ON A CHILLY APRIL morning in the Missouri Ozarks an Army drill sergeant barked at a huddle of raw Army recruits. "Don't bunch up," he told us, "one grenade could get you all." The sergeant understood an important general principle that we did not. Indeed, the very first principle of security and survivability is rooted in the distribution of "value." And first value of all values is the physical security of your people.

Given the importance of human life it is particularly distressing that the experience of September 11th has taught us so little about the fragility of our current work model, based upon commuters swarming to large common urban workplaces and reversing this migration in the evening.

In spite of the current evacuation planning (see: "Head for the Hills? It Won't Be Easy" Wash Post, March 16, 2003) we are not encouraged that either people or critical government functions can survive or insure continuity of operations in case of terrorist attack, protesting tobacco farmers or natural calamities.

President Bush, in his support for the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, has focused upon the need for assuring the protection of those critical infrastructures and assets of public health and safety, governance, economic and national security.

Even assuming that people can safely be evacuated from urban centers in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, we must deal with the issue of continuity of operations of our key government agencies and other critical entities, such as public health. To accomplish this second goal, we must provide these geographically dispersed collections of people, who form these key government agencies, the ability to communicate in a secure, robust manner. The lesson of Sept.11 was that the phone system and even Internet information access was overwhelmed by people striving to understand the unfolding calamity and to communicate with friends and family.

So how shall we proceed? A key element in the solution is support of Telework initiatives for government and other critical workers. The current arguments for employing Telework are compelling: improved employee quality of life, reducing environmental pollution and dependence upon fossil fuels, savings in the cost of infrastructure or reducing the daily commuter traffic congestion. Physical security of our workforce and continuity of operations in our government makes even a stronger case.

Insuring the continuity of operations for key government and public health agencies requires the daily work of key agencies to be done in a geographically dispersed manner. Fundamental to this task is a robust, broadband communications service between every home, business and government facility. The required communications backbone currently exists in the networks put in place through the huge investments by the public into the telecommunications industry in the last decade. What remains is the extension of the broadband to the "last mile" into the home and office. These currently involve complex regulatory, market and investment issues. Whether through a public/private partnership, as currently being pursued in Utah in the broadband UTOPIA project, or by using some other investment model, we must move ahead from our current market stagnation.

President Eisenhower, in 1955, announced the "National Defense Highway System" initiative to build a superhighway network of over 41,000 miles of roads to enhance our National security through the ability to move military equipment and personnel more efficiently. Independent of the military use, the economic benefit of building this national road system has been a 30-fold increase in our GNP.

The rationale for building a "National Defense Communications Network" is no less important to our personal security and survivability than Eisenhower's national roads system was in 1955.