Stephen E. Flynn: “Resilience: Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters”

8/8/2019 Stephen E. Flynn: “Resilience: Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters”

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³Resilience: Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters´

by

Stephen E. Flynn, Ph.D.President

Center for National Policysflynn@center fornationalpolicy.org

A Paper Pre pared for the

Global Future Forum General Meeting 2010:

Building Resilience in the Face of Future Shocks

at

Marina Mandarin HotelSingapore

Se ptem ber 13, 2010



³R esilience: Defying Terr orism and Mitigating Natur al Disasters´ by Dr . Ste phen Flynn

President, Center for National Policysflynn@center fornationalpolicy.org

Introduction

The k ey to assuring saf ety and pr os perity in the 21st

Centur y is possessing resilience in

face of chr onic and catastr ophic risk s. The years ahead will be mar k ed by tur bulence,f ueled by unconventional conflict, lik ely changes in climate, and the sheer com plexity

and interde pendencies of modern systems and networ k s. This places a premium on assuring that communities, cor por ations, and countries have the capacity to withstand,

res pond, r apidly recover , and adapt to man-made and natur al distur bances. Those that lack resilience will place themselves at a com petitive disadvantage since individuals and

investors will gr avitate away f r om places and com panies that cannot demonstr ate acapacity to pr ovide continuity of essential services and oper ations. R esilience also has

deterrence value in dealing with man-made threats. Adversaries or terr orists that target resilient societies or systems will f ind little disru ptive return for their effort.

Given the benef its of resilience² and the direct and indirect risk s associated with f r agile

or brittle jurisdictions and systems²it is ver y much in the interest of the internationalcommunity to advance it at all levels. This will require developing policies and

incentives that encour age community resilience at the local level, and within and acr oss networ k s and inf r astructure sectors both regionally and globally. It also requires

ack nowledging that saf ety and security efforts that aim to eliminate risk s will always reach a point of diminishing returns. In most cases, a more prudent and realistic

investment is to build the sk ills and capabilities for managing risk s.

An em phasis on resilience pr ovides a com pelling r ationale for greater levels of cooper ation and collabor ation within and acr oss societies and between the pu blic and

private sectors. At the community level it requires a str ong civic s pirit of neigh bors wor k ing with their neigh bors. When it comes to assuring the continuity of oper ations for

essential systems and networ k s, the users, designers, oper ators, managers, and regulators all have a shared interest in inf r astructure resilience and each has an im portant r ole to

play. There should be no higher priority than engaging and integr ating the multi plicity of parties into a common effort to build a more resilient global community.

The sim ple fact is that there never will be enough pr of essionals at the right place at the

right time when terr orists or disasters strik e. Intelligence and technologies are falli ble and Mother Nature cannot be deterred. While many might wish it were other wise, when

it comes to detecting and interce pting terr orist activities or dealing with a catastr ophic natur al event, the f irst preventers and f irst res ponders will almost always be civilians who

by circumstance f ind themselves unwitting targets of terr orists or in the path of a disaster when it strik es.



The Rol e of Resilience in De fying Terrori sm

The tactical and str ategic value of em phasizing resilience as counterterr orism im per ative has been reinforced by a re port on ³Assessing the Terr orist Threat´ that was released on

Se ptem ber 10, 2010 by the National Security Pre paredness Gr ou p.1

The re port highlights how the diversifying nature of the terr orist threat has been motivated in part by a gr owing

recognition by al Qaeda and associated organizations that terr orist attack s on the West and es pecially the United States do not have to be s pectacular or catastr ophic to be

eff ective. As the attem pted bom bing of Northwest Air lines Flight Num ber 563 on Christmas Day 2009 dr amatically illustr ated, even near-miss attack s can gener ate

consider able political fallout and a rush to im pose ex pensive and economically disru ptive new pr otective measures. Since relatively small and unsophisticated attack s have the

potential to gener ate such a big- bang for a relatively small investment, the bar can be lowered for recruiting terr orist oper atives, including those who belong to the targeted

societies.

A succession of recent cases that have come to light within the United State and elsewhere in the West has highlighted that terr orist r adicalization and recruitment is

indeed gr owing. The pr ocess of tr aining is being facilitated by an increasing diverse arr ay of global bases f r om which terr orist gr ou ps are oper ating. There seems no longer

any clear pr of ile of a terr orist. Moreover , the means thr ough which many of these persons have been r adicalized over the Internet, suggests that the r ank s will be continued

to be f illed by those who are dr awn to the r adical causes f r om the privacy of their own bedr ooms. Among the new oper atives dr awn f r om Western countries, the only common

denominator appears to be a new found hatred for their native or adopted countr y; adegree of danger ous malleability; and a religious f ervor justifying or legitimizing

violence that im pels these ver y im pressionable and perhaps easily influence individuals towards potentially highly lethal acts of violence.

