America the Resilient

Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters

Stephen E. Flynn

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008

Summary:  A climate of fear and a sense of powerlessness caused by the threats of terrorism and natural disasters are undermining American ideals and fueling political demagoguery. Rebuilding the resilience of American society is the way to reverse this and respond to today's challenges.

STEPHEN E. FLYNN is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House, 2007), from which this essay is drawn.

Second is resourcefulness, which involves skillfully managing a disaster once it unfolds. It includes identifying options, prioritizing what should be done both to control damage and to begin mitigating it, and communicating decisions to the people who will implement them. Resourcefulness depends primarily on people, not technology. Ensuring that U.S. society is resourceful means providing adequate resources to the National Guard, the American Red Cross, public health officials, firefighters, emergency-room staffs, and other emergency planners and responders.

The third element of resilience is rapid recovery, which is the capacity to get things back to normal as quickly as possible after a disaster. Carefully drafted contingency plans, competent emergency operations, and the means to get the right people and resources to the right places are crucial. Some small communities, such as Eden Prairie, Minnesota, are organizing themselves so that everyone can pitch in right away in the case of an emergency. Citizens are being trained to be auxiliary first responders, and local companies are committing themselves to providing resources and lending expertise in order to dramatically reduce the economic aftershocks of any disaster. Among the larger cities, Seattle has put together a business emergency network, a communications system linking the city government and businesses. It is designed to aid the local business community in predisaster preparation and to help disseminate information quickly and accurately when disaster strikes.

Finally, resilience means having the means to absorb the new lessons that can be drawn from a catastrophe. It is foolish for a society to go right back to business as usual as soon as the dust clears, by, say, rebuilding homes on floodplains or failing to resolve interoperable communications issues that confound coordination and information sharing among first responders. People must be willing to make pragmatic changes, such as relocating when their homes are repeatedly destroyed or reaching deeper into their pockets to pay for the communications and other tools communities need to improve their robustness, resourcefulness, and recovery capabilities before the next crisis.

Working to strengthen the four features of resilience is a far more open and inclusive process than a national effort centered on security, because it requires drawing on the United States' greatest strengths: civil society and the private sector. Furthermore, whereas boosting the security apparatus is usually very expensive, advancing resilience almost always provides a positive return on a relatively smaller investment. As a June 2007 report by the Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based group "committed to ensuring the future prosperity of all Americans," concluded, "The ability to manage emerging risks, anticipate the interactions between different types of risk, and bounce back from disruption will be a competitive differentiator for companies and countries alike in the 21st century."

BRAVE NEW AMERICA

Increasing the resilience of the American people will require presidential leadership. For years, the fear of terrorism has been stoked and the federal government's ability to defeat radical jihadists has been exaggerated. This has created a passive citizenry that oscillates between fretfulness and cynicism. In his or her inaugural address, the next president will need to call on Americans to recapture their spirit of endurance and optimism. During the new administration's first hundred days, it must work with Congress to put in place programs that help Americans build robustness, achieve resourcefulness, enhance their ability to recover swiftly, and revise designs and protocols based on lessons learned from crises. Given the American tradition of self-reliance and volunteerism, the effort will strike a strong bipartisan chord.

The new secretary of homeland security should be charged with transforming the department's law enforcement culture, which so far has held citizens and the private sector at arms length. He or she must also reach out to the private sector and task it with taking the lead in advancing resilience at the company and community levels. CEOs should not require much prodding. As globalization, interdependence, and geopolitics become more volatile forces, people and companies will gravitate to those firms and places that are dependable. Those enterprises that do poorly at managing crises because they fail to foresee and prepare for them will lose shareholder value and market share. Companies adept at managing operational risk can also help communities rebound when disasters strike. In 2005, for example, Wal-Mart was able to bring 66 percent of its stores in the Gulf States back into operation within 48 hours of Hurricane Katrina's coming ashore, providing many of the critical supplies that everyday citizens, small businesses, and government agencies needed to get back on their feet.

Two tricky but potentially influential allies in the effort could be the mass media and Hollywood. To a large extent, the stories Americans see on their small and big screens have been part of the problem. A more inspirational and less dramatic reality is rarely portrayed. As the mass evacuation of Manhattan on September 11 made clear, in real crises Americans largely keep their wits about them and assist one another. During World War II, Hollywood played a helpful public-service role by supporting war-bond drives and producing training films, while providing much-needed entertainment. Media executives today could do the same by committing themselves to relating stories and communicating messages that inform and inspire individual and societal resilience.

In the end, everyday Americans will have to step up to the plate in their homes, schools, and workplaces. An August 2006 study sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security found that nine out of ten Americans believed that being prepared for emergencies was important. Yet a poll commissioned in the same month by Time magazine found that only 16 percent of Americans thought they were "very well prepared" for an emergency.