Northern Command Roles and Missions, and More from CRS
Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).
“Homeland Security: Roles and Missions for United States Northern Command,” January 28.
“Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Security Issues,” updated January 14, 2008.
“Pakistan’s Political Crises,” updated January 3, 2008.
“Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Oversight Issues and Options for Congress,” updated January 4, 2008.
“East Asian Regional Architecture: New Economic and Security Arrangements and U.S. Policy,” updated January 4, 2008.
“The United Nations Human Rights Council: Issues for Congress,” updated January 8, 2008.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.