Has the DHS Abandoned Resilience?

Has the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) abandoned the resilience-based approach for protecting the country’s critical infrastructure? That’s what the House Homeland Security Committee would like to know.

In an article on the Security Management website, Matthew Harwood says a subcommittee of the Homeland Security Committee asked that question at a hearing last week on national resilience.

The answer? According to Robert B. Stephan, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, the DHS is still using that resilience-based approach.  Since 9/11, he said, DHS has provided $14.8 billion in risk-based grant funding to help the private sector protect the nation's critical infrastructure as well as build resiliency into it if disruptions do occur. Eighty-five percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is owned and operated privately.

Stephan told the subcommittee that national resiliency results when four factors are continuously achieved, according to Harwood. “First is robustness, meaning a society continues to function during a disruption. Second is resourcefulness, which means managing the response to a disruption as it unfolds. Third is rapid recovery, or a society's ability to quickly get things back to normal after the disruption. Fourth is the ability to absorb new lessons learned from the disruption,” Harwood reports.

“I think that DHS’s efforts to date reflect these tenets,” Stephan told the subcommittee, pointing to the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), where the NIPP teams voluntarily with the private sector and “serves as the unifying framework to ensure that [critical infrastructure and key resource] investments are coordinated and address the highest priorities, based on risk.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/has-dhs-abandoned-resilience