Customer Reviews

Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years

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Michael Chertoff is a much respected jurist who was Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2005-2008. In this book he provides his assessment of how DHS did from its creation in January 2003 to January 2008. Not surprisingly his overall assessment is that DHS performed very well indeed during this period.

Chertoff's assessment is questionable however in that he actually appears to know very little about the mechanisms and processes that drive DHS. He devotes an entire chapter to risk management without ever giving any indication he really understands what risk management means. He briefly discusses Hurricane Katrina as an example of the failure of all levels of government to retrain "risky housing development' and "to invest in maintaining New Orleans' levees. " Yet he says nothing of the failure of DHS to step in with a risk mitigation plan or of the disastrous failure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the aftermath of the hurricane. Indeed in a separate chapter on FEMA, Chertoff allows that, "By all accounts FEMA has acquitted itself well", a clear indicator that he does not know what he is talking about.

The message that one takes away from this book is that Chertoff was perfectly content to sit in his office everyday and have his staff brief him on what they thought he needed to know without really troubling himself to determine how the disparate components of DHS actually worked. He clearly had no interest in developing anything like a risk management strategy for DHS. This book provides an excellent insight into the mentality of the man who was responsible for homeland security yet had no clear picture of what that responsibility actually involved. This is a fascinating book for aficionados of government incompetence.

This book was a required textbook for one of my homeland security courses in my Master's degree. One of the better texts that I have been assigned, and I'm definitely thankful for that!

Chertoff discusses the Department of Homeland Security from its beginning in January 2002 through January 2008.