TWENTY YEARS OF EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE’S CIVIL SUPPORT MISSION

Over the last twenty years, the Department of Defense’s response enterprise for civil support missions has experienced evolutionary change and almost exponential growth. Three events served as the catalysts for the changes; the Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas attack, the 9/11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. Each event exposed critical shortfalls in the nation’s, as well as DOD’s, ability to respond to a domestic catastrophe in enough time to produce a life-saving effect. Once derived solely from warfighting capabilities that could be applied to domestic assistance, DOD now maintains Title 10 and Title 32 units, teams, and task forces specifically designed for civil support missions. Not only are DOD’s capabilities split among two different governing Federal statutes, the Department has created a dichotomy in its response enterprises, one designed specifically to respond to a catastrophic CBRN incident and one to respond to incidents without a CBRN element. DOD can no longer afford to maintain this dichotomy, in part because of the duplicity of the capabilities involved and also because the dichotomy is not in line with current DOD strategy and doctrine for an all-hazards approach to civil support