Porous Lines of Defense

As is often the case, in the face of great threats with high operational complexity, the United States must turn to its last lines of defense first with greater frequency. This was true in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, in what was a predictable disaster, as the city’s system of levees could not cope with a major hurricane. The post-Katrina era has seen either the federalization or militarization of disaster response become all the more frequent.

This pattern follows the run up of mega disasters affecting the country that quickly overwhelm local emergency response resources and capacity. From record-breaking hurricanes, such as Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Superstorm Sandy, to name a few, to record-setting flooding and wildfires, national disaster-readiness capabilities must be shored up. What the pandemic has shown us is that these capabilities must be broadened to respond to a vastly interconnected and rapidly evolving risk landscape that can lay havoc on communities and the economy whether we face a smoking crater or blue sky disaster.

The scale, impact, and likelihood of disasters is proving that the model of building fortress nations is very difficult. This highlights the fact that people are the first link in the chain of national resilience. It should be troubling from a public policy and safety point of view that such a large percentage of the population falls through porous safety nets at the local, state, tribal, and territorial levels, eventually falling in the hands of strained federal programs. Whether in the form of direct relief, post-disaster support or otherwise, the pyramid should be inverted—for a federal or military intervention is often the costliest kind and can engrain moral hazards in how community risk sharing is perpetuated.¹

This is not to suggest that federal disaster response programs are not important. Rather, the observation is that the risk landscape and the clustering of mega disasters, for which the COVID-19 pandemic is the most acute event in the crescendo of complex risks affecting the country over the last 50 years, are calling up last line assets first. Even then, the long range impact of these events is still overwhelming. For example, post-Katrina New Orleans has never fully recovered its pre-disaster population. A similar out migration from Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria saw more than 120,000 people leave the island, in a veritable climate change mass exodus. In this environment, the tax base, population, and workforce of a community deflate at the same time, making post-disaster economic recovery all the more complex.

As in Hurricane Maria, the deployment of military assets, including the hospital ship USNS Comfort, to buttress local response capabilities is an important part of the response and recovery effort. Indeed, much of FEMA’s work during the crisis has been to serve as a supply chain management and logistics agency to coordinate the national response to the pandemic. Military-style airlifts of vital supply for frontline healthcare workers, such as PPE, ventilators, and the N95 masks, were the type of materiel FEMA’s supply chain was mobilized to support—a demand curve covering virtually the entire country, and world, seeking the same supplies at precisely the same time.

The lack of prefunded strategic capabilities, stockpiles, and in particular financial resources that can be mobilized nationally on an all-hazards basis is clearly a vulnerability. Since the taxpayer is increasingly first in line to absorb the long term costs of large-scale complex events, whether they are caused by man-made, natural, or emerging threats, then it would stand to reason that better stewardship of these resources can be handled through pooling economic resources against future threats. These funds should be entirely segregated, evergreen, and held as a risk-agnostic instrument that can accrue over time and used to shield the very taxpayers and citizens who are already first in line to bear the brunt of economic losses.

A national chief risk officer should have overall accountability for shoring up financial resilience on an all-hazards basis and to report on meaningful ways of bridging known protection gaps that expose citizens and communities to increasingly predictable and deleterious losses.