The Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) and Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) panel members educate the audience on the ISAC’s and SCC’s role in creating a resilient defense posture for a contested homeland. HOMELAND DEFENSE INSTITUTE
CADET NANEA SATTERFIELD
The Homeland Defense Institute (HDI) conducted the second annual Homeland Defense Awareness Symposium (HDAS) July 11-12, 2024, in conjunction with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) Joint Training and Education Academic Workshop (JTEAW) to provide an integrated forum for strengthening academia, government and industry collaboration. The institute hosted 118 participants from research centers, NORAD and USNORTHCOM, academia, the private sector, interagency partners and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA).
In this era of strategic competition, the importance of homeland defense is magnified as the North American homeland faces escalating threats, necessitating cohesive solutions, cross-DOD and interagency coordination, and expanded collaborative research and development efforts to strengthen resilience and adaptability. This year’s symposium, which focused on homeland defense resilience, aimed to enhance readiness, responsiveness, and resilience through strategic overviews, research presentations, and goals such as expanding innovation communities, increasing threat awareness, and promoting integrated solutions for cyber and physical security.
The event was sponsored by HDI and was a formal collaboration between USAFA and NORAD and USNORTHCOM that advances homeland defense through strategic education, innovative research and collaborative partnerships.
Day 1 provided NORAD and USNORTHCOM perspectives and priorities on homeland defense to shape research opportunities and educational programs. NORAD and USNORTHCOM staff briefed on NORAD and USNORTHCOM commands, strategic competition, homeland defense resilience/critical infrastructure, and a campaign of experimentation. Day 1 culminated in a senior leader panel providing an overview of each directorate’s contributions to the NORAD and USNORTHCOM missions, threats to the homeland, and steps to increase homeland defense resilience.
Day 2 showcased homeland defense experts and research to increase awareness, promote whole-of-nation solutions and foster collaborative partnerships. The symposium’s keynote speaker was Justin Gerber, senior advisor for mission assurance and defense critical infrastructure, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Gerber highlighted the DOD’s critical infrastructure resilience and risk management efforts and emphasized the need for collaboration and more importantly, coordination of engagements across the whole of government. The symposium’s guest speaker was Professor Bert Tussing, director of the Homeland Defense and Security Issues Group, U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership. He provided insights on the need for increased public and private sector awareness of homeland defense threats, as well as the need for whole-of-nation preparedness.
This was followed by the Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) and Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) panel that educated the audience on the ISAC’s and SCC’s role in creating a resilient defense posture for a contested homeland. The goal was to ensure that critical infrastructure is protected and to prepare the nation for diverse security threats. The symposium was attended by 11 federally funded research and development centers and unaffiliated academic research centers — Argonne National Laboratory; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Institute for Defense Analyses Systems and Analyses Center; Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; MIT Lincoln Laboratory; MITRE; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies; University of Hawaii Applied Research Lab — that showcased their homeland defense research portfolios in a poster session.
The symposium concluded with four HDI-sponsored research presentations: Lessons learned from the Baltic theater and High North — protecting against critical infrastructure risks and subthreshold attacks in the North American Arctic (The German Marshall Fund of the United States); Risks of Arctic subsea warfare and impact on U.S. critical national infrastructure (Polar Institute, Wilson Center); civil-military air domain awareness integration (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments); assessing the viability of artificial intelligence to structure data for social network analysis of critical infrastructure response; and threat networks (Sam Houston State University Institute for Homeland Security). In addition to opportunities for networking and an exchange of ideas with renowned homeland defense experts, the symposium provided a venue to connect the NORAD and USNORTHCOM problem sets with practitioners, analysts and industry partners. The symposium successfully highlighted the interconnected efforts required to protect and sustain North America’s strategic support area against a diverse array of threats, reinforcing the vital role of collective engagement and innovation for future security.
Nanea Satterfield is a Cadet at the United States Air Force Academy and a summer intern at the United States Northern Command.