Risk Management Within Homeland Security Essay

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was formed more than a decade ago with a very significant mission of safeguarding America's homeland from hazards, threats, and national disasters. This department conducts its mission through securing the country's borders, preventing terror attacks, and responding to incidents or threats to its citizens (Miller, n.d.). Generally, the most important roles of the Department of Homeland Security are to lead a concerted national effort in securing the United States and preserving the American way of life. The department was established in 2002 in reaction to the 9/11 terror attacks and has since developed a nationwide strategic plan for evaluating and updating its mission statement and effectiveness of operations. These plans can be updated and transformed to accomplish the needs of the Department for Homeland Security and the American people.

As we move into a new era were a more robust and urgent homeland security program is needed, it is important to talk about how officials are managing all of the risk. There are a multitude of threats; from terrorism, where tactics are all the more unconventional an unpredictable, to climate change, with extreme weather conditions causing severe droughts or other catastrophic storms. The risk accepted by federal officials must be weighed and prioritized in a manner that is conducive to the longevity of the nation but also eliminates political or other personal agenda. To ensure a standardized approach the Department of Homeland Security adopted a risk management. The following will look at defining what risk management is as well as an example of how it is being incorporated within the homeland security enterprise and how doing so is of benefit.

The homeland security is a department responsible for developing various mechanisms aimed at ensuring that the country is safe. The main focus of homeland security is to shield or reduce the cases of terror attacks. The prevention and response to both manmade and natural disasters also fall under homeland security (McElreath, Jensen, and Wigginton, 10). The Department of Homeland Security, therefore, has a broad range of responsibilities. At its formation in 2003, the department was composed of twenty-two federal agencies with over 180,000 employees. Homeland security’s formation was necessitated by the September 11th attacks in United States. Today, the Department of Homeland Security

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is third largest Executive Department of the Federal Government charged with protecting the security of American homeland. Its primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reducing vulnerability to terrorism and minimizing the damage from potential attacks and natural disasters. The DHS was created by President G.W. Bush in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on America in 2001. It is relatively new agency that continues to evolve in the 21st century. In my chosen topic I will perform research on the history and creation of Department of Homeland Security, identify 3 of the 22 agencies within the DHS and describe their responsibilities. The purpose of this paper is to define and give detailed information about Homeland Security in the United States. Exploration of this topic will enhance knowledge about DHS and help understand the responsibilities of the agencies.

values, building security partnerships, and building a culture of resilience (President 2011, 4). The DHS has shown progress in building security partners through the department’s efforts in information sharing efficiency as demonstrated in fusion centers. Building a culture of resilience entails the DHS mission of understanding and reducing the vulnerability of the nation, and mitigating the damage from an attack. Evaluating the DHS’s progress in this task is difficult, because it is uncertain how much of the nation’s resilience is inherent, and how much is a product of the DHS’s actions. Future terrorism projections state that weapons of mass destruction and explosive devices will be more accessible to terrorists and organizations (West 2012, 4). A suggested strategy to combat this forecasted threat is to develop stronger relationships with foreign governments and other stakeholders. The DHS will need to build a stronger relationship with other government departments in order to access the resources and intelligence to build the suggested relationship with foreign governments and stakeholders to meet this future threat.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a proposed rule, on December 30, 2015, entitled "Retention of EB1, EB2, and EB3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers." Included in the proposed rule is the long-awaited provision for the ability to obtain an employment authorization document (EAD) based on an approved form I-140, employer petition. Unfortunately, eligibility for this immigration benefit under the proposal is highly restrictive and therefore will aid a far narrower group of foreign national workers than had been hoped.

The Department of Homeland Security supplies a national protection plan concerning critical infrastructure security. This plan targets a wide audience, including public and private critical infrastructure owners and administrators. Managing risks through identifying, deterring, and disrupting threats to critical infrastructure is the direct focus of this plan. The ability of an organization to reduce the impact of a threat that has occurred and reducing the impact of one that may occur is essential to an active security posture. Compromise of a critical infrastructure such as oil, airports, or traffic flow management could result in a major loss of life or resources (Department of Homeland Security, 2013).

The Establishment of the Department of Homeland Security as Established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002

The Department of Homeland Security is liable for establishing the safety and defense of the U.S. from terrorism and natural disasters. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on America by terrorists, Department of Homeland Security’s main concern has been on federal measures to prevent terrorism attacks and handle other crisis situations. When the Department of Homeland Security was created it had four goals: to diminish America’s vulnerability to terrorism by securing the borders, minimizing the damage and speed the recovery from attacks that happen to occur, to develop technologies devices to detect terrorism and to share all intelligence gathered from all federal agencies (Haulley, 2006). These four

Homeland Security was created by President George W. Bush as a counter defense to the tragic September 11 attacks. It is the third largest cabinet department after the Department of Veteran Affairs and Defense. The department was official formed on November 25, 2002 around almost a year after the actual attacks. Its primary function was to protect the United States and its territories from natural disasters, man-made accidents, and most importantly terrorist’s attacks. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security after the mailing of the anthrax spores. By establishing the Homeland Security Act of 2002, it consolidated U.S. executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single cabinet agency. In March 2002, the department created the Homeland Security Advisory System. This system was a color coded

The ability of the Department of Homeland Security to effectively manage risk is vital to national security. Risk in general, is something that is permanent but because this is known, strategies can be used to mitigate situations as they present themselves. Government managers must manage risk in a complex environment taking into consideration the diverse missions and multiple objectives of public agencies (Hardy, 2014). The role of risk management within the homeland security enterprise was managed by best and worst case scenario planning. This is something that is inevitable as we are faced within a definite variety of threats. One way to grade or rank threats is through worst-case analysis. As this analysis can be used for worst-case scenarios the federal government cannot leave out lower ranking situations (Roberts, 2007). Since the Department of Homeland Security is charged with managing risk within the enterprise, a basic equation is used to help figure out different variables and how they would be affected.

Before Risk Assessment can be addressed we must first briefly discuss Risk Management (RM), the framework of which is where risk assessment resides for the United States Army. The Army uses RM to ensure mission accomplishment in current as well as future operations and applies to operations and non-operational activities (Department of the Army [ATP 5-19], 2014, p. 1-1). The Army process of RM utilizes five steps as part of its holistic approach to mitigate risks, but because this paper’s focus in on the Risk Assessment of the management solutions identified last week, it will only focus on the first two steps of RM, Identify the hazard and Assess the hazard.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, a series of risk management evaluations were created by the US Federal Government to assess the future risks the homeland was going to face. When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was officially created in 2002, more effective risk management assessments were re-designed to evaluate the past and present dangers, prevent them and respond successfully to more terrorist attacks. Since 2001 until 2007, a development of risk assessment has been divided in phases to be able to reach a better formula that would analyze the risk within the homeland security and provide the appropriate fund to homeland security enterprise.

Good security management requires risk management to mitigate or reduce risk to an acceptable level within an organization. Security management’s objective is to protect the company and its assets. A proper risk analysis will identify the company’s major assets, threats that put those assets at risk, and estimate the possible damage and loss a company may endure if any of the threats were to become real. With a good risk analysis, management can determine the type of budget they want to set to mitigate threats. Risk analysis justifies the cost of the countermeasures against the threats and determines the benefit or worth of security

The reader will become familiarised with the term risk and it definitions from specifically the ISO 31000 standard of risk management and also the definition of risk from the criminology crime triangle. Which one of these two definitions that are the most suitable for usage within the security industry will be discussed and evaluated. How and why consequence is important when assessing risk priorities and determining where to allocate resources will be examined and answered.