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February 2009
By Joseph Straw
Security Management - Security's Web
Connection
James M.Walker, Jr., is the country’s first and longest-serving director of a cabinet-level state homeland security agency. Walker was tapped in January 2003 to head the Alabama Department of Homeland Security, the first such agency in the United States. Prior to that, he served 20 years as an Army infantry officer and airborne ranger with units including the 25th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). During his Army career, Walker also served as aide-de-camp to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as an aide to President Ronald Reagan. He also worked as operations briefer to Gen. Colin Powell during Operation Desert Shield and as a congressional fellow and legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. John Tanner (D-TN) and as a congressional liaison officer for the Secretary of the Army. Upon his retirement from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2001, Walker worked in Washington, D.C., as a strategic consultant for a Houston-based company. A Tennessee native, Walker holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and a master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Oklahoma. He is a graduate of the Executive Leadership Program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey, California.
Q. What are your office’s responsibilities?
A. The Alabama Department
of Homeland Security was created by
legislative statute in 2003. It was one of
the initiatives of my governor [Gov. Bob
Riley] during his first year in office. I
believe that we were the first state in the
country to create a cabinet-level department
of homeland security by state legislative
statute. In simple terms, if you were to ask
my governor how he would define my job, he
looks at his homeland security director as
the honest broker. That is somebody that
takes a strategic approach in looking at the
state, and then tries to fill in the gaps
where we determine the gaps to be. When you
look at state agencies, the Emergency
Management Agency of the state is a separate
cabinet department. In our state, that
director rolls up under me as the Assistant
Director for Emergency Preparedness and
Response. So, I do have the EMA that rolls
under the Homeland Security Department.
Now, the other entities are really sort of independent and operational. The EMA is an operational entity. Think about it in this context. I don’t get bogged down, per se, in operational, day-to-day stuff. I take a step back and serve as the governor’s honest broker in trying to see where we can make the most difference, either through policy or the infusion of grant money or the development of programs that benefit the entire state. Governor Riley would look at me and say, “OK Jim, I expect you to do everything that you can to ensure that our Emergency Management Agency is the best in the country. I expect you to do everything that you can to make sure that the Director of Public Safety, who has all the state troopers, is the best in the country. I expect you to look at the Department of Public Health, whose director does not work for Governor Riley but is appointed by a board; I expect you to work with them on funding issues so they are the best in the country. The same applies with the Department of Agriculture and Industry, etc.
I also focus on making sure Washington understands we can’t, as a nation, secure our country from inside the Beltway. It’s going to take all 56 states and territories. Well, it’s the same in Alabama. We have 67 counties and our federally recognized Poarch Creek Indian Tribe. It is my responsibility to do what I can to build strong county programs in each of our 68 jurisdictions.
The bottom-line approach should be: What are you doing to benefit people at the tip of the spear and to shape state agencies to serve the overall umbrella of the state?
Q. What’s your assessment of our progress as a nation?
A. I think we have
increased awareness and begun the dialogue.
A lot of folks will be crucial of the
decisions in Washington, but you know, a lot
of this is fine-tuning. We’ve done OK on the
major muscle moves, but we’ve must continue
to fine-tune. One of the challenges we face
is taking advantage of everything we have,
and promoting personal responsibility among
our citizens. We must engage states and
locals in a really responsible way.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Let’s
look at about response and recovery; a FEMA
mission. When you think about all the things
that happen in this country every day, from
chemical spills to fires to IEDs, lots of
bad things happen. Out of everything that
happens, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc., FEMA
only becomes involved in less than 2 percent
of everything that happens. At the state
level, Alabama only becomes involved in
roughly 11 percent of everything bad that
happens in the state. That means 87
percent-plus of all the bad stuff that goes
on is managed at the county or local level.
It seems to me, then, we need to put the
emphasis where it should be. A guy named
John Peters wrote a book in the 1980s called
In Search of Excellence. The premise of the
book is ‘you’ve got to figure out what the
main thing is and make the main thing the
main thing’ and ‘the customer is always
right, regardless of what business you’re
in.’ The customers for us are the first
responders and state and local people.
