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"Critical Issues in Homeland Security: A Casebook encourages analytical and careful examination of practical homeland security problems through the presentation of contemporary cases involving major state or national events. Case studies demonstrate the complexity of challenges within the domain of homeland security policy and administration. Editors James D. Ramsay and Linda Kiltz carefully curated fourteen cases, all from top scholars and practitioners, to cover a broad range of legal, policy, and operational challenges within the field of homeland security. Timely and interesting cases on such issues as arctic security, the use of drones in targeted killings, cyber security, and the emergency management lessons of the 2010 Haiti earthquake give students a deeper understanding of the relationship between the theories and the practices of homeland security. Discussion questions at the end of each case and an online instructor's manual make Critical Issues in Homeland Security an even more effective learning tool for any homeland security program"--

Part I. Homeland security and organization and administration: a first look at homeland security organization / Keith Gregory Logan; Law and policy in homeland security and emergency management / Emily Bentley; Private sector and homeland security / Michael Chumer -- Part II. Homeland security resources: critical infrastructure protection / Steven D. Hart and James Ramsay; Homeland security intelligence / William J. Lahneman; Defense Support of civil authorities / Bert Tussing; Homeland security technology / Randy Griffith; Environmental security and public health / Terry O'Sullivan and James Ramsay -- Part III. Homeland security strategies: emergency management / Scott Robinson; Strategic communication for homeland security / Gail Fann Thomas; Strategic planning / Samuel H. Clovis, Jr.; American and terrorism in the twenty-first century / George Michael; Terrorism and counterterrorism: defending our communities at the local level / Michael L. Hummel.

This book, prepared by academics and practitioners, explores the various subjects that comprose the homeland security discipline in a post-9/11 environment, including administration, intelligence, emergency management, terrorism and counterterrorism, environmental security, public health, and much more.

Abstract
A few years after the end of the Cold War, Richard Betts argued that a specter was haunting the field of strategic studies, "the specter of peace," and asked whether that field should survive the new era. Today, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks that stimulated the field of homeland security (HS) studies, we could ask a similar question about that field. Should it survive as an academic field of study, and if so, how should it adapt and change in an era in which concerns about terrorism have in large part been overtaken by great power competition, climate change, AI, pandemics and a host of other asymmetric threats? Is it/can it be an academic discipline? A profession? What questions does it ask and what contributions does it make to practitioners, policy makers, or society? This article reviews the state of HS studies today and what sub-fields and disciplines it touches. It examines HS publication and education in the United States and evaluates the contributions that HS studies have made to date. This review suggests homeland security studies should indeed survive, as a meta discipline that serves a valuable purpose by addressing the question of how governments and societies should best prepare for and respond to threats to their security that can range from local to global in scope, from small to large in scale, and from tame to wicked in character.

Colleges and universities that educate aspiring homeland security professionals are duty-bound to supply a national workforce that is capable and adequately prepared to meet the National Preparedness Goal. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to suggest that developing a qualified homeland security (HLS) workforce could be considered a matter of national security. Indeed, an appropriately educated workforce is not only (at least implicit) part of the current FEMA National Preparedness Goal, it was identified as a national security imperative as early as 2001 by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. A baseline set of education standards for homeland security education would, at the very least, ensure that academic programs would consistently graduate a workforce that has a common set of competencies aligned to the needs of both public and private sector actors engaged in domestic and national security. In turn, employers and students alike would better understand not only what homeland security is, but what HLS graduates can do. Many mature disciplines ultimately use education standards to not only define themselves, but to sanctify and protect their professional boundaries. Nutritionists, for example, are professionals protected by registration, and licensure (as well as certification in some cases). Yet to become a registered dietician, one needs to graduate from an accredited academic degree program, the basis of which is compliance to a set of education (i.e., accreditation) standards assessed by an external organization. In the same way, and to advance the HLS profession, it makes sense to think that HLS practitioners should have educational backgrounds (like doctors or lawyers) that share some common set of educational competencies. To date, we observe that higher education's response as to how to best educate students to enter the homeland security enterprise has been to consider homeland security as a meta-discipline, or a discipline of disciplines. As such, homeland security curricula tend to include faculty, courses and student learning outcomes from a variety of other disciplines such as law, business, management, political science, international relations, emergency management, etc. Second, we note that academic homeland security education is still largely characterized as an emergent discipline. That is, the core theory of what is and is not "homeland security" remains under-developed. Indeed, it is accurate to characterize homeland security more as a "practice discipline" such as medicine, nursing or law (each of which, by the way, shares the characteristic of being meta-disciplines), albeit a practice with a growing literature and experience basis as well as a theoretical basis. This project leveraged the collective expertise of subject matter experts over roughly a 3-year period to emulate the structure and approach used by these better-established disciplines and create a consensus set of HLS education standards. Created were nine knowledge domains and a set of competencies (aka knowledge, skills and abilities as student learning outcomes) per domain. Taken together, such a set of knowledge domains and competencies (the minimum set of skills, knowledge, and abilities students of homeland security acquire academically) would describe the professional boundaries of the homeland security discipline. A major remaining challenge is how best to conceptualize and implement a system that integrates a set of competencies into all academic HLS programs nationwide. The paper tackles this issue by proposing a system of "voluntary academic accountability" from all academic institutions that offers a bona fide peer review of undergraduate level homeland security programs.

Whereas many researchers have developed sophisticated instruments to assess quality of care in nursing facilities (NFs), the concept of quality, its measurement, and its relationship to organizational characteristics remain important issues that are characterized by inconsistent findings across studies. The conceptualization and methodologies used in twenty-four NF quality studies are compared. The review identifies four main sources of variation hypothesized to be important bases of inconsistency in the NF quality literature: (1) differences in conceptualization and operationalization, (2) differences in the unit of analysis (resident vs.facility), (3) differences in sampling method and sample constitution, and (4) differences in the main method of analysis. As an empirical test of three of these sources of variation, the authors investigated relationships between primary organizational characteristics and various measures of quality using a sample of 104 Wisconsin NFs. From both the comparative and Wisconsin analyses, implications for research are drawn.