The Washington Post article discusses the latest of a series of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) exercises called TOPOFF; the acronym stands for Top Official and is a congressionally mandated series of exercises that are designed to bring together the leadership from local, state, and federal levels to focus on fortifying the country’s ability to prepare for and respond to a terrorist attack. This event, TOPOFF 4 CPX, a Command Post Exercise (CPX) held as a warm-up for a full-scale exercise in May 2007. This CPX involved more than 4,000 people from more than 85 federal, state, local, and private partners. Participants in the CPX and the 2007 full-scale TOPOFF 4 exercise will be Portland, Oregon; Phoenix, Arizona; and Guam. Each of the jurisdictions receives DHS grant funds to cover exercise-incurred expenses: upward of $3.5 million for the CPX.
TOPOFF challenges participants to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from a simulated terrorist attack involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or other explosive weapons. Each TOPOFF exercise involves a two-year cycle of planning, seminars, exercises, and training activities leading to a CPX in the first year and a full-scale exercise in the second.
The first TOPOFF exercise took place in 2000 before DHS was formed. In 2003, TOPOFF 2 was held in Chicago with a simulated biological weapons attack and in Seattle with a simulated dirty bomb/radiological dispersal device . Connecticut and New Jersey were the venues for TOPOFF 3 in 2005 , with a full-scale exercise that simulated a coordinated terrorist attack involving biological and chemical weapons; additional support was provided from the United Kingdom .
The scenario for TOPOFF 4 exercise takes place in the imaginary city of Landport, Oregon with a fictitious terrorist group setting off a significant explosion and threatening Washington, DC with another explosive device. TOPOFF 4 is the first to bring DHS, FBI, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) together on separate exercises?FEMA’s Forward Challenge 2006, which involved a test of federal continuity of operations plans, and FBI’s Marble Challenge 06-02, which involved a law enforcement WMD exercise?built around a common scenario. The FBI portion has been classified as secret.
“This is an opportunity to strengthen our decision-making capability,” said George Foresman , DHS Under Secretary for Preparedness, “This year’s exercise was the first time the federal government engaged state and local partners in a meaningful way.” His statement, then, certainly begs the question: What were the roles given to state and local partners during TOPOFF 2 and 3, if TOPOFF 4 is the first time the federal government engaged them “in a meaningful way”? During the previous TOPOFF exercises, the local and state jurisdictions accepted the millions of dollars in grant funding to support the planning and execution of the exercise and turned it over to the First Responder Community that has been doing the same exercise planning and execution for their jurisdictions for years. On the day of the exercise, most of the top officials at the local, state, and federal level were nowhere to be found?save the obligatory press appearance to state how great the exercise was and how much all the participants had learned from working together. They were not in their jurisdictions’ emergency operations centers or a location they would be expected in during times of crisis, providing leadership and resolving policy issues that will emerge during a catastrophic event. If TOPOFF 4 will be an “opportunity to strengthen our decision-making capability” as indicated by Under Secretary Foresman, then the top officials at the local, state, and federal levels need to put aside the “tyranny of the day to day urgent” and focus their jurisdictions on the exercise at hand, taking seriously that terrorists armed with a weapon of mass destruction targeting US cities is not all that obscure a scenario.
