Russ Vane, DDE ’19
I work for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and am the second chair for analytics on the CISA support team to FEMA and HHS for Region 1, the New England States. I work with the Physical Security Analysts to highlight impending shortfalls in capacity. I also support on-the-fly modeling to look over the horizon at the next wave in this campaign. My normal job is Future Planner at the National Risk Management Center in the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency. I’ve been attached as of March 27th to support FEMA Region 1 COVID-19 response as a virtual analyst for our Infrastructure Protection team. Their titles are Physical Security Analysts and there is one for each state (ME, NH, VT, CT, RI, MA) with a small leadership element near Boston. Recently FEMA stood up a new section — Region 1 Data Analytics Section. A team of nine, with two liaison officers — one from Health and Human Services and one from CISA (me). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is performing most of the modeling (3 of the 9). Three are FEMA analysts and they have a process improvement person serving to help us capture lessons learned (4/9). This team considers numerous inputs to calculate hospitalization, ventilator needs, and PPE needs on a daily basis. It’s a lot of smart, knowledgeable, hard-working people. No one wants to run out of anything, but as you know, we over-allocate at others’ peril. My job is to help people understand that precision isn’t accuracy. Just because the math says that one state needs 271 more ventilators from the stockpile by April 18th, doesn’t mean that someone else doesn’t have a more urgent need. My job this week is to explain how to select plans when the future is ‘iffy.’ But that’s why I was a USAWC student!
Dr. Russell R. ‘Russ’ Vane III
Distance Class of 2019, Seminar 20