They’re the main thing, and we’ve got to
fine tune our systems and processes to in
fact make them the main thing. I don’t think
we do as good a job at that as we should. If
we [Washington] did, it would cure a lot of
our ills.
The other is the federal government needs to realize they have a lot of willing state and local partners. I’m going to give you an example. When I was in the Army, the active Army was serving in Bosnia pretty heavily, and in fact, our active Army units were being tapped out. There was a decision made inside the Pentagon to send a National Guard division to replace an active division in Bosnia because of how the operational tempo was killing the active force. You could have heard the giant sucking sound coming out of the Pentagon saying ‘No, no, no. We cannot send the National Guard. They’re not as proficient as an active division, humma humma,etc.’ When the Pentagon realized it had no choice, it sent a National Guard Division to Bosnia, and they did a terrific job. As a result, they sent another National Guard division to Bosnia, and then on and on. Now you look at Iraq today, and you see the percentage of reserve component units there. National Guard and reserve make up about 65 percent of the fighting force in Iraq today.
You can see where we went from not trusting a Guard unit; to now, they take up most of the force. There has to be a tipping point where the people in Washington, who are holding fast to a lot of core competencies like immigration enforcement, customs enforcement, TSA, understand they have lots of willing partners who can do the job really well. There’s going to be a tipping point where people in Washington say, ‘You know, we’ve got to empower the locals to take on some of these jobs.’ When we do that, we’re going to be a lot better off.
There’s the issue of the main thing, which
is making the guy on Main Street a
priority, and then taking advantage of
everything the guy on Main Street
brings. If we can do those two things,
we will shore up a lot of our problems.
Q. What are the states primary assets and threats, natural or manmade?
A. If experience is your
guide, we have been pummeled with five
major hurricanes and a tropical storm
during Governor Riley/s tenure. We’ve
also had over 450 tornados, 1,600
reports of floods. Natural disasters are
an issue for us. We deal with natural
disasters constantly. On the man-made
side, we have a very robust chemical
industry in Alabama. We also have some
cultural and iconic things that demand
attention. We’ve got the 14th busiest
port in the country. We also have the
second-largest research and development
park in the country. It’s number one for
the defense industrial base. It’s
located in north Alabama. Alabama’s a
pretty diverse state. We’ve got the
second largest medical research
infrastructure in the South. We’re an
agricultural state. The third largest in
poultry exports and 22nd in beef cattle.
We’ve got four major military
installations, and the second-largest
financial infrastructure in the south
behind Charlotte Alabama has places
where you have lots of mass gatherings.
We’ve got two college football stadiums
on campus that house over 90,000 people
on Saturdays, and we’ve got the
Talladega Superspeedway. We actually had
a Congressional Committee come down and
spend a week with us at the Talladega
Superspeedway. This is what’s
fascinating about Talladega. The Super
Bowl is declared a special security
event in our country. The Super Bowl
houses 80,000 people and lasts three
hours. Talladega Superspeedway will last
two weeks and have 300,000 people.
That’s a drill for us.
To go on, I’ve got challenges with hate groups. We have well over 30 registered hate groups in our state; we’ve had some problems with them here recently. Alabama is an interesting state. Alabama is the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. The first president of the Confederacy was sworn in here, and we’ve got people who are still hovering on the fringe of both of those issues. It makes for an interesting state.
Q. How has your personal background helped you on the job?
A. I was a soldier in the
United States Army. I spent 20 years in
uniform, and the military model for
teamwork and training has served me well
in this job. It serves me well in
another capacity too. Because I’m not
necessarily an operational guy, I didn’t
come into this job with a bias toward
firefighters, police officers, emergency
managers, emergency medical technicians
or 9-11 operators. I didn’t have that
background. I think that some people in
some states struggle a little bit,
because if you come into this job with a
background in law enforcement, I think a
broader subset of your first responder
community will think you favor one group
over another. When you come in as a
soldier, you really don’t have any
institutional bias toward any of the
first responder groups. I think we’ve
been able to articulate that fairly well
and gain broad support out of our first
responder community.
