Date and Time
August 22, 2007 - August 24, 2007

Availability
By Invitation Only
RSVP required by 5PM August 24

Speaker
Paul Stockton (moderator)

Homeland security remains a house divided. Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which incorporated 22 disparate agencies four years ago, major challenges persist in building cohesion and cooperation across Department boundaries. Difficulties also exist for strengthening interagency cooperation between DHS and the other federal Departments (ranging from Defense to Health and Human Services) with homeland security responsibilities. Still greater challenges lie in building cooperation beyond the federal government. States, localities and the private sector are critical to homeland security, but do not ordinarily fall under the president's command, and have their own priorities related to infrastructure protection, disaster preparedness, and other key functions. The profoundly non-hierarchical structure of the homeland security system requires unprecedented efforts to create unity of effort: that is, coordination and cooperation to accomplish mutually agreed objectives, by components of the government and private sector that typically cannot order each other what to do.

The CISAC Forum on Homeland Security will enable approximately 25 private sector leaders, senior government officials and scholars to share insights on homeland security beyond their usual realms of interaction. We would like to launch a dialogue between participants on the problems that exist in creating coordination and collaboration in homeland security, how unity of effort might be defined (and ultimately measured in terms of effectiveness) as a means to overcome those problems, and how different approaches in industry and government might be adapted to fill specific gaps in homeland security cooperation. The conference will conclude with an effort to reach consensus on initiatives that seem most promising to pursue, both for action by policymakers and industry leaders and for analysis in follow-on discussions and academic research.