NISAC?

NISAC

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2002, it instantly became the third largest Department in the U.S. government.  Its birth also triggered the largest reorganization of American government since the Department of Defense was created in 1947.  With all that reshuffling, it should be little wonder some smaller parts of DHS have ended up being known only to a few.  One such part of DHS is the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) - an entity that has Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) at the core of just about everything it does.  As described by a DHS fact sheet, NISAC,

"...provides advanced modeling and simulation capabilities for the analysis of critical infrastructures, their interdependencies, vulnerabilities, and complexities.  NISAC is a partnership between Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). It was established in the year 2000 to integrate the laboratories’ expertise in the modeling and simulation of complex systems for evaluating national security problems."

If you would like to learn more, find below some links to help you do that:

• DHS NISAC Homepage
• DHS NISAC Fact Sheet
• Los Alamos NISAC Homepage
• Sandia Labs NISAC

Comment: If you hang around the water cooler long enough with folks in the Federal government who are responsible for dealing with "big, bad and ugly", sooner or later you will hear the term "reachback".  Reachback is a way of saying if personnel in the field need expert advice, there is an organization somewhere that has spent a lot of time and money to be ready for whatever has just been encountered.  When it comes to disasters, infrastructure, and DHS - reachback equals NISAC.