The diversity of this arr ay of recent terr orist recruits presents new challenges for

intelligence and law enforcement agencies that are already over-stressed and inundated with information and leads, to run these new threats to gr ound. Sophisticated attack s

such as those carried out on New Yor k and Washington on Se ptem ber 11, 2001 require a

1 ³Assessing the Terr orist Threat.´ A R e port by the National Security Pre paredness Gr ou p by Peter Bergen

and Bruce Hoff man with contri buting su pport by this author . (Washington: Bi partisan Policy Center , Se p10, 2010). The NSPG is com posed of a distinguished bi partisan gr ou p of ex perts led by former 9/11

Commission chair and vice-chair Governor Thomas K ean and Congressman Lee Hamilton. It mem bers

include former U.S. Secretar y of Energy and U.S. Senator E. Spencer Abr aham, Peter Bergen, Dr . Ste phen

Flynn, Dr . John Gannon, Dr . Bruce Hoff man, former Congressman Dave McCurdy, former Attorney

Gener al Edwin Meese III, former U.S. Secretar y of Homeland Security and Governor of Pennsylvania Tom

R idge, Fr ances Townsend, former U.S. Attorney Gener al R ichard L. Thorn burgh, former Congressman Jim

Turner , and former Secretar y of Agriculture and BPC Senior Fellow Dan Glick man. Michael Allen,former ly of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council, is the Executive Director .



larger gr ou p of oper atives, communications with those overseeing the planning, and time to conduct surveillance and rehearse the attack. Money, identify documents, saf ehouses

for oper atives, and other logistical needs have to be su pported. All this effort ends u pcreating opportunities for detection and interce ption by intelligence and law enforcement

off icials.

Less sophisticated attack s on the other hand, particular ly those being conducted byhomegr own oper atives and lone wolves are almost im possi ble to prevent. In the May

2010 bom bing attem pt on Times Square it was a sidewalk T-shirt vendor , not the NYPD patr olman sitting in a squad car directly acr oss the street, who sounded the alarm about

Faisal Shahzad¶s ex plosive-laded SUV. Shahzad was not on any f eder al or NYPDdatabase that identif ied him as a sus pected terr orist.

Given that smaller-scale terr orist attack s are being motivated because they are harder to

prevent and can yield a res ponse that is costly and disru ptive to the targeted society, it follows that there is tactical and str ategic value f r om investing in better res ponding to and

r apidly recovering f r om attack s when they occur . If attack s have limited potential todisru pt a society in any meaningf ul way, they become less attr active to carr y out. In

other words, should targeted nations demonstr ate an unwillingness to inflict damage on their way of lif e in the face of terr orism, terr orism becomes a less attr active weapon.

Alternatively, a lack of resilience that results in unnecessar y loss of lif e, destruction of pr operty, and disru ption of k ey networ k s and f unctions is reckless. It is also a str ategic

vulner ability in an er a when non-state actors will continue to elect to wage their battles in the civil and economic s pace r ather than the conventional militar y s pace.

The Rol e of Resilience in Mitigating Natural Di sa st er and Larg e-S cal e Accid ent s

Most natur al disasters and large-scale accidents are far more r outine than people are gener ally willing to ack nowledge. Individuals, community, and cor por ate leaders of ten

convince themselves that disasters reside in the realm of chance and fate. But the realityis that the risk of disaster is gener ally predictable. In addition, the over whelming costs

associated with disasters are almost always associated with failures to pre pare for them u pf r ont. Losses and damages rise ex ponentially when risk mitigation measures that

assure adequate r obustness are not in place, when res ponses to disasters are poor ly planned and executed, and when efforts to s peed recover y and im plement changes based

on lessons learned receive too little attention.

Accordingly, while the danger that disasters will occur is inescapable, boosting resilience will always pr ovide a positive return on investment. On a micr o scale, it is far more cost

eff ective to mak e an u pf r ont investment in saf eguards that mitigate risk and consequences, than to pay the price for res ponse and recover y af ter a foreseeable hazard

manif ests itself. To illustr ate this point, one need look no f urther than the Deepwat er Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico where inadequate attention to preventative

measures and lack of planning for dealing with the af termath of what was widely viewed



as a low pr obability event ended u p leading to a massive ecological disaster . Another com pelling exam ple f r om current events is the devastation and tremendous loss of lif e

wr ought by the Januar y 2010 earthquak e in Haiti and the com par atively much smaller tollex perienced by Chile shortly thereaf ter in the face of a far more power f ul earthquak e.

