The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) yesterday released its strategy for securing the nation’s northern border with Canada, setting out three goals that include deterring and preventing terrorism and illegal cross border activities, maintaining efficient and secure travel and trade, and ensuring the resiliency and safety of communities.
While there are no surprises in terms of the goals, the Northern Border Strategy emphasizes five “means and methods” for achieving its goals, including using a risk-based approach that relies on partnerships, information and intelligence.
“Information and intelligence enable DHS to maximize resources and conduct successful operations along and across the northern border,” the strategy document says. “The information and intelligence that DHS and other partners such as fusion centers gather, analyze, and disseminate enables law enforcement and other partners to make risk-informed decisions when interdicting threats, conducting investigations or safeguarding and encouraging lawful trade and travel.”
The strategy recognizes the importance of relationships and partnerships between various domestic partners, including the state and local governments and the private sector, and also discusses throughout the document the importance of working with Canada, the largest trading partner with the United States.
The strategy’s vision statement says that “We envision a U.S.-Canada border where DHS entities, our U.S. federal, state, local, and tribal partners, and our Canadian counterparts collaborate to deter and prevent terrorism and transnational threats at the earliest opportunity, including before they reach North America.”
The most important aspect of creating the strategy is establishing the goals and means to achieve them in a document as a way to provide leadership and guidance for the agencies that operate under DHS, Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a homeland security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Defense Daily yesterday. But there are key secondary audiences, including Canada, and it’s important that their interests are considered in the strategy and that “we treat them as a partner,” he said.
The use of technology as a force multiplier is critical in helping to achieve a more secure northern border where legitimate trade and travel are also expedited, the document says. Technology is important for enhancing domain awareness and achieving interoperability, including with Canada, it says. Biometrics, scanning and screening systems, radio frequency identification technology, license plate readers and interoperable communications have been and will continue to be important as part of a northern border operations, it says.
Personnel, including a focus on cross-collaboration within DHS, working with various partners in fusion centers, and a focus on infrastructure and assets along the northern border are also highlighted as key means and methods for accomplishing the strategic goals.
In the strategy, DHS takes the unusual step of publishing the various types of measures that need to be take to assess the success of its border management operations and policies.
“Given the unique nature of the environment and operations there, properly measuring our success will require reevaluating the performance measures we have traditionally used along the border,” the strategy says.
Traditional output-based measures such as the number of illegal border crossers apprehended, the number of people and vehicles expected at border crossings, will continue to be used. In addition, DHS uses, and is building new, outcome-based measures that try to show the benefits of a program, the strategy says.
DHS is also developing process-based performance measures “such as cooperative operations and intelligence exchanges” that can “boost the productivity of law enforcement and security officials,” the document says.
“DHS will measure our success in the northern border environment partly on how many seizures, interdictions, arrests, or investigations occurred but also will use measures that evaluate how well we facilitate trade and travel and how well we work with our partners to enhance security and efficiency,” the document says.
CSIS’ Nelson says that DHS “should be commended” for publishing its concepts for measuring its performance in implementing its goals for a northern border strategy. Publicly stating that the goals will be measured “leads to Congress and the pundits out there saying, ‘You said you were going to measure it. Okay, let’s see what you have,’” Nelson said. DHS is “taking some institutional risk” by opening itself to such public evaluation but “it’s a credit to the department for doing that.”
As for the tactical details that will flow from the strategy and how well the goals are achieved, Nelson said it will take a few years for these to play out as budgets are appropriated and the department aligns resources.