigation Framework discussion. This is your opportunity to provide your ideas an input into those development pieces. You see mitigation there now—over the next few days we will post links for prevention, response and protection as well.
You see on this page we have a couple of things we are specifically asking about that I’ve highlighted in that section—people in leadership roles and examples of activities, whether that has lessened the impact, to get a sense from you if you were looking back from ten years from now—what made your community more resilient?
We are seeding these discussions across the board—prevention, protection and response will come up shortly as well. We are constantly monitoring this. We love to see the discussion and ideas. An interesting facet of this tool is that it allows people to vote.
So we get a sense. If someone posts a comment on a normal bulletin board it is hard to tell if that is one person or a lot of people that feel that way. People very quickly can say they agree or disagree and we can get an idea of what the temperature is on that issue.
Finally, we are going to provide opportunities are various stages of this process for you to provide comments on products. That is not in the writing. That is more reaction, feedback and what we are missing. It will still affect the content.
These first two options on the slide allow you to directly participate during the writing phase—right now, what is going on, and it gets your ideas in front of the writing team.
So that’s it and there is a lot going on. Let’s open it up for questions.
[Slide 20]
Amy Sebring: Thank you very much, Doc. Now, to proceed to our Q&A and audience comments.
[Audience Questions & Answers]
Question:
Derek White: How will this affect the HSEEP process for exercises, and will previous HSEEP training need to be re-taken by students and HSEEP trainers to take PPD-8 into account?
Donald Lumpkins: One of the things we are doing right now is looking at in greater detail what the specific impacts would be. I will speak out of school a little bit because I am not with the Exercise Office, but PPD-8 doesn’t change the way we design, manage, or evaluate exercises process-wise.
If you have been through HSEEP training—I went through one of the very first ones—none of that will be affected. Where you might see a change is that certainly the content of the evaluation guides—we might take a look and see if updates are needed there because of the transition from the target capabilities to the core capabilities.
The actual conduct of exercises isn’t really affected by the content in PPD-8. In fact, we specifically reference in the preparedness system that the National Exercise Program and HSEEP are critical elements.
Question:
Isabel McCurdy: What are "the greatest risks" as defined in your goal? And was Canada involved in the process of the development?
Donald Lumpkins: No, we did not specifically engage any foreign nation to the U.S. in the development process. We have since begun discussions with a number of our partners—I don’t know if Canada was one of them, I would need to look—to brief them up on the effort, to make sure they understood our activities, to answer questions, and to provide them any information or materials they might need as they consider updates to their preparedness efforts as well.
In terms of the greatest risks, we identify a number in the preparedness goal of those risks. You can imagine there are a number of natural hazards which can cause regionalized catastrophic impacts, whether those are very large hurricanes, massive multi-state snow storms, etc. We identify a number of threats and hazards in the goal.
Terrorism obviously remains a continuous concern when it comes to greatest risk on two fronts—one being the potential use of a weapon of mass destruction, but also a large-scale conventional attack, something similar to the incident in Mumbai, India. That is certainly one of the greater risks we need to take a look at.
Even cyber—I know we list cyber as one of the things that poses a great risk. Cyber isn’t terrorism. Cyber security issues could be an act of terrorism, could be criminal acts, or could just be a flaw in the system. There is a lot of flexibility there.
You’ll find there is a pretty solid balance in the goal between what we would refer to as natural, some of the technological, and the human-caused, or adversarial things like terrorism. The results—those are the highlighted results from a strategic national risk assessment that was done, the summary of which is listed on the PPD-8 website.
Amy Sebring: Is this [Strategic National Risk Assessment] going to replace the old National Planning Scenarios?
Donald Lumpkins: The trick here, when we switched from HSPD-8 to PPD-8 is that the planning scenarios helped us to a certain degree. They got us to a point. The problem was that people were—and we were certainly a culprit in this—treating this as "one size fits all".
With PPD-8 we really want to use risk as the driver. The risks we face at a national level while comprised of risks we face at all levels of government and all levels of society are not the same. The risks you might have in British Colombia may not be the same you would have in a different part of Canada. Certainly it may not be the risks that Canada is concerned about nationwide.
To look at this another way—I am from Maryland and what concerns Baltimore may not concern the state, and what may concern the state of Maryland, may not concern the nation. The reality is there are risks for all three of us. Baltimore would plan, or another city, to look at the risks it faces and build its capability to capacity.
That in turn will ultimately inform the state and national risks.
Question:
S. Atyia Martin: How will the core capabilities change the Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) priorities, requirements, and structure?
Donald Lumpkins: With FY11 we already started using the core capabilities, so in and of themselves, you have seen the change and that is that it largely reflects reporting for those grants. The State Preparedness Report, which was just due, asks jurisdictions to look at core capabilities, a select set that were of the best alignment to the TCLs and begin the soft transition.
The transition will begin further in FY12. We are still sorting out the details of all of that, but the transition from the Target Capabilities List to the Core Capabilities List in and of itself does not cause a dramatic change in the grant programs.
There are plenty of other things that have been going on with Congressional requirements, the downsizing of the grant programs and all—I think they will have more significant impact than the transition from the TCLs to the core capabilities.
Question:
John Vocino: The former Nat Preparedness Goal also included a number of National Priorities (IEDs, NIMS compliance, community preparedness, etc. if I recall correctly) I see that this version does not include any National Priorities. Why?
Donald Lumpkins: When we switched to this goal, the focus was to be on the missions themselves. Instead of isolating a specific set of priorities we have one priority, and that is a secure and resilient nation. We have a number of tools at our disposal in the 31 capabilities to achieve that goal.
