Volume 15, Issue 3

Colleges and universities that educate aspiring homeland security professionals are duty-bound to supply a national workforce that is capable and adequately prepared to meet the National Preparedness Goal. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to suggest that developing a qualified homeland security (HLS) workforce could be considered a matter of national security. Indeed, an appropriately educated workforce is not only (at least implicit) part of the current FEMA National Preparedness Goal, it was identified as a national security imperative as early as 2001 by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. A baseline set of education standards for homeland security education would, at the very least, ensure that academic programs would consistently graduate a workforce that has a common set of competencies aligned to the needs of both public and private sector actors engaged in domestic and national security. In turn, employers and students alike would better understand not only what homeland security is, but what HLS graduates can do. Many mature disciplines ultimately use education standards to not only define themselves, but to sanctify and protect their professional boundaries. Nutritionists, for example, are professionals protected by registration, and licensure (as well as certification in some cases). Yet to become a registered dietician, one needs to graduate from an accredited academic degree program, the basis of which is compliance to a set of education (i.e., accreditation) standards assessed by an external organization. In the same way, and to advance the HLS profession, it makes sense to think that HLS practitioners should have educational backgrounds (like doctors or lawyers) that share some common set of educational competencies. To date, we observe that higher education’s response as to how to best educate students to enter the homeland security enterprise has been to consider homeland security as a meta-discipline , or a discipline of disciplines. As such, homeland security curricula tend to include faculty, courses and student learning outcomes from a variety of other disciplines such as law, business, management, political science, international relations, emergency management, etc. Second, we note that academic homeland security education is still largely characterized as an emergent discipline. That is, the core theory of what is and is not “homeland security” remains under-developed. Indeed, it is accurate to characterize homeland security more as a “practice discipline” such as medicine, nursing or law (each of which, by the way, shares the characteristic of being meta-disciplines), albeit a practice with a growing literature and experience basis as well as a theoretical basis. This project leveraged the collective expertise of subject matter experts over roughly a 3-year period to emulate the structure and approach used by these better-established disciplines and create a consensus set of HLS education standards. Created were nine knowledge domains and a set of competencies (aka knowledge, skills and abilities as student learning outcomes) per domain. Taken together, such a set of knowledge domains and competencies (the minimum set of skills, knowledge, and abilities students of homeland security acquire academically) would describe the professional boundaries of the homeland security discipline. A major remaining challenge is how best to conceptualize and implement a system that integrates a set of competencies into all academic HLS programs nationwide. The paper tackles this issue by proposing a system of “voluntary academic accountability” from all academic institutions that offers a bona fide peer review of undergraduate level homeland security programs.

In this paper, we examine cybersecurity challenges faced by America’s local, governments, including: the extent of cyberattacks; problems faced in preventing attacks from being successful; barriers to providing high levels of cybersecurity management; and actions that local governments believe should be taken to improve cybersecurity practice. Our research method consisted of a focus group of information technology (IT) and cybersecurity officials from one American state. Our findings indicate that cyberattacks are constant and can number in the tens of thousands or more per day. While our participants noted that while they were not perfect at it, they felt that they had cybersecurity technology under good control. Their biggest challenge is human – that is, end-users who make mistakes or engage in misconduct. Local governments face several barriers in providing high levels of cybersecurity, including: insufficient funding and staffing; problems of governance; and insufficient or under-enforced cybersecurity policies. Participants suggested several ways to improve local government cybersecurity, including: vulnerability assessment, scanning and testing, cybersecurity insurance, improving end-user authentication and authorization, end-user training and control, control over the use of external devices, and improved governance methods, among others. We conclude by making suggestions for further research into local government cybersecurity.

Communication is an integral part of emergency response, and improving the information dissemination network for crisis communication can save time, resources, and lives. In a foreign animal disease (FAD) outbreak, timeliness of detection and response are critical. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a particularly significant FAD, could cripple the agriculture economy. This research uses communication data from a FAD response exercise in Kansas to develop a reliable crisis communication network model, contributing a general method for creating an information dissemination network from empirical communication data. We then introduce a simulated annealing heuristic that identifies an alternative network structure that minimizes the time for information to reach all response participants. The resultant network structure reduces overall information transmission time by almost 90% and reveals actionable observations for improving FAD response communication. We find that not only can a crisis communication network be improved significantly, but also that the quantitative results support qualitative observations from early in the data extraction process. This paper adds original methods to the literature and opens the door for future quantitative work in the area of crisis communication and emergency response.

Despite the growing interest in interorganizational border management, relatively little is known about antecedents that drive such coordination efforts emerging in and around border regions. This case study uses exponential random graph models to test hypotheses about the antecedents of a border management coordination network in El Paso, Texas. The analysis demonstrates that actors tend to build tightly closed relationships through bonding and clustering, while also seeking cross-sectoral partnerships. In addition, actors tend to build ties with public organizations, and with organizations that represent regional interests/issues in the border management context. The research discusses the findings and offers some policy and administrative implications to enhance actor relationships within the border management network.

A Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process based model was proposed and evaluated for social vulnerability assessment using a case study. The evaluation process is formulated as a multiple criteria decision making problem under uncertainty, where the subjective and imprecise judgements of multiple decision makers are represented as fuzzy numbers. Based on factors extracted from literature review, the researchers determined the factor weights and calculated social vulnerability scores for each county (district) using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process method. The researchers demonstrated how the social vulnerability scores of counties (districts) and factor weights change under different uncertainties via sensitivity analysis. The results were comparted with data produced by conventional Analytic Hierarchy Process to test performance of the proposed method. The results show social vulnerability of each county (district) in Ankang City, implying the Urban-Rural Gap exist in current Chinese disaster management system. Most important sub-factors contributing to social vulnerability were also highlighted according to the results on factor weights.