Q. What has been the biggest challenge?
A. I think the team building. I think we’re there now. Having been on the job for almost six years, I think that we’re moving into a pretty good place in Alabama with our overall homeland security efforts. I think that different groups either accept or respect what we’ve done and understand the methodology. But when you’re a new entity, you’ve got a lot of money and you’re trying to make the right decisions, you’ll have folks coming after you who are distrustful of change and building the team. It was a labor of love, but it was tough. Now that we’ve done it and have some programs receiving national recognition, we’re respected in the state.
Another challenge is I work for a conservative Republican governor. Our legislature is two-thirds Democrat to one-third Republican in both houses. With that factor, the team building across the spectrum has been tough but rewarding.
Q. How would you characterize your office’s relationship with its federal partners? What would you change, if anything?
A. I think my biggest beef is what I explained to you earlier. We’re [Alabama] trying to make a case that the people serving on Main Street ought to be the focus. It ought to be the focus at the state level; it ought to be the focus at the national level. When we make a case to benefit our citizens and our first responders, and we are denied… or it becomes blatantly obvious that these are decisions made by people in white-walled rooms in Washington without a clue about what’s going on outside of the Beltway… it becomes incredibly frustrating. I think we’ve had some leaders in Washington that want to do the right thing, but then they get this quagmire with lawyers and this or that, and it turns into something we don’t recognize. That has been my biggest source of frustration.
An example would be a string of tornadoes that went through southern Tennessee and northern Alabama. The tornado killed 20-some folks in Tennessee, and five or six people in Alabama. It happened in a very rural part of Alabama. Tennessee was declared as a disaster within hours just about, and all of these FEMA people show up in Tennessee. Well, because it was a rural community in Alabama, we didn’t see anybody from FEMA. We added up our totals, and we asked for a disaster declaration. We didn’t get an answer for three weeks. Then, we got one on Friday afternoon at 5:00 P.M. going into a three-day weekend denying our request. They didn’t even bother to call Governor Riley to tell him they were denying his request. Now that’s the kind of stuff that you just scratch your head and say, ‘Where are we putting the priority here? It’s the same line of tornadoes, and it just happened to be rural people.’
Another frustration is when I look at the funding for homeland security grants. It’s based largely on risk and need. You’ve got 50 of the largest cities in the country receiving more grant money than the rest of the country combined. The irony in that is that’s the way Congress has designed it. But, who is in a better position to generate revenue to benefit their first responders? Urban areas or rural areas? When you consider that dynamic, you know that rural people can’t afford the things people in the cities do. We’re [the United States] only going to be as strong as our weakest link. We must understand that rural America provides the surge capability for cities. That dynamic frustrates me, but it’s a political one.
On a macro level, the fact that we had 85 or 86 committees and subcommittees in Congress with their fingers in grants colored for homeland security muddies up the process. As a result, inefficiencies and bad decisions are going to come out of that.
Q. Do you think states’ homeland security efforts are fiscally sustainable?
A. First of all, there is
not enough money to give everybody
everything they need. There’s probably
not enough money to give any homeland
security director everything he or she
needs. That’s why you have to make smart
decisions. One of the decisions you can
make in Washington is to give the
people, homeland security directors, or
give the state administrative agencies
and their governors the latitude of
knowing what they need in their state. I
don’t understand how somebody can sit in
Washington and tell me that I need to
spend 25 percent of my money on IEDs and
25 percent of my money on planning. How
about since I’m down here and I’m just
as much of a patriot as you are inside
the Beltway, let me decide, with my
governor, how we can best serve our
citizens here and what our priorities
are.
On the money piece, it’s an issue of what is a core competency for our country. Is providing for the common defense a core competency? If it is and you and I agree that it is, we need to fund it, OK? If we choose not to fund it, let me tell you what’s going to happen. You go to any governor. Now, granted, my governor [Governor Riley] has been hugely successful at creating jobs. Governors are interested in jobs, education, and healthcare. That’s what citizens expect. So, you go out and create a bunch of jobs. And lo and behold it triggers your cost share for additional federal funding. Let me just give you an example. Hypothetically, let’s just say that the average median income for a family in Alabama is $30,000. My boss goes out and creates a bunch of jobs, raises the median income in the state from $30,000 to $34,000. Well, when we hit $32,500 per family, our cost share for Medicare jumps up 25 percent. In one fiscal year, my boss has $160 million he’s got to come up with to fund Medicare in his state. Facing a budget crisis, do you think my boss is going to let elderly citizens go without healthcare to buy first responder equipment? It’s not going to happen. What you will see if the money dries up is legislatures and governors around the country not spending the money. If it is a core function of our government, then we’ve got to continue to make the investment. If we decide that it’s not, then let’s just decide that it’s not. But, we’re going to have to suffer the consequences when something happens to us.
