Homeland Security

First U.S. Army Battalion to Be Stationed Inside American Borders

Army, Government, Homeland Security, Politics, Security State, US

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1


3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
By Gina Cavallaro – Staff writer ARMY TIMES
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDT

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

“Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future,” said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. “Now, the plan is to assign a force every year.”

The command is at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who returned in April after 15 months in Iraq, will operate out of their home post at Fort Stewart, Ga., where they’ll be able to go to school, spend time with their families and train for their new homeland mission as well as the counterinsurgency mission in the war zones.

Stop-loss will not be in effect, so soldiers will be able to leave the Army or move to new assignments during the mission, and the operational tempo will be variable.

Don’t look for any extra time off, though. The at-home mission does not take the place of scheduled combat-zone deployments and will take place during the so-called dwell time a unit gets to reset and regenerate after a deployment.

The 1st of the 3rd is still scheduled to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan in early 2010, which means the soldiers will have been home a minimum of 20 months by the time they ship out.

In the meantime, they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.

“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds … it put me on my knees in seconds.”

The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home … and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”

While soldiers’ combat training is applicable, he said, some nuances don’t apply.

“If we go in, we’re going in to help American citizens on American soil, to save lives, provide critical life support, help clear debris, restore normalcy and support whatever local agencies need us to do, so it’s kind of a different role,” said Cloutier, who, as the division operations officer on the last rotation, learned of the homeland mission a few months ago while they were still in Iraq.

Some brigade elements will be on call around the clock, during which time they’ll do their regular marksmanship, gunnery and other deployment training. That’s because the unit will continue to train and reset for the next deployment, even as it serves in its CCMRF mission.

Should personnel be needed at an earthquake in California, for example, all or part of the brigade could be scrambled there, depending on the extent of the need and the specialties involved.

Other branches included

The active Army’s new dwell-time mission is part of a NorthCom and DOD response package.

Active-duty soldiers will be part of a force that includes elements from other military branches and dedicated National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams.

A final mission rehearsal exercise is scheduled for mid-September at Fort Stewart and will be run by Joint Task Force Civil Support, a unit based out of Fort Monroe, Va., that will coordinate and evaluate the interservice event.

In addition to 1st BCT, other Army units will take part in the two-week training exercise, including elements of the 1st Medical Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C.

There also will be Air Force engineer and medical units, the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

One of the things Vogler said they’ll be looking at is communications capabilities between the services.

“It is a concern, and we’re trying to check that and one of the ways we do that is by having these sorts of exercises. Leading up to this, we are going to rehearse and set up some of the communications systems to make sure we have interoperability,” he said.

“I don’t know what America’s overall plan is — I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they’re called,” Cloutier said. “It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help the people at home.”

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Correction:

A non-lethal crowd control package fielded to 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, described in the original version of this story, is intended for use on deployments to the war zone, not in the U.S., as previously stated.

A City’s Police Force Now Doubts Terror Focus

9/11, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Homeland Security, Politics of Fear, Providence
July 24, 2008

By DAVID JOHNSTON

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Nearly seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the war on terror in this city has evolved into a quiet struggle against a phantom foe.

Last year, when a sailor slipped over the side of a Turkish merchant ship in the city’s port, a Providence police detective assigned to a joint terrorism task force was quickly alerted, reflecting a new vigilance since the Sept. 11 attacks. Alerts also went out to immigration, customs, the F.B.I. and other federal agencies, but the case went cold.

Another alarm was sounded over a suspicious man of Indian descent who asked a metals dealer about buying old power tools and hair dryers. The lead petered out when the prospective buyer told a police detective in an interview that he wanted to refurbish the equipment for resale overseas.

Like most of the country’s more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies, the Providence Police Department went to war against terror after Sept. 11, embracing a fundamental shift in its national security role. Police officers everywhere had been shaken by disclosures that the police in Oklahoma, Florida, Maryland and Virginia had stopped four of the Sept. 11 hijackers at various times for traffic violations, but had detected nothing amiss.

Over the years since, police officials in Providence joined with state and federal authorities in new information-sharing projects, met with local Muslim leaders and urged their officers to be alert for anything suspicious. Flush with federal domestic-security grants, the police department acquired millions of dollars’ worth of hardware and enrolled officers in training courses to detect and respond to a terrorist attack.

But much has changed. Now, police officials here express doubts about whether the imperative to protect domestic security has blinded federal authorities to other priorities. The department is battling homicides, robberies and gang shootings that the police in a number of cities say are as serious a threat as terrorism.

The Providence police chief, Col. Dean M. Esserman, said the federal government seemed unable to balance antiterror efforts and crime fighting.

“Our nation, that I love, is like a great giant that can deal with a problem when it focuses on it,” said Colonel Esserman, who became chief in 2003 when he was hired by Mayor David N. Cicilline. “But it seems like that giant of a nation is like a Cyclops, with but one eye, that can focus only on one problem at a time.”

“The support we had from the federal government for crime fighting seems like it is being diverted to homeland defense,” he added. “It may be time to reassess, not how to dampen one for the other, but how not to lose support for one as we address the other.”

