CHDS State/Local / Beginning in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began to define and implement a national domestic all-hazards preparedness goal, intended to improve the nation's preparedness for national catastrophes, including terrorist attacks. DHS's approach was capabilities-based planning (CBP), adopted from the Department of Defense (DoD). CPB is intended to develop the means--capabilities--for organizations to set priorities responding to a wide range of potential, but uncertain challenges and circumstances, mindful of issues of cost and sustainability. This thesis is intended to help officials better understand CBP and the factors important to its successful implementation. These factors range from setting out the business case for CBP adoption to necessary organizational and cultural enablers. In conclusion, the thesis recommends enhancing the CBP approach to national preparedness planning through integrating its approach with use of a national preparedness management standard, coverage of the mission areas of the National Strategy for Homeland Security, and encouraging performance partnership and collaborative. / Analyst-In-Charge and Senior Analyst, US Government Accountability Office

CHDS State/Local / Responding and recovering from large scale disasters is extremely labor intensive. Unfortunately, a problem confronting all communities is inability to employ on a regular basis the large number of personnel needed to effectively manage large scale disasters. One possible solution to increase workforce capacity during times of critical need is for emergency managers to integrate a volunteer component into their existing disaster management plan. The federal government is assisting local communities with volunteer recruitment by nationally sponsoring Neighborhood Watch, Volunteers in Police Service, Medical Reserve Corps, Community Emergency Response Team and Fire Corps programs through county-wide Citizen Corps Councils. The acceptance of volunteers by paid responders can vary significantly from one community to another. The results of a 13 item questionnaire from 50 CERT volunteers from a metropolitan community, who had at least one previous experience working with paid responders during the recovery phase of a large scale disaster identified that 24 percent felt as if they were in the way, 20 percent felt as if they worked harder than the paid responders, 36 percent were given assignments that did not match their skill level or training, only 48 percent were tasked immediately and only 60 percent reported that paid responders were helpful. Encouraging is the fact that even though some experiences may have been less than optimal, 100 percent reported that they would feel comfortable working with the same responders during another event. In addition, two case studies are used to tell the story of CERT volunteers that assisted with the recovery phase after the 2004 hurricane season in Florida. Each case study concludes with a list of lessons learned that emergency managers can consider when planning for similar missions. Primary issues and courses of action are provided to assist community leaders with deciding whether or not volunteers should be integrated into their existing disaster management plans. If the decision is made to integrate volunteers, several recommendations are discussed to assist planners with developing implementation strategies to address the needs and concerns of both populationâ s volunteers and paid responders. / Division Chief, Tampa Fire Rescue

Wireless systems, including wireless local area networks (WLAN) and cellular networks, are increasingly being used for both commercial and military applications. For military applications, it is important to analyze the effect of interference on wireless communications systems. The objective of this research is to investigate the performance of variable code rate signals transmitted over frequency-nonselective, slowly fading channels in a worst case, pulse-noise interference environment. Both binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and noncoherently detected binary frequency-shift keying (NCBFSK) are considered. System performance with both Viterbi hard decision decoding (HDD) and soft decision decoding (SDD) is analyzed for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) alone and for AWGN plus pulse-noise interference for various receiver types and conditions of channel fading. The effect of varying the code rate, both for HDD and SDD, is examined. The amplitude of the signal power 2 c a is modeled as a random variable, and the channel is modeled as either Rayleigh fading or Ricean fading, depending on the modulation under consideration.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Efforts to improve the military decision and action cycle have centered on automating the command and control process and improving interoperability among joint and coalition forces. However, information automation by itself can lead to increased operator overload when the way this information is stored and presented is not structured and consistently filtered. The majority of messaging systems store information in a document-centric free-text format that makes it difficult for command and control systems, relational databases, software agents and web portals to intelligently search the information. Consistent structure and semantic meaning is essential when integrating these capabilities. Military-grade implementations must also provide high performance. A widely accepted platform-independent technology standard for representing document-centric information is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML supports the structured representation of information in context through the use of metadata. By using an XML Schema generated from MIPâ s Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM), it is feasible to compare the syntactic strength of human-readable XML documents with the semantics of LC2IEDM as used within a relational database. The insert, update, retrieve and delete performance of a native-XML database is compared against that of a relational database management system (RDBMS) implementing the same command and control data model (LC2IEDM). Additionally, compression and parsing performance advantages of using various binary XML compression schemes is investigated. Experimental measurements and analytic comparisons are made to determine whether the performance of a native-XML database is a disadvantage to the use of XML. Finally, because of the globally significant potential of these interoperability improvements, a number of look-ahead items to future work are proposed including the use of.

Proper procurement method selection is an integral part of project success. Better informed owners are able to more successfully select the project delivery systems that best suit their needs. This study utilizes utility theory to construct a framework to assist in the procurement decision making process. Through the use of expert weighting of important procurement criteria, real world projects were used to develop an overall threshold to which future owner's can compare their subsequent projects. This threshold, which marks the boundary between Design-Build and Design-Bid-Build, can be used to measure an owner's propensity to use either procurement method. It is fully tailorable to any owner, as owner-specific inputs are used. This ability for owners to objectify the largely subjective procurement decision making process allows owners to create a predictable, measurable trend, thereby improving their overall decision making ability. / US Navy (USN) author.

