WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- The Senate Homeland Security Committee's report on Hurricane Katrina, released in its entirety Tuesday, outlines the initially slow but then dramatic military response to the storm, after it threw off its bureaucratic shackles in the face of the devastation.
What followed was an outpouring of military units on Louisiana, largely voluntary, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency struggled to respond.
Such improvisation is not recommended for future operations, and far greater planning and preparation is needed, the committee concluded.
"Although individual commanders exercised their own initiative to prepare, identify and alert troops as a result of the forecasted magnitude of Katrina, and had expedited certain procedures, these actions were not coordinated by senior leaders in the Defense Department. For the most part DOD's actions were consistent with the type of pre-hurricane actions it had undertaken in the past. One of the lessons from Katrina is that these procedures are inadequate in the event of a catastrophic incident," states the 750-page report, "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared."
After a seven-month investigation, however, there are still unanswered questions -- many of which the White House has refused to answer.
"One of the key questions is why did it take so long for the president to respond to (Lousiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's) request for troops?" the report states.
Blanco made a vague request -- "send me everything you've got" -- on Monday, Aug. 29, the day Katrina made landfall. She followed up the next day with a request for active duty troops, as she thought the National Guard forces there were insufficient and getting overwhelmed.
By Friday, the senior military commander on the ground, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, agreed and put out an informal request to a Marine general for additional forces.
On Saturday, U.S. President George W. Bush announced the deployment of 7,200 active duty troops.
"Unfortunately much of the story of the president's decision remains opaque. The White House refused to permit the committee to interview White House personnel about the president's decisions or actions of the White House staff. DOD instructed its personnel not to discuss communications with the White House," states the report.
Another question that remains unanswered concerns a several-day dispute between Blanco and the White House regarding the federalization of the Louisiana National Guard troops.
Doing so would have prevented the Louisiana Guardsmen from being used as law enforcement -- arresting looters, for instance. As a federalized force, they would have been limited by U.S. law to rescue, relief and basic order assignments. According to the report, Karl Rove, then assistant White House chief of staff, apparently advanced the idea that the troops be federalized.
Then-FEMA director Michael Brown told the committee he wanted to federalize the troops and declare an insurrection so the government would have "active duty troops who are ready, willing and able to kill in that area, because we can't do search and rescue with that kind of stuff going on," he said.
However, media reports of looting and shooting, based on faulty information from New Orleans city officials and witnesses, were alarmist and largely inaccurate. At the Superdome where thousands sought refuge, for instance, there were 11 deaths; not one was a murder. There was one suicide. There was only one shooting inside the Superdome and that was the accidental shooting of a National Guardsman by a fellow soldier. There was one attempted rape, but no rapes, according to the report.
Bush and Blanco met on Friday, Sept. 1, to discuss options for more troops and Blanco's opposition to federalization. Because of the White House's refusal to meet with the committee, the Senate panel was unable to determine whether Bush delayed in announcing the additional troops as a means of pressuring Blanco into accepting federalization.
For all the serious problems highlighted by the committee report, there were bright spots -- particularly in the military response. By Tuesday, April 30 -- the day it was becoming clear to people outside New Orleans that the levees had been breached and large parts of the town rapidly flooded -- then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told their commanders to work under verbal orders, rather than waiting for the cumbersome but necessary paperwork. And while the Pentagon had received just one request for assistance so far from FEMA, commanders were to try to anticipate what they might be asked for so they could immediately provide it.
The report singles out Lt. Gen. Honore for particular foresight. He began tracking the storm that would become Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 8, even before it had gathered enough force to be declared a tropical depression. Before receiving any orders, he declared the start of "Exercise Katrina" and moved himself and a small staff to Mississippi to be in place once the storm blew past.
He did not get all the support he needed.
At 1 pm on Sunday Aug. 28, before Katrina hit, Honore asked U.S. Northern Command -- the four-star headquarters that would be in charge of responding to a domestic emergency -- to assess what military assets would be available to Honore to respond to a catastrophic hurricane. He asked for a response by 7 pm that night, and expressed particular interest in helicopters, boats and communications equipment. Honore's commander sent the same request to Joint Forces Command. NORTHCOM also forwarded the note to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.
But, according Maj. Gen Richard Rowe, NORTHCOM's operations director, the Joint Staff did no planning because it had not yet received a request from FEMA, as doctrine demands.
A day later, 12 hours after Katrina made landfall, Rowe was unable to provide Honore with a list of available assets.
"Somewhat hamstrung by (the Joint Director of Military Support's) desire to wait for a request for assistance," Rowe wrote.
JDOMS, the Pentagon office assigned to provide military support to civilian agencies, issued its first official order during the Katrina disaster in response to a FEMA request on Monday, Aug. 29 at 7 pm, for two helicopters to survey damage -- 24 hours after receiving the request. Those helicopters did not arrive until Tuesday, Aug. 30, because that is the day FEMA said it wanted them.
"The expeditious response of the helicopters suggests the Army was ready to mobilize, but that in this case orders slowed the response," the report states.
"The lack of situation awareness early in the response may have contributed to a delay. Other witnesses have attributed the time of response to department bureaucracy and a cultural reluctance to commit (DOD) assets to civil support missions unless absolutely necessary," the committee report said.
Many DOD leaders did not know the levees had been breached until Tuesday or Wednesday morning, and most gained all of their immediate information from media reports early in the crisis. Most believed media assessments that New Orleans, having made it through the storm intact, had "dodged a bullet." The breeching of the levees was slow to make the airwaves.
By Tuesday morning, England told NORTHCOM it had "a blank check" for any DOD resources believed reasonably necessary for the Katrina response. Myers told the service chiefs to begin deploying forces they thought might be needed, but had not yet been requested.
"This third phase of the response represented the type of approach that may be necessary in a catastrophic incident. Rather than wait for requests or mission assignments, agencies must anticipate requests and begin deploying assets in advance of any such requests," the report states.
According to the report, that began to happen in spades, to the point that NORTHCOM had difficulty accounting for all the military forces descending on the area.
"Right now I have an unexplained 13th Corps support command flowing, 1,000 more 82nd Airborne Division than we asked for, odd Navy comms pieces. Unexplained Marines. Services are killing me off buddy deals," complained Rowe to Honore in an e-mail quoted by the committee.
FEMA and Homeland Security Department officials have complained the Pentagon did not do enough to help them and was slow to process their requests. The committee takes issue with that assertion.
"Our investigation has found that, in fact, FEMA originated very few requests in this early period. In one instance, DOD received complaints about actions it did take," the report states.
For instance, the Navy had ordered the USS Bataan, a helicopter ship, to move forward to New Orleans to prepare to provide assistance to FEMA. However, on Monday afternoon, a senior DOD representative told the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense that "folks over here are (hopping mad) about the news that a Navy ship announced their deployment without evident legal authority."
The USS Bataan and its helicopters ultimately rescued, evacuated or transported 2,000 people.
Many other Navy ships also showed up, helping in rescue and relief efforts, as did military forces from across the United States.
"Any reluctance gave way beginning Tuesday, as top DOD officials took steps to expedite the responsiveness and bypass the ordinary approval process in moving assets forward," the report states.
