MR: Yes. Okay. Just to kind of open up, Americans have been hearing a lot about terms weapons of mass destruction, weapons of terror. What kind of a threat do you think is possible biological/chemical warfare poses for the American public?

MR. CRAGIN: Well, Secretary Cohen thinks that it, it's a threat that we have to be prepared to address. It's a, it's kind of like, as he says, the poor man's atomic bomb----easy to make, not terribly easy to discover, and unbelievably lethal if utilized.

So it, it's not the sort of thing you can bury your head in the sand about and say it won't happen. We know that there are people in this world that have particular points of view and some of them like to emphasize that point through violence and terrorism.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. Describe your response scenario if there were an attack in a local city. After the first local responders arrive, at what point do, do federal responders come in and at what point would the raid(?) teams, in particular, be called in?

MR. CRAGIN: Okay. Well, you've asked, you've asked a good question by using the term federal responders. Secretary Cohen is trying to construct an infrastructure of providing military support to civil authorities, and the governors of the states are essentially the sovereigns of responsibility when it comes to dealing with either natural or manmade disasters within their particular jurisdictions. The federal government comes in to assist them in responding to the extent that their resources have been exhausted.

As part of the Secretary's initiative to integrate the reserve components into a response to weapons of mass destruction, he has established and sent to Congress as part of his legislative proposal ten rapid assessment and initial detection teams, the so-called RAID teams that you refer to, which will be full-time Army National Guard personnel which have the ability, because of the uniqueness of our national guard, to wear a state hat rather than a federal hat at, at the outset so that a governor can utilize these teams immediately without having to go through the legal process of federalizing them and having them provided as part of a federal resource.

And obviously, since we're positioning ten of them around the country in FY 99 (the fiscal year), we're going to be looking at interstate compacts between the states and things of that nature so that they can work, (1) cooperatively, and (2) have the mobility they need to immediately respond in, in some sort of situation. But once a state's local response was exhausted, the governor would call upon other resources that he or she had within their particular state, including the National Guard operating in a state role.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. If you, right now the, the Marine and the Navy their CBIRF Force and there's the Army Technical Unit, and there are various other federal emergency response teams. How does the RAID, I mean are these gonna be eliminated or are they all going to be working together?

MR. CRAGIN: Well, they, they'd all be working together. I think the, the federal government, with FEMA having the lead for consequence management, has a senior interagency working group that works to ensure that there's close collaboration and coordination within the various agencies of the federal government. They also work very collaboratively with their colleagues, the local responders, who are the, really the first people on, on the scene of any emergency in this country and their state emergency coordinators.

The, the CBIRTF that you mentioned is the Chemical-Biological Incident Response Task Force, made up of active duty Marines, approximately 300-person complement. They provide a decontamination and removal capacity, but they're most effective when they have been deployed to a scene in advance----say, for example, to a major event such as an Olympics, or something of that nature----because of their deployability. The Tech Escort Unit is a unit that's within the active Army, and it provides essentially escort services for munitions and things of that nature within, within the military and also provides expertise in, in the chemical environment. We see all of this as synergy.

The beauty of utilizing the Guard and Reserve to be part of this military team is that they have, as the Secretary likes to say, location, location, location. They are part of the communities in which they serve. They understand the local infrastructure. They've been working with these folks day in and day out, and they're there and they're accessible.

INTERVIEWER: I should say also at this time that my questions are not gonna be on. So if, at some point you need, need to rephrase the question and the answer.

MR. CRAGIN: You mean what you really meant to ask was?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. If you could just elaborate for, I mean about the, about the National Guard and the Army Reserve component, exactly what, I mean I guess I, I understand why the National Guard and, and the Army Reserve. But if you could explain why they're more capable, why they have the better resources to handle this than the Army, or the Marines, or the Navy, or something, or just the regular military, why the National Guard is chosen for this particular program.

MR. CRAGIN: Well, we have to take a look at this in the, in the context of the total force. I mean we don't draw specific distinctions between the reserve component and the active component. The Secretary looks at all of the members of the military as facets of the total force. And some of the competencies of this total force are completely, or to a great extent, resident in one or another of the components. For example, chemical/biological decontamination units are to a great extent in the Army Reserve. They're not in the active force. And so you have to reach to that part of your total force to take advantage of whatever you're looking for in your inventory.

INTERVIEWER: Um hmm.

MR. CRAGIN: And this isn't really just an Army Reserve-National Guard mission. We have within, in the reserve components today a group of men and women who are called Emergency Preparedness Liaison Officers. And they're reservists from the Navy, from the Air Force, and from the Army Reserve who are representatives of their services with each of the emergency preparedness offices at the state level in the National Guard, as well as with the FEMA regional offices and with planning agencies within the Department of Defense. And so you, you have a lot of synergy that is already resident that, that deals with emergency preparedness.

And what we have to do is we have to take it the next step from dealing with floods, and fires, and earthquakes, and ice storms to dealing with the tragedy of a, of a manmade disaster that involves weapons of mass destruction. And so we're involving all of the reserve components in this process.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that the RAID program is one aspect of a far greater program. If you could just briefly talk about that and say what is this offices and your particular responsibility in overseeing this. What is, what is your role?

