I don't see what in that article makes you think it's busywork. Do you have some reason for believing that these efforts to coordinate emergency communications are not needed?
That is correct. Those agencies have wildly different communications needs, and one system, full of compromises, will never work as well as them paying attention to what's built in their own backyards.
The "all-hazards" mandate will destroy any chance of that group ever reaching consensus. Been there, done that. When it hits the field, there are technical aspects that only affect subsets of those agencies that make a unified system either unfeasible or outrageously expensive.
Also think about coverage of such a system and plan. Do you cover big cities first? Do small towns in the middle of nowhere get ignored? Etc.
That question and lots of others are all things that smaller system planners and engineers can and do work through, every day... Those items looked at inside a national project would be dropped as "not high enough priority".
I'm quite literally right in the middle of a year or more long planning cycle for one dinky (compared to those guys) agency and already see where the compromises have to be made to make it "standard".
That big group is a farce that will never be able to produce anything but papers. Papers that will largely be ignored by local folks who "know the lay of the land" so to speak.
Even my "big" group needs to try desperately to stay out of the way of locals who've figured out a better way than we can possibly imagine. Our recommendations will need to be bendy and squishy for some things and inflexible on others. But they're still just recommendations with a few hard rules tossed in.
Example: One lone large city but in mountainous terrain agency here in Colorado, stayed on VHF analog longer than any other their size -- because their system engineer knew he would need ten years to acquire enough extra sites to cover the exact same geographical area, at very high cost to the taxpayer.
He also knew he'd be mandated to move to 700-800 MHz eventually, but a big delay gave time for all that extra infrastructure to be built and paid for. That's a very simple one. If he'd have just blindly followed the mandates passed down from NTIA, he'd have put many Public Safety workers lives in danger because his coverage area would have dropped significantly.
There are much harder problems out there than that obvious one, in anything called a "national communications plan". What's the intended coverage area of this giant group's systems? A big strategic plan is nice, for throwing underneath a log to set it on fire when you're cold and the infrastructure is out. Real strategy happens where the need is.
Plus, let's not forget that it's been tried before. By the time those systems were deployed, they were hopelessly out of date and not able to be upgraded without starting over on a new design. Technology is moving way faster than that group can. It's too big and will be bogged down by massive bureaucracy.
So yeah... Count me in the camp that says it's a waste of money and time...
Stuff like the NIFOG is where Feds can be useful. DHS did a good job on that. When they start talking about specifics, they're reaching too far down into the local knowledge pool's forte' and ignoring it. That never works out well.