Fr om a macr o stand point, a society¶s level of resilience will increasingly be a source of

its global com petitiveness. The one thing that can be saf ely predicted with conf idence is that the 21

st centur y will be mar k ed by major disru ptions arising f r om man-made and

natur al threats. There is the risk of pandemics, earthquak es and volcanoes, and more f requent and destructive storms associated with climate change. In addition, as the wor ld

witnessed with the near meltdown of global f inancial mar k ets in the fall of 2008, with increasingly com plex and interde pendent networ k s su pporting modern global economic

activity, pr oblems in one part of the system can quickly have cascading consequences acr oss the entire system. The countries, communities, and com panies that are most able

to manage these risk s and bounce back quickly will be the places where people will want to live, wor k, and invest. Those that are so brittle that they break instead of bend in the

face of familiar and emerging risk s will become the national and global backwaters.

Building Resilience

The twin realities that resilience can pr ovide both a positive return on investment and be a source of com petitiveness tr anslate into a ri pe opportunity for aligning the interests of

the private sector with the pu blic sector . What is required is a truly collabor ative appr oach that taps extensive private sector capabilities and assets by encour aging the

private sector to su pport local, state, and regional emergency pre paredness initiatives.

One way to encour age greater levels of private sector engagement in pre paredness is to

pr ovide f inancial incentives in the form of tax break s or direct su bsidies for com panies that agree u p f r ont to build and maintain capacities that the government could call u pon

during an emergency. Government contr acts written in advance of disaster with retainer payments would help to reduce the overhead cost and pr ovide a source of income for

private sector to purchase these capabilities. It would also reduce the need for smaller communities to purchase, maintain, and tr ain people to oper ate s pecialized capabilities

that might be used r arely or not at all.

There already exists a well-established model for this k ind of initiative. The U.S.De partment of Def ense has long relied on commercial air liners to lend them their

passenger and cargo planes when the militar y needs them. Under the Civil R eserve Air Fleet pr ogr am, or ³CRAF,´ U.S. air lines pledge some of their aircr af t and flight crews to

su pport the Pentagon when its air lif t requirements out pace what its militar y aircr af t can pr ovide. This includes quickly converting civilian 767 into air am bulances by tak ing out

the passenger seats and re placing them with litters. The air lines store conversion k its in their hangers so that their plane can be quickly retr of itted to help evacuate casualties f r om war zones. The way the militar y pr ovides an incentive for air lines to mak e this



commitment is they award them sizeable peacetime air lif t contr acts for r outine flights for servicemen and militar y cargos.

Another innovative appr oach to partnershi p would be for governments to enter into cost-

sharing agreements with large and smaller businesses to maintain in stock many of the su pplies in greatest demand during an emergency. R etailers are in a position to r otate

items lik e batteries, diapers, baby formula, f irst aid su pplies, and bottled water thr ough their store¶s inventor y before these pr oducts ex pir ation date. This would reduce the

overhead cost mak ing it a far less ex pensive appr oach than the tr aditional one where emergency agencies purchased these items outright and placed them into stor age at

conventional shelters.

Still another way to pr ovide incentives for private enter prises to invest in resiliencymeasures is by lever aging insur ance. In much the same way as insurers pr ovide a family

a break on their premiums if they install a home alarm system, com panies ideally could reduce their insur ance bill if they adopted measures that lowered insurers¶ ex posure in the

event of a disaster . But mak ing insur ance an ally in dealing with the risk of catastr ophic events is trick ier business than it is for homeowners policies for three reasons. First,

insurers tend to steer away f r om things that may involve ruinous losses and insolvency.Second, insurers want to have as br oad a pool of policyholders as they can to diversify

the risk. Therefore they need to be conf ident that enough people will elect to buy their insur ance pr oduct to allow for this diversif ication. Third, private insur ance com panies

need to be conf ident that the measures they would be su bsidizing by way of reduced premiums do in fact mitigate risk and that their clients are actually adopting these

measures.