Q. Has the state engaged the private sector in the homeland security mission?
A. Yes. I’ll give you
three really good examples. We hit the
volunteer citizen group really hard
here. I can tell you that were it not
for the outreach of faith-based
organizations, volunteer groups,
business in the wake of a disaster, we
would not have come through these
hurricanes as well as the state of
Alabama has. Our citizens and our
businesses come out to assist. That’s
one piece of it.
We have created a Web portal called SHARE where we have an online dialogue with the private sector. It’s not a zero-sum game for them, and we encourage a dialogue between security professionals and the private sector. If you ask most homeland security directors, they will tell you engaging the private sector is one of the toughest nuts to crack. We have a program called Be Ready Business where we are working with the Chamber of Commerce and the League of Municipalities to create a guide for our emergency managers to go and sit down with any business in their small town and help them become more resilient—things that they need to do in the wake of a disaster. Let’s face it. Most people will tell you, ‘Once I can flush the toilet, get the faucet back on and the power is back on, we’ve gotten through a disaster.’ You really don’t start getting though a disaster until people start going back to work and drawing a paycheck. That is engagement with the private sector.
The other is to leverage technology. We’ve got a program that’s won a number of national awards called Virtual Alabama. We’re trying to show some success now by uploading all of the cameras, security systems and floor plans in our schools throughout the state. When we do that, it gives me a real strong voice for engaging the private sector and saying, ‘There’s no reason why you should not put your plant cameras, your floor plans, your things, behind a firewall that we can then release if something happens at your plant… that allows the first responders to see what they’re getting into when they show up to deal with a shooter or a bombing or whatever at your plant.’
I’m knee-deep in our safe schools initiative right now. I’ve got to grow that out over the next year. When you’re engaging the private sector, they’re a little skeptical of government. You’ve got to show them success and that the system that you have can work. It’s going to take me a little bit of time to do it. But, I think it will be revolutionary when we do. It will take technology and bridge together the public and private sector in ways that have not been done before.
We’ve got some pretty aggressive programs. Again, that’s [engaging the private sector] a tough area for all homeland security directors.
Q. Did any recent responses or exercises provide valuable lessons?
A. We learn every time we
do one of these things. We continue to
learn when we deploy our assets to help
our neighbors that we can’t have enough
satellite communications. We also
recognize if we have a common operating
picture, like we do with Virtual Alabama
throughout the entire Gulf region, we
would all benefit; whether they’re
coming to help me, or I’m coming to help
them. We’re [state government] also
continuing to look at other statistics,
societal figures and demographics that
will help us in our evacuations. Every
time we have an evacuation, we learn how
to do things better the next time. We
practice that stuff in Alabama. We will
have evacuation drills before hurricane
season to make sure we’ve captured the
things that we’ve learned this year.
Every time we have something, we learn
from it.
Q. What are your main goals for the coming
year?
A. My boss [Governor
Riley] has two years left on the term.
We are in the process of looking at
those legacy systems we want to have in
place for the next administration.
Virtual Alabama is one. Our Be Ready
Alabama campaign is another.
Strengthening the investments that we’ve
made in our 67 counties with our strong
county teams is another. We have
capabilities in Alabama that were
unheard of 10 years ago. We have gotten
people to buy into our philosophy that
‘you may not have everything that you
need, but we’ve got it somewhere in the
state.’ We tell them if you need it,
it’s just as much yours as it is the
person that owns it. That’s a tough
thing to try to convince people of, but
I think that we’re on the cusp of doing
that.
We have made a lot of investments in bridging together radio systems at the county level, and we’re almost doing it at the regions now. Hopefully, we’ll be at the state level by the time my boss goes out of office. We’re going toward that now, but we’ve got some legacy things that we’re starting to transition to make sure they’re in place when the citizens have to elect a new governor.
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