Current Preparedness Issue Paper Term Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Current Preparedness Issue - Term Paper ExampleThus, it is important to analyze how noncombatant- multitude coordination to emergencies in our system occurs. Unfortunately, while keen strides have been made, the coordination between US civil and phalanx agencies at the local, state and federal level still have m each procedural and practical problems during emergencies. Hurricane Katrina was a fracture point that demonstrated widespread failure in the US disaster response system. There was widespread confusion on operations, communications, and protocols (Meyer and Baca, 2010). Blanco, Nagin and FEMA were unable to consecrate properly with each other at the leadership level, with competing and often redundant mandates. There were many other reasons for failure during Katrina, of course, some of which deserve more psychoanalysis later Racism among local officials that led to people being locked in, FEMA becoming a backseat agency after Homeland Security, etc. But what is illustra tive for the ecumenic disaster response lesson is that the problem was predictably caused by a lack of state participation in the National Response Plan. Further demonstrating the lack of any meaningful role by state and local governments in the adoption of the NRP is the fact that the officials who approved the NRP do not include a single non-federal representative. The section of Education, an entity with no role whatsoever in domestic incident response, is a signatory to the NRP, while FEMA is not. Not one governor or mayor subscribe it (Mayer and Baca, 2010). Things have improved since Katrina, but the government should still be preparing for another debacle on that scale in the interim. Levinson and Granot (2002) make clear why military command only is predictably likely to fail by analyzing the case study of Israel. Their disaster response agency, while nominally civilian, is still staffed by power military career men with little experience in civil-military relations. Whe n disasters happened like the 1990 train disaster, the scenario went along the lines of military thinking and not according to a course-of-business civilian accident. The case study indicates a few flaws with a purely military approach. First Military leaders are not used to workings with civilian chains of command or lack thereof. Firefighters, EMTs and police do not have as strong a chain of command as the military do, so more respect for individual autonomy is essential. Second Military leaders tend to respond to disasters by treating them as full-scale operations. They gum olibanum tend to overescalate responses, assign too many resources (as if the situation were a battle that must be overwhelmed), and can lead to panic. Third The focus on hierarchy not only leads to more alienation of civilian personnel, but it also has additional problems. It prevents the coordination of volunteers who are trying to do what they can but may new at excessive command and control. It alienat es those with management skills, both those people with little disaster experience and those with plenty. It can prevent coordination among multiple groups at different levels, specially pushing away NGOs like the Red Cross and religious associations. And in most emergency response agencies, the ground-level people have the most expertise, yet military planning tends to prioritize consulting people with less experience but more clout. In the military, experience at a core task is the key to progress In civilian life, there is