Using those capabilities as the focus, we in effect have to hit every one of those priorities that was identified in the National Preparedness Guidelines. In order to truly achieve these 31 capabilities we need to have communities involved, improve our intelligence and information sharing, and look at cyber issues.
So in some ways it is a recognition that the capabilities need to be the focus. Two, that the goal needed to be a national document—what that means is that what might be priorities for the federal government might not be the priorities for counties.
While we now need to consider the 31 capabilities, the level of capacity for a particular capability and the prioritization of those capabilities would be driven by your needs, as opposed to a single, "one size fits all" set of needs chosen on this end.
Question:
W Russ Webster: Doc, Can you comment in a general sense on the roles of the FEMA Regions in the operationalization of PPD8?
Donald Lumpkins: Right now it has largely been supporting the outreach and engagement for this. As we move forward, now that we have the system description, we need to actually look at how we implement that system.
We have discussed this recently in December as well in a meeting with the leadership—to better lay out the role of the FEMA regions. I see that role certainly in some ways expanding, but the reality is that a lot of what the regions do already complements the PPD-8 effort. We have NIMS coordinators in the regions.
We work day in and day out with the regional staff on exercises and training and grants management, and all these things. Again, this is an evolution, not a revolution. Will there be an impact? Will there be a greater role for the regions? Absolutely, but this is not the earth-shattering event that one might associate with a Presidential Directive.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Can you talk about measuring preparedness? There has been criticism in the past that we are doing too much bean-counting—the numbers of equipment we have, etc. Are we going to have a new approach to measuring preparedness going forward?
Donald Lumpkins: I can’t get into a lot of detail yet, but I think you will see a lot of improvement on how we do that. The focus will be on capability and less on bean-counting, per se. We will be focusing on our real progress to achieve capability and working with everybody in the community to identify those marks. What are those national targets, and what are the targets for each of those components? There is more to come.
Amy Sebring: I think you’d be more than happy to get some comments on the IdeaScale?
Donald Lumpkins: Absolutely.
Question:
John Vocino: Could you speak to the mission of "Mitigation," especially how it differs from the "Protection" and "Prevention" missions? I ask because the definitions for each seem indistinguishable to a cold reader, BUT, when reviewing the capabilities for each one, seem to have significant differences.
Donald Lumpkins: Let me break the bad news first. We are working with the mitigation folks now on their ideas in the framework, so I am going to leave that as a cliffhanger. You can see on the Idea Scale website where their thinking is and where they are seeking ideas.
There is no great line between mitigation and protection and prevention, and especially between mitigation and protection. A lot of the focus on protection has been on critical infrastructure protection which gets at specific assets and resources whereas mitigation tends to be much more focused on entire communities.
Traditionally there has been a soft split where a lot of the terrorism piece has ended up with protection and everything that is not terrorism has ended up as mitigation. But with this directive this blurring that was referenced by the person with the question has been made blurrier because mitigation has to get into the resilience of critical infrastructure and protection is expected to be more than just terrorism.
How that shakes out—we have explained some of the goal a little bit, but as we build the frameworks over the next several months my hope is that we can provide a little more clarity as to those connection points.
Prevention in some ways is very straightforward, especially the framework. It is specifically focused on preventing imminent terrorist threat. Prevention is very focused on the bad guy whereas protection is looking much more at how we stop a terrorist attack from occurring and how to make sure our infrastructure is well-protected and well defended, and mitigation is looking at the actions we take over the long term to reduce likelihood and consequences across entire communities.
I know I didn’t make it much clearer, if any at all, but it is one of the things we are looking at ways to provide greater clarity over the next several months.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Are you planning on developing addition CPG guides in support of this?
Donald Lumpkins: We are. The expectation is that we will provide guidance to state, local, tribal and territorial partners in support of each one of the mission areas. There will be more to come on that but I expect to see announcements of how we are proceeding with that soon.
Question:
Paul Timmons: In reference to the "whole community approach" can you share brief feedback by State leadership / Partners on current PPD-8 development?
Donald Lumpkins: General feedback has been supportive. There are a lot of questions about the long term implications of this. We have afforded for any state who has come in or city that has come in who have wanted to directly participate in development—we are providing opportunities. We have state and local partners sitting on the writing teams helping develop the product, which has helped with engagement to get issues addressed quickly, that sort of thing.
It is a "wait and see". The goal and system were the high doctrine—people have questions, obviously everybody is curious. Many of the questions you all have asked today they have asked as well, and we have been answering the best we can.
As this process moves forward and we get a sense of the real implications there will be more opportunities to engage them directly and get their ideas of how to best implement this effort. Generally positive and not a lot of people are upset, but obviously everybody has questions and concerns as that moves forward.
We are doing our best to either answer them or explain why we can’t answer them yet.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: One that note we will wrap for today. On behalf of Avagene and myself and all our participants today, thank you again Doc very much for taking time to share this information with us today. It seems you have your work cut out for you this coming year, and we wish you every success.
Donald Lumpkins: I thank you much for your time and I look forward to coming back to you with some more stuff over the next many months.
Amy Sebring: That would be wonderful. If we did not get to your question today here is the address you can write to [email protected] or use the FEMA IdeaScale to get your input in.
Our next program will take place, Wednesday, January 25th. Please watch for our announcement and plan to be with us then. If you are not on our mailing list you can go to our home page and subscribe from the link on the left side.
In the meantime, thanks to everyone for participating today. Thanks for your great input. Please do come again. Have a great afternoon. We are adjourned.