Perspectives on Homeland Security and Defense Course (PHSD)

March 5 - 19, 2010
Application Period: Oct 1 - Nov 2, 2009

Candidate Profile - Application Instructions - Application Form

The course goal is to permit participants to analyze and compare the nature and scope of different perspectives on homeland security and defense, and to visualize ways to increase regional cooperation in order to respond to natural and man-made threats throughout the Western Hemisphere. This course will not focus on US perspectives nor seek a universal expression of “Homeland Security and Defense”. The course is designed for a multi-country audience and will use a comparative approach, where the US approach/doctrine is presented as “one” approach.
The course objectives include:

• Analyze the increasingly transnational nature of the challenges to national and regional security and identify ways to prevent and respond to these challenges.
• Analyze implications of globalization, weak and failed states, and environment changes to defense and security.
• Compare countries’ responses to those threats and challenges to national and regional defense and security.
• Describe the relevance of cooperation and regional cooperation toward increasing Homeland Security and Defense measures.
• Assess the relevance and identify modes for improving the defense support to civil authorities.
• Identify measures to improve the nations’ ability to respond to natural and man-made disasters.

In the 2010 course there will be 42 participants selected during a competitive selection process from all qualified candidates from the Western Hemisphere. The course will be conducted in Spanish. The first two and one half weeks will be held in Washington, DC and the final four days will be held at NORTHCOM Headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There will be a distance-learning phase lasting two weeks just before the participants’ arrival to CHDS. This is a familiarization phase in which some of the recommended readings will be in English. Thus, participants must be able to read English. However, all course discussions will be in Spanish, with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish if an invited lecturer is presenting in English. 

Candidates may be civilians, military and/or from the country’s security forces and should be positioned in organizations participating in prevention-recovery from natural disasters or counter-terrorism. 
CHDS graduates must have waited one year from the last course they attended to be eligible to apply.