On the day after the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson addressed attendees at the annual ASIS conference in Orlando on Monday where he stressed the importance of the relationship between the public sector and the private security community in helping to keep the nation safe from the new wave of threats that face our nation. While the odds of a terror group pulling off a coordinated attack on the scale of 9/11 are slim today given the improvements that have been made in the country’s security infrastructure and intelligence operations in the years since then, the threat of terrorism hasn’t not subsided and indeed has only grown in complexity.
Johnson, who was at the 9/11 memorial ceremony on Sunday, said in all of the interviews he took part in at the event that each reporter asked him the same question which was: Are we safer?
The answer, Johnson said was “yes” in terms of preventing another 9/11-style attack, however, the same cannot be said of so-called lone wolves or terrorist-inspired attacks like the one that took place in San Bernardino last December or at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando just three months ago.
“We’re now in a phase where we have to be concerned not only about the terrorist- directed style attack, the most prominent example being 9/11, to now the terrorist-inspired attack,” he said. “This morning before I came here, I went to the Pulse nightclub and it is a reminder of our new threat environment. In this new phase of self-radicalization, the lone wolf, the terrorist-inspired attack is, frankly, harder to detect by our law enforcement community and our intelligence community in advance.”
According to Johnson, security professionals and the industry, as a whole, plays a vital role in helping the government mitigate against the threat of lone wolves and others who seek to carry out similar attacks.
“Our partnership between the public and private sectors devoted to security – the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Defense, our intelligence community, the national security apparatus of our government, state and local law enforcement on the one hand and [security practitioners] dedicated also to public safety and the protection of our homeland in the private sector – has never been more important given our current threat environment,” Johnson told the crowd of attendees. “We must now, more than ever, function as an effective partnership for the good of the people we all serve.”
Having visited the site where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on 9/11 in Shanksville, Pa. several years ago, Johnson said he felt that particular hijacking was really emblematic of the terror threats that face the nation today.
“The monument there is striking because it is an elegant, sleek, modern monument in the middle of vast countryside in the middle of farmland and it brings home how random terrorism can be,” Johnson said. “No one, prior to Sept. 11, 2001, could have ever imagined that Shanksville, Pa. would be one of the sites of the worst terror attacks in our nation’s history.”
And while it is important to look back and commemorate these incidents – especially the heroes who sprung into action and the innocent people who lost their lives - Johnson also feels that we should be looking forward.
“We are a resilient, strong nation. We always come back stronger than we were before,” added Johnson. “It’s no accident that the year after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that thousands of additional runners signed up to run that same marathon in 2014.”
To combat the growing and ever-evolving threats we face, Johnson said they are building a more effective and efficient DHS. Through the “Unity of Effort” initiative that he announced two years ago, Johnson said they are doing a number of things to improve how they operate as an agency, such as centralizing decision making, restructuring their headquarters functions, and revamping hiring and budget-making decisions.
“After soliciting the views of our entire 226,000 workforce, we’ve developed a mission statement intended to unify our vast workforce across 22 different components. The principal words that came forth from our employees were honor, integrity, safeguard and values. Our mission statement therefore reads: With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland and our values,” he said.
In answering one of the most frequently posed questions to security professionals about what keeps them up at night, Johnson said it is the prospect of the next lone wolf attack that can take place almost anywhere, which is why the agency is leaning on its partners in the private sector so heavily today.
“Ladies and gentlemen, very often in Washington you hear a lot of canned statements. This is not a canned statement: We need you now more than ever for public safety, for the protection of your families, your businesses, the clients you serve – private and public,” said Johnson.