Governments can help lower or eliminate each of these barriers for insurers. For instance, the government can cap the risk that insur ance com panies face by eff ectively

becoming a reinsurer . That is, the government can establish a ceiling on the amount of losses a private insur ance com pany would have to pay, and agree to mak e u p the

diff erence to the policyholder if the losses exceed the cap. The government can also helpassure an adequate pool of customers for the insur ance com panies by mandating it as a

condition for receiving a permit or license or pr oviding a tax break to the insurers whowrite new policies or to businesses that pay these premiums. Finally, the government can

establish and reinforce the standards against which the insur ance incentive is set.

A ver y pr omising model for dee pening private- pu blic cooper ation and aligning f inancialincentives for building and maintaining pre paredness at the local level is the ³Community

R esilience System Initiative´ that is being developed by the Community and R egionalR esilience Institute at Oak ridge National Labor ator y. Dr awing on pr ototype efforts

undertak en in Char leston, SC, Gulfport, MS, and Mem phis, TN, the initiative has twogoals. The f irst is to identify the policies, pr actices and capabilites that can increase the

ability of communities to maintain normal f unctionality with little disru ption or , when disru pted, to recover normal f unctioning r apidly and with minimal loss of economic and



social value. Second, is to encour age communities to mak e sustainable investments in the above.

The initiative is designed to help community stak eholders: (1) understand what char acterizes resilience; (2) how to assess resilience; (3) how to prioritize options for

im pr oving their resilience; (4) how to objectively measure the im pact of the im pr ovements; and (5) how they can be rewarded for their investments.

At the national and international levels, there should be a com pelling interest in encour aging the development of more resilient communities because these communities

will place less demand for external resources in the af termath of a disru ption. Because the Community R esilience System would pr ovide objective measurements of risk and

vulner ability management, communities should be in a position to accrue tangi ble economic benef its for reaching these standards as well. These benef its might include the

insur ance and re-insur ance industries favor ably ad justing insur ability and r ates if acommunity is evaluated as having greater levels of resilience. The same common

measurement might also boost the conf idence of lenders and those assigning bond r atings which would lower the cost of loans for resilient communities. In turn, these measures

would help communities attr act new businesses and current business ex pansions, there byincreasing the community¶s economic development potential. A model of this appr oach

is below:



The S ocial Bene fit of Building Resilience

One f inal benef it of mak ing resilience a national and global im per ative is that it reinforces what unites us as opposed to what divides us. Quite sim ply, it is not possi ble

to build resilience without su bstantial collabor ation and cooper ation at all levels within asociety and acr oss societies. Individuals must develop the means to withstand, r apidly

recover f r om, and adapt to the risk s they face at a personal and family level. Com panies and communities must look within and beyond themselves to ensure that they are

pre pared to handle what may come their way as a result of internally and externallygener ated risk s. Finally, at the national, regional, and global levels, the em phasis on

resilience highlight the necessity for forging relationshi ps and developing pr otocols for dealing with shared risk s.

In short, a determination to conf r ont ongoing ex posure to catastr ophic man-made and

natur al disasters is not an act of pessimism or par anoia. Nor is it something that is inherently a cost center . It is a mature recognition that things go wr ong f r om time to

time, and that in pre paring for such times, one is reminded not to tak e im portant and critical things for gr anted.

Conclu sion

In ear ly June 2010, I had the opportunity to see a dr amatic sym bol of resilience just

outside of Gulfport, Mississi ppi and a f ew hundred yards f r om the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. In an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, there stands a live

oak tree k nown locally as the Friendshi p Oak. The tree is appr oximate 50-f eet tall with atrunk that measures about 18-f eet in circumf erence, has dee p and s pr awling r oots, and

boughs that stretch 150 f eet. The Friendshi p Oak has stood sentinel on that s pot for more than 500 years.

Live oak s are model of resilience. They have adapted to their envir onment by developing

the capacity to withstand what periodically comes their way. When sailing shi ps were built of wood, it was lum ber f r om live oak trees that was the most sought af ter material

for building the curved portions of a vessel¶s hull where the most strength was needed.As communities, as countries, and as a global society at large, we should look to the live

oak as a guide for how to manage the risk of terr orism and disaster . Lik e these magnif icent trees we need to adapt and gr ow to be not only able to cope with what we

k now will come our way, but to stand tall, conf ident, and true to our potential in the pr ocess.

S t ephen Flynn i s t he pr esid ent of t he C ent er for National Policy and t he C hair of t he

S t eering Committ ee for t he Community Resilience S y st em Initiative. H e i s al so aut hor of

The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (NY: Random Hou se, 2007)

Documents

Stephen E. Flynn: “Resilience: Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters”