The U.S. Army has issued a new field manual (pdf) on the use of National Guard units known as “civil support teams” (CST) to respond to domestic terrorist or other incidents involving weapons of mass destruction.
“The mission of the WMD-CST is to support civil authorities at domestic CBRNE [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive] incident sites by identifying CBRNE agents and substances, assessing current and projected consequences, advising on response measures, and assisting with appropriate requests for additional support.”
The new manual describes the origins, capabilities, organization, and operations of the civil support teams. The Army approved the document for public release.
See “Weapons of Mass Destruction – Civil Support Team Operations,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-11.22, December 10, 2007.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.