MR. CRAGIN: Well, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs is the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense for all matters that relate to the utilization of the reserves. We have 900,000, approximately, reservists who are selected reservists and about 600,000 individual ready reserves, and they make up about 50 percent of the total force of our U.S. military. And in any given day we have as, have reservists serving on active duty someplace in the world: flying aircraft, being military police----you name it. So they all have these core competencies.

And what the Secretary is looking at with respect to weapons of mass destruction is to identify all of these competencies that we have within the force today: chemical/biological decontamination resources, for example; civil affairs; medical teams; reconnaissance teams; logistics personnel. All of those things that, in the event of some sort of disaster, you would need to call upon.

And what the Secretary did was he identified that there was one facet that was missing from all of these resources, and that was the so-called Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection teams. And so he's proposing to form those up. But they would become one facet of a much larger response force that would fall under a response task force commander were they to be federalized, rather than wearing their state hat as a member of the state national guard.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. Can you briefly just give a breakdown of the ten teams, or pick a team. Each team has 22 members. What is their background? Is it many chemical/biological experts? How are they trained?

MR. CRAGIN: Well, they're, they're going to be medical experts within that organization. There will be logistics experts. There will be communications experts. There will be people who have expertise in the chemical arena, people who have expertise in the biological arena.

One of the problems that we have learned from the experience of others who have been unfortunate enough to have one of these situations befall them----the one that comes to mind immediately is the, the gas attack in the Tokyo subway----was that for several hours they did not even know what they were dealing with. And if you don't know that you've been exposed to a contaminant, and then people are dispersed and they enter a number of different hospitals, for example, you've just contaminated all of those hospitals.

And so what, as, as the Secretary was developing this program, the people involved in putting it together met and discussed the issues with the local responders, those firemen and hazmat people in the communities, and said what is it that you truly need that you don't feel you have the ability to provide for yourselves? And the answer that came back generally was we need the experts to tell us what we're dealing with. You know, we can't just send in a canary and see if the canary flies out of the mine. We have to know what we're dealing with. And it was on that basis that we set up the Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection teams.

Now we're also fielding a number of reconnaissance teams and a number of decontamination teams, and they'll be stood up in the period of the fiscal years ninety-nine and, and oh-oh.

So this is, as I said, this is a program that encompasses much more than just these ten teams spread out throughout the United States.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. What are you doing to foster greater interoperability between the local forces and the federal forces if they were to be coming together? I mean are they being trained in the same--I mean you have the DPP program. Are members of the National Guard and the reserve component being trained at the same time as the local forces are, or is it a completely separate training program? So that they know, if they're all together, who has what responsibility and it runs very smoothly.

MR. CRAGIN: There, there are a number of training programs that are underway in, in the country, some of which are independent training activities, and others of which are joint training activities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducts a number of training activities that both military and civilian responders come together in. The Department of Defense has the lead in implementing the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici activities as far as training local responders, but they work hand-in-glove with their colleagues at other federal agencies in doing that.

National Guard and reserve component personnel are also integrated into that training activity. And in fact recently a number of National Guard personnel have become instructors in that program. Secretary Cohen also, as part of his defense reform initiative, also changed the complexion of the Directorate of Military Support, the so-called DOMS, that coordinates the provision of military support to civil authorities by placing the deputy director of that organization as a general officer in the National Guard and directing that up to 50 percent of the action officers in that organization would come from the reserve components.

So as we're working and, and interacting with our colleagues, I mean the true champions in, in all respects, the local first responders, we're also integrating our own organizations. And we're learning about the incident response system because that's the system that local responders use.

And when we come to a situation we come in a totally supporting role. We're not there as, you know, coming up over the hill saying here we are and we're in charge. We're there to provide support as requested to civilian authorities.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. With all this emphasis on chemical and biological preparedness, using the military to, you know, if there were an attack, is this diminishing the military's preparedness or the Army's preparedness for other military roles?

MR. CRAGIN: Absolutely not. I, I would imagine and, and believe that because we are training our folks in a more expansive role that we are providing them with additional expertise in force protection areas, so that they in fact can, one, protect themselves and also protect their colleagues within the force.

The, the asymmetric threat is, is, is opaque. I mean you can't really see it, but you know it's there. And it will come at you from a point of perceived weakness. And we have to ensure that we're able to assist in protecting the citizens of this country. And one of the ways that we protect the citizens of the country is to protect the force. And so I would suggest to you that the more training that we can provide to our force, the better off everyone is.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. Do you think right now the U.S. government----the DOD, FEMA, the federal agencies----are doing enough to get us to a state of general domestic preparedness? And if not, what more do you think we should be doing? Kind of in closing.

MR. CRAGIN: Well, that, that's an excellent question and obviously it calls for, for an opinion. I, I think that we all have to walk before we can run. Secretary Cohen wants to stand up these Rapid Assessment and Initial Detection elements and learn from them.

As you're probably aware, we intend to field them progressively through fiscal year 1999. They will go through a training program that will have them up and truly ready by the end of the year 2000, and we will be observing that process. He did not feel it was appropriate to launch a large-scale program without having a sense of the validity of the program.

And so we're moving, as I say, forward on that basis, working with our colleagues at FEMA. In fact, James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA, was one of the individuals who suggested to Secretary Cohen that he consider fielding these small rapid assessment elements.

So there's a lot of synergy going on there. As I say, they meet on a regular basis with their colleagues in the state emergency organizations, and they, of course, work on a day-to-day basis with the local, local responders. So I think it's a pretty good network.