When I first became involved in emergency management back in 1989, things were much simpler. Emergency Management was by and large considered a second career and emergency managers were predominantly male with previous careers in other services such as police, fire, and the military. we were tactically and operationally oriented and our focus was almost exclusively on the development of local emergency plans. The emphasis on civil defense planning that had characterized previous decades was being replaced by the concept of all hazards planning and the focus was shifting from strategic national issues such as nuclear war to planning for local disasters.
Things have changed. While the professionalization of emergency management has continued to increase, so has the complexity of the issues with which we now deal. One of the biggest changes that I have seen in emergency management is the shift from purely operational planning for local disasters to the consideration of more large-scale strategic issues. This is the product of our experience with regional catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina. The problem is that consideration of strategic issues requires that we put aside personal feelings in favor of an objective assessment of risks that could affect the people we serve.
Consider the over politicized issue of climate change for example. Despite how we may feel about the causes of climate change and on which side of the political debate we come down on, the fact remains that sea rise is occurring and that storms are becoming both increasingly frequent and more violent. Forecasts for 2023 suggest that it may well be one of the hottest years on record continuing the pattern of record droughts across the southwestern United States and affecting agricultural production. As emergency managers we need to deal in facts, not in political rhetoric and we need to be focused on the potential impacts that are occurring.
Another issue of concern is growing political violence within the United States. In her recent book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them political scientist Barbara Walter traces some 20 years’ worth of research on the issue of civil wars and concludes that the United States may well be close to civil war. She notes that two key indicators of a potential civil war are a 21-point polity scale, with minus 10 being full autocracy and plus 10 being full democracy, and a five-point scale measuring factionalism. On the polity scale the United States went from a + 10 to a +5 after the January 2021 storming of Congress and has since returned to a + 8. Walter notes that civil wars tend to occur when countries become factionalized not based on politics but on other issues such as race and religion and to be initiated by once-dominant groups who are experiencing an erosion of privileges they believe are theirs by right. Her opinion is that the United States is well within the danger zone for potential civil war.
How do we deal with strategic issues of this sort? Our traditional approach has been operational: creating contingency plans based on the military model that we have been using for generations. I suggest instead that we think more in terms of adaptable strategy that considers the risk associated with these issues and determine how we can repurpose what we’re already doing. Climate change clearly demands a focus on mitigation and long-range community planning, something that emergency managers aren’t particularly adept at. Civil war would most likely be targeted political violence, something for which we’ve already been preparing for with the war on terrorism. Our emphasis should not be on producing new plans but rather considering how we can adapt existing plans to these emerging threats.
Strategic thinking requires that we acknowledge potential threats, identify the risks associated with them, and consider what we would need to mitigate, respond, and recover from those risks. Isn’t this what we have always done? This has always been the basis of all-hazards planning. What’s required is to expand your thinking beyond short-term operational response to long-range strategy.
