1115.org

Swift on the heels of last week’s Senate Committee hearings, and the leak over the weekend of the House Republican committee’s draft report on the bungled response to Katrina, Michael Chertoff made what is usually described as a major announcement at a meeting of state emergency management directors in Alexandria, Va. on Monday.

“I want to be clear, as the secretary of homeland security I am accountable and accept responsibility to the performance of the entire department, good and bad,” Chertoff said.

You accept the responsibility? Does that mean you accept the blame? Shouldn’t you be resigning in that case?

Chertoff conceded major communications failures in the catastrophe, comparing the situation to “the fog of war.”

“The first step in addressing that fog is to enhance and expand a hardened set of communications capabilities,” Chertoff said.

Not a good sign, I don’t think. In his appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, last week, Michael Brown came across as honest, credible, trustworthy (to me, at least). That is not to say he didn’t screw up the Katrina response. But at last week’s hearings, what he was saying, and how he said it, made me believe him. However, I have a really hard time believing or trusting a guy who speaks like Chertoff just did. “Enhance and expand a hardened set of communications capabilities”? What the heck does that mean in English? In my experience, all 51 years of it, people speak like that only when they don’t understand what they are talking about, or when they don’t want you to understand what they are talking about, or both.

(My best guess at this point: he wants to take a bunch of cell-phones, spray them with some kind of cell-phone Viagra, add a finish of glitter spray to enhance them, and then inflate them using a bicycle pump.)

The story goes on to list “planned changes at FEMA” in the attempt “to fix what went wrong”. Apparently, these include:

Tracking trucks carrying food, water, ice, blankets and other emergency supplies by satellite to ensure they arrive at disaster sites quickly and with enough equipment.

This is, evidently, an important element of the plan, since it’s one of four changes that were listed. Will someone please inform Chertoff – preferably using an expanded and hardened set of communications capabilities – that satellite tracking is not a spatial acceleration system? If he goes “Huh?”, then switch to “tracking trucks by satellite doesn’t help them arrive on time, it only lets you know how late they will show up”. If you want them to reach disaster sites quickly, you might want to defrictionalize the dispatch sub-system of the relief plurality matrix.