40 Use of the Homeland-Defense Operational Planning System (HOPS) for Emergency Management (PSAM-0456)

The Homeland-Defense Operational Planning System (HOPS), is a new operational planning tool leveraging Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's expertise in weapons systems and in sparse information analysis to support the defense of the U.S. homeland.

HOPS provides planners with a basis to make decisions to protect against acts of terrorism, focusing on the defense of facilities critical to U.S. infrastructure.

There are four major aspects to the program:

• Criticality assessments of high value facilities. These assessments provide high-resolution analyses that identify the specific attributes of a facility that make it critical as well as its impact to the nation or state were it to be compromised. The results are based on a composite matrix of specific projected casualty, economic, and sociopolitical impact bins. From these criteria, significant unidentified vulnerabilities are identified and secured.

• Vulnerability assessments of critical infrastructures associated with industry, agriculture, transportation, government/military installations, and large public structures such as sports arenas and convention centers. Vulnerability is a function of accessibility, attack deterrence capability (security measures, protective force), and the element's “hardness” or physical ability to withstand the attack or contingency stress.

• A robust communications network that enables strategic planners engaged in homeland-defense to access the HOPS database to make decisions for strategic planning, and to communicate with subordinate and parallel organizations engaged in homeland-defense and to emergency responders in the event of an attack.

• Analytic tools, such as three dimensional atmospheric plume modeling that utilizes real time wind conditions and conflict simulations that model the effectiveness of security plans.

To provide insight into potential successes by malevolent actors, HOPS analysts strive to base their efforts mainly on unclassified open-source data. However, more cooperation is needed between HOPS analysts and facility representatives to provide an advantage to those whose task is to defend these facilities.

Evaluated facilities include: refineries, major ports, nuclear power plants and other nuclear licensees, dams, government installations, convention centers, sports stadiums, tourist venues, and public and freight transportation systems. These analyses have in many instances identified vulnerabilities not previously identified.