In Washington, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has defended cuts in criminal justice programs. At a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in April, Mr. Mukasey responded to a chorus of complaints from Democrats. “We’re not pretending that less money is more money,” he said. “But we’re trying to use it as intelligently as we can.”

In a recent interview, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, cautioned against using domestic security programs to help pay for day-to-day policing needs. “I don’t think we want to take a program designed for one purpose and slowly massage it into another purpose,” Mr. Chertoff said. “If you are pursuing street crime, I don’t think all the organs of national security should be involved in that.”

Some officials of the Department of Homeland Security worry about complacency given the passage of time since Sept. 11 without an attack or concrete evidence of a domestic threat. These officials say they are convinced that Al Qaeda remains determined to strike inside the United States and will find vulnerabilities if vigilance is relaxed.

In Providence, the police have girded for an attack. Flush with money from the Department of Homeland Security, the police bought a 27-foot patrol boat to monitor the city’s port, along with an automated underwater inspection and detection system and a portable small-craft intrusion barrier.

At police headquarters, the department upgraded a video surveillance system, erected 159 concrete posts and 220 feet of guardrails around the building’s perimeter. Supposed targets for attacks, like rail and air terminals, have been inventoried and assessed, and in some cases, hardened against assaults.

The department acquired a small fleet of S.U.V.’s for emergency response, a bomb containment vehicle, a bomb response canine vehicle, mobile data terminals, scuba gear, trauma kits, underwater camera and video gear and special protective suits for all officers. With a $5.6 million grant, it is developing a radio system so police, fire and other emergency responders throughout the region can communicate with one another.

Police officers have enrolled in training that would have been unlikely before Sept. 11. Officers attended a terrorist bombing school in New Mexico, learned how to interpret deceptive responses in interviews, studied unconventional weapons and clandestine explosives laboratories and attended classes in terrorism prevention and suicide bombings.

Today, the boat still patrols the harbor, especially when liquefied natural gas tankers arrive from overseas. The stanchions around police headquarters are in place. The S.U.V.’s, loaded with emergency response gear, have been distributed to field units who use them as part of regular patrols. Most officers have learned to put on and take off their emergency gear, but none of the equipment or training has been needed to respond to a terrorist threat.

From 2002 to this year, the department went from zero to more than $11.6 million in total domestic security grants, according to Police Department figures, while other criminal justice grants, like those from Justice Department programs used to pay overtime and hire more officers, dwindled to less than $4.5 million for the same period.

One Justice Department program, the Byrne Justice Action Grant, which helps the police fight violent crime by paying for overtime and other policing costs, has suffered heavy cutbacks. Providence’s Byrne grant was reduced to $118,000 this year, from $388,000 in 2007.

The Bush administration has proposed eliminating money for the program in its 2009 budget.

Larry Reall, a 21-veteran of the Providence Police Department, is the liaison to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. He has top-secret security clearance and access to classified computer databases at the local F.B.I. office down the street from City Hall.

In Detective Reall’s six years on the job, none of the hundreds of leads he has chased have turned up a terrorist. But he keeps looking, convinced that his work has made the city safer and may have deterred a potential extremist before a threat materialized. “It’s not whether we are going to be attacked; that’s probably not going to happen,” Detective Reall said. “But I don’t think that you can let your guard down. Just because nothing has happened doesn’t mean that something won’t.”

Police experts said Providence’s experience was similar to that of other cities around the country. Looking back, local law enforcement agencies took on new counterterrorism responsibilities when violent crime rates had plunged to statistical lows.

By 2005 and 2006, while overall crime rates were stable, middle-size and larger cities began to be hit with increases in homicides, robberies and aggravated assaults, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which studies policing issues.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police recently issued a scathing analysis of federal spending, saying, “Unfortunately, funding federal homeland security efforts at the expense of state, tribal and local law enforcement agencies weakens rather than enhances our nation’s security.”

The frustration is expressed by other Providence police officials. The deputy chief, Cmdr. Paul J. Kennedy, said the department no longer had the flexibility to use federal money to pay for overtime. “I just wish we had some discretion about how we can use this federal money,” Commander Kennedy said. “We know what our problems are. If you say to us the money can only be used for homeland security or equipment, it really limits how effective we can be in fighting crime.”

A weekly meeting of the department’s command staff, in which nearly three dozen city, state and federal officials, including representatives of social welfare and animal control agencies, assemble in a windowless third-floor conference room to discuss crime, focuses heavily on gangs like the West Side Clowns, the Chad Browns and others, mostly associated with crime in the city’s housing projects.

Providence has big-city crime problems, but is small enough so that when the police talk of shootings, assaults and robberies, they sometimes know the victims, the suspects and their families on a first-name basis. Representatives of the F.B.I. and other federal agencies are on hand, but there is little talk about terrorism.

“This is what we do,” Colonel Esserman said of how crime and violence absorbed his department. “We talk about crime. We talk about it all the time. And we try to respond to it as effectively as we know how.”