Defense against terrorism both at home and abroad has become a priority in the United States. As a result, resource allocation has also increased. However, even as resources increase, they are still finite. So the dilemma becomes how to efficiently allocate these limited resources. Currently the data, while abundant, is confusing. One suggested method is to allocate resources based on risk. However, there is virtually no guidance on how that risk should be defined or what the parameters are in a risk-based approach. Also, there is no flow of information model that outlines how to communicate to decision makers the risk reduction potential of each policy alternative. This thesis investigates the usefulness of quantitative risk analysis as an approach to determine the allocation of counter-terrorism resources. This approach develops a simulation-based quantitative risk assessment method that allows for subjective elements and uncertainties. The risk assessment information is then integrated with the cost of the alternatives to yield a risk-reduction-cost-tradeoff curve that guides decision makers with resource allocation decisions. This approach is demonstrated by using the Port Security Grant Program as an example. We find that the approach provides the decision maker the information required to discover robust resource allocation solutions.

Agent technology is widely deployed in numerous commercial areas such as networking, modeling, and software; however, this technology remains under-utilized by operational organizations within the United States Navy. This thesis will investigate the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) for military training simulations, particularly in the training of intelligence personnel in the Navy. The Computer Generated Forces (CGF) of the current Intelligence Team Trainer's (ITT) system initiate actions as a result of rigid scripted programming. Forces will execute the same actions regardless of what the user decides to do, resulting in highly unrealistic scenarios. For instance, in a scenario where an ARG (Amphibious Ready Group) transits the Strait of Hormuz, the response of Iranian P3 or an incoming dhow would be the same whether the battle group utilized frigate escorts or not. This thesis will produce very simple, but less rigid AI, which can easily be made more complex and intelligent in later phases. Demonstrations and assessments will validate the importance of AI integration for the ITT. Furthermore, this analysis of the requirements for the AI will assist training commands and combat information centers fleet wide with the range of realistic combat-related possibilities needed in order to ensure a fully capable 'combat ready' watch team.

Commanding Officer's Standing Orders are critical to shipboard watch standing. Written by the captain and used by watch standers, Standing Orders perform many unique and powerful functions aboard ships. Using genre theory, this study provides insight into the specific roles Standing Orders play. This insight also provides deeper perspective into commanding officer to watch stander relationships, as well as the nature of CO power aboard ships. Deeper understanding of the role Standing Orders play provides new perspective on shipboard relationships, communication, and culture. In turn, this new perspective can lead to reevaluation of Standing Order function and use.

Visualizing operations environments in three dimensions (3D) supports the warfighters' ability to make rapid, well-informed decisions by presenting complex systems in a naturalistic, integrated display format. Unfortunately, constructing these environments is a time-consuming task requiring specific expertise not typically available in the command center. The future use of 3D visualization in military operations depends on the ability of personnel with minimal graphics experience to create virtual environments quickly and accurately by leveraging data-driven customization of content from model archives with the data available in the command center. Practical 3D visualization depends on standardized scene autogeneration. The Extensible 3D (X3D) Graphics family of specifications is approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as the Web-based format for the interchange and rendering of 3D scenes. Previous work has demonstrated that an archive of X3D scenes, such as the Scenario Authoring and Visualization for Advanced Graphical Environments (SAVAGE) library, can be used to autogenerate sophisticated 3D tactical environments. Assembling and making sense of the data necessary to autogenerate a 3D environment requires context and good documentation, best accomplished through metadata. Metadata also supports data-centric, component-based design; key philosophies in promoting interoperability of networked applications. Coupled with recent developments in X3D, enhanced features of the Savage X3D Model archives are now sufficiently mature to support rapid generation of tactical environments. This thesis proposes an XML metadata standard to collect and organize the information necessary to create and populate a tactical 3D virtual environment: the Savage Modeling and Analysis Language (SMAL). The logical extension of a well designed standard is the ability to cross the boundaries of usage, allowing simulators to share data with command and control (C2) suites and mission planning tools based on the construction of a virtual scene. SMAL provides the informational "glue" necessary to perform tactical modeling, simulation, and analysis using networked, physics-based X3D virtual environments.

Network coding allows each node in a network to perform some coding operations on the data packets and improve the overall throughput of communication. However, network coding cannot be done unless there are enough packets to be coded so at times it may be advantageous to wait for packets to arrive. We consider a scenario in which two wireless nodes each with its own buffer communicate via a single access point using network coding. The access point first pairs each data packet being sent from each node and then performs the network coding operation. Packets arriving at the access point that are unable to be paired are instead loaded into one of the two buffers at the access point. In the case where one of the buffers is empty and the other is not network coding is not possible. When this happens the access point must either wait for a network coding opportunity, or transmit the unpaired packet without coding. Delaying packet transmission is associated with an increased waiting cost but also allows for an increase in the overall efficiency of wireless spectrum usage, thus a decrease in packet transmission cost. Conversely, sending packets un-coded is associated with a decrease in waiting cost but also a decrease in the overall efficiency of the wireless spectrum usage. Hence, there is a trade-off between decreasing packet delay time, and increasing the efficiency of the wireless spectrum usage. We show that the optimal waiting policy for this system with respect to total cost, under phase-type packet arrivals, is to have a separate threshold for the buffer size that is dependent on the current phase of each arrival. We then show that the solution to this optimization problem can be obtained by treating it as a double ended push-out queueing theory problem. We develop a new technique to keep track of the packet waiting time and the number of packets waiting in the two ended push-out queue. We use the resulting queueing model to resolve the optimal threshold policy and then analyze the performance of the system using numerical approach. / October 2016