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

Current Preparedness Issue - Term Paper ExampleThus, it is important to read how noncombatant- forces coordination to emergencies in our system occurs. Unfortunately, while great strides mystify been made, the coordination between US civil and military agencies at the local, state and federal level still have many procedural and practical problems during emergencies. Hurricane Katrina was a crack 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 coordinate properly with each other at the top offership level, with competing and a lot redundant mandates. There were many other reasons for failure during Katrina, of course, some of which deserve more analysis after Racism among local officials that led to people being locked in, FEMA becoming a backseat agency after motherland Security, etc. But what is illustrative for the general 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 pregnant role by state and local governments in the adoption of the NRP is the fact that the officials who approved the NRP do non include a single non-federal representative. The Department of Education, an entity with no role whatsoever in domestic consequent response, is a signatory to the NRP, while FEMA is not. Not one governor or mayor signed it (Mayer and Baca, 2010). Things have improved since Katrina, exactly 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 former military career men with little experience in civil-military relations. When disasters happened like the 1990 train disaster, the scenario went along the lines of military idea 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 working with civilian chains of command or lack thereof. Firefighters, EMTs and police do not have as crocked a chain of command as the military do, so more respect for individual autonomy is essential. Second Military leaders slope to respond to disasters by treating them as full-scale operations. They thus 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 delays the coordination of volunteers who are trying to do what they can but may smart at excessive command and control. It alienates those wi th management skills, both those people with little disaster experience and those with plenty. It can prevent coordination among multiple groups at different levels, especially pushing away NGOs like the Red Cross and apparitional associations. And in most emergency response agencies, the ground-level people have the most expertise, yet military intend tends to prioritize consulting people with less experience but more clout. In the military, experience at a core task is the key to promotion In civilian life, there is