Office of Operations Coordination

The Office of Operations Coordination is responsible for monitoring the security of the United States on a daily basis and coordinating activities within the Department and with governors, Homeland Security Advisors, law enforcement partners, and critical infrastructure operators in all 50 States and more than 50 major urban areas nationwide.

Leadership

The Office of Operations Coordination is headed by Director for Operations Coordination, Roger T. Rufe, Jr. (USCG Ret)

Mission

The Office of Operations Coordination works to deter, detect, and prevent terrorist acts by coordinating the work of  federal, state, territorial, tribal, local, and private sector partners and  by collecting and fusing information from a variety of sources.

Goals

The Office is responsible for:

• conducting joint operations across all organizational elements.
• coordinating activities related to incident management.
• employing all Department resources to translate intelligence and policy into action.
• overseeing the National Operations Center (NOC) which collects and fuses information from more than 35 Federal, State, territorial, tribal, local, and private sector agencies.

Organization

Information is shared and fused on a daily basis by the two halves of the Office that are referred to as the “Intelligence Side” and the “Law Enforcement Side.” Each half is identical and functions in tandem with the other but requires a different level of clearance to access information. The Intelligence Side focuses on pieces of highly classified intelligence and how the information contributes to the current threat picture for any given area. The Law Enforcement Side is dedicated to tracking the different enforcement activities across the country that may have a terrorist nexus.  The two pieces fused together create a real-time snap shot of the nation’s threat environment at any moment.

Through the National Operations Center, the Office provides real-time situational awareness and monitoring of the homeland, coordinates incidents and response activities, and, in conjunction with the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, issues advisories and bulletins concerning threats to homeland security, as well as specific protective measures. The NOC – which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – coordinates information sharing to help deter, detect, and prevent terrorist acts and to manage domestic incidents. Information on domestic incident management is shared with Emergency Operations Centers at all levels through the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN).