Defense Critical Infrastructure: Actions Needed to Improve the Consistency, Reliability, and Usefulness of DOD's Tier 1 Task Critical Asset List

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) relies on a global network of defense critical infrastructure so essential that the incapacitation, exploitation, or destruction of an asset within this network could severely affect DOD's ability to deploy, support, and sustain its forces and operations worldwide and to implement its core missions, including current missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of its importance to DOD operations, this defense critical infrastructure could be vulnerable to attacks by adversaries, and vulnerable to natural disasters and hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Since September 2003, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs (ASD[HD&ASA]) has been responsible for developing and ensuring implementation of critical infrastructure protection policy and program guidance. To identify and help assure the availability of this mission-critical infrastructure, in August 2005 DOD established the Defense Critical Infrastructure Program (DCIP), assigning overall responsibility for the program to ASD(HD&ASA). In April 2008, DOD issued an instruction that further assigned responsibilities and prescribed procedures for the implementation of DCIP, among other things. In October 2008, DOD formalized the process for identifying and prioritizing its critical infrastructure. Since 2006, ASD(HD&ASA) has collaborated with the Joint Staff to compile a list of all DOD- and non-DOD-owned infrastructure essential to accomplish DOD's missions. To support this effort, the combatant commands and military services are to identify and place their critical assets into prioritized tiers, including Tier 1 Task Critical Assets, which are assets of such extraordinary importance that their incapacitation or destruction would have a serious, debilitating effect on the ability of one or more military services, combatant commands, or DCIP Defense Infrastructure Sector Lead Agents to execute the mission essential tasks they support. Defense Critical Assets, on the other hand, are the assets most critical for fulfilling overall DOD missions and are identified from the universe of Task Critical Assets. The Joint Staff worked with the combatant commands, military services, and Defense Infrastructure Sector Lead Agents to develop the current departmentwide list of Tier 1 Task Critical Assets. In October 2008, ASD(HD&ASA) formally accepted the Joint Staff's Defense Critical Asset nomination list as an initial list of Defense Critical Assets. In its May 2008 report on H.R. 5658, the House Committee on Armed Services addressed DOD's lack of progress in analyzing the risks of electrical power outages to critical DOD missions through DCIP and, among other things, directed that GAO continue its review of DCIP. As a result, we initiated our on-going review of the assurance of electrical power supplies to DOD's critical assets.