Engaging the U.S. Resilience System

A Watershed Moment for the U.S. and its Place in the World

For over two centuries, the United States of America has offered examples of opportunity, principles of good governance, resilience, and sustainability to the rest of the world. During much of the 20thCentury, America has provided inspiration and leadership to a large part of humankind. However, in many quarters, this positive view of the United States has been shaken in recent years.

The Obama Administration is taking a number of early steps to help restore trust and confidence in US intentions and capabilities, both at home and abroad. But symbolic gestures alone will not be enough. The Administration must be ready to respond effectively to challenges, both natural and man-made, that it may face in its early months and throughout its first four years. It also must be willing to examine U.S. policies at a fundamental level and, if necessary, break with policies that are not just reflective of the Bush (43) Administration, but also with policies that may have worked in the late 20th Century, but have now become maladapted to the 21st Century.

How the Obama Administration meets these tests may define how U.S. citizens and the rest of world judge our nation’s ability to reclaim its former stature on the world’s political stage, and define the Obama Administration’s place in history. It will likely determine how citizens and allies will attempt to collaboratively work with the U.S. government in facing our collective challenges in the months and years ahead. A forward-thinking approach to constructive engagement is now essential in order to reduce the likelihood of enemies and competitors of the United States attempting to undermine U.S. efforts to recover and shape its place of leadership in the 21st Century. Early efforts by the Obama Administration to reach out with new avenues to engage citizens, American institutions, and allies, while dissipating tensions with critics and competitors through the U.S. Resilience System may represent a watershed moment in the evaluation of America’s promise and place on the world stage going forward.

The Problem and Opportunity

The President-elect is facing exceptional challenges in standing up his first-term Administration in an atmosphere of a domestic and global economic downturn coupled with multi-faceted global change (including, but not limited to, climate change, global food crises, health crises, energy shortages, large-scale social tensions and, in some scenarios, wars over declining resource availability). However, if emergent crises are addressed effectively early in the Administration with more resilient health, human security, humanitarian, and disaster management systems, the President-elect may avoid many of the pitfalls of inexperience that have undercut the credibility of other new governments. The FAC-enabled teams described herein build on the technologically sophisticated, yet socially enabling approaches that were used effectively during the Obama campaign for President.

The U.S Resilience System approaches, and its FAC teams, are fully consistent with – and provide a cost and time efficient mechanism for engaging the objectives of – the Project on National Security Reform . Deployed during the first few months of 2009, the U.S. Resilience System, and its FAC teams, can help assemble a system that can assist the United States, its allies and others to remain resilient in the face of unprecedented global challenges.

The Need

The collective challenges ahead demand that our nation bring to bear the full capabilities of America’s government, business and civil society to energize and engage the vast capabilities represented by the communities and institutions of our citizens and allies. The Project for National Security Reform, the Center for American Progress’ Sustainable Security program and the President Obama’s deep commitment to health care reform and a viable energy policy, for example, has demonstrated the need and policy avenues for starting the process of change. However, the change that is needed must start not only from government, but from the American people themselves. When Americans and their communities and institutions come to feel collectively committed within new approaches that value and enable their potential and contributions, the nation will be dramatically more secure and on the road to recovery.

President Obama will have to lead by stimulating the imagination and entrepreneurial spirit of all Americans and our allies throughout the world to develop new systems that engender peace, resilience, and sustainability in the face of new conditions. OFA 2.0 (now Organize for America ) and Change.gov have become clear demonstrations of President Obama’s commitment to move America boldly into the future by fully engaging the American public as agents of change, but the change still has to go broader and deeper to meet the challenges ahead. We must address these challenges peacefully and collaboratively, but with the focus and commitment normally associated with fighting a great war, or organizing a “new New Deal” – because the emerging challenges are, in the long run, no less threatening and perhaps more detrimental to the American way of life than war and economic depression. A new paradigm of management and governance replacing old and limiting bureaucratic and command and control infrastructures will be essential.

The Solution

The emerging U.S. Resilience System offers the citizens of the United States greatly enhanced resilience and sustainability. This system must streamline expensive and inefficient bureaucracies, while enabling the United States and its citizens to develop food, water, environmental, energy, and health security, as well as economic and physical security within the United States and around the world. This new U.S. Resilience System must be compatible with a model of sustainable security which acknowledges and addresses the viability of socio-ecological systems in a time when our health, well-being, and socio-political integrity is less dependent upon our military might exercised on a traditional or Cold War battle field, or within a “War on Terrorism,” than on addressing the underlying challenges of maintaining the viable flow of food, renewable energy, clean water, environmental integrity, affordable and accessible health services, and collaborative human enterprises within and between our communities, both domestic and overseas.

Whatever solutions we collectively adopt through the emerging Resilience System, we must address our basic and advancing needs not only within the boundaries of our great nation; we must also concern ourselves with aiding the self-sustainability, self determination, as well as the health and well-being of people throughout our evermore interdependent world, which is shrinking as a result of inexpensive, instantaneous, global communication and real-time situational awareness.

There has been a strong tendency by some to ignore the suffering of others in our own communities and worldwide. It may initially seem that we can benefit from the fruits of our own abundance and self-governance, as if we live in a closed system isolated from the rest of the world. The lessons of history tell us that such approaches are short-lived, especially for superpowers, which tend to attract collective animosity from around the world.

The extreme poles of strong-arm international relations and attempts at isolationism will, at this point in history, only invite calamity to our own doorstep, in the form of deepening economic downturn, provocation of enemies and allies, terrorism, and war. The U.S. Resilience System, extending into a Global Resilience Network, must ultimately achieve peaceful, dynamic balance by spawning resilience and self-sustainability on the part of all people and their communities and nations worldwide. To be credible, the U.S. Resilience System must start with the resilience and sustainability of our own citizens and communities within the United States, but it must also apply to all people, especially some of the most vulnerable, if we expect to address the underlying problems of the global market and global change in a manner that invites partnership rather than dissension from others around the world.

The U.S. Resilience System has the following core elements:

- Significant numbers of FAC-enabled humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams that can be organized into Hastily Formed Networks
- Resilience networks that enable American citizens and their communities to understand how to live better, more sustainable lives, while actively becoming a part of the solution to emerging mission-critical gaps associated with large-scale socio-ecological crises and global change.
- A new generation of environmentally-friendly logistics and distribution systems (like the DOD’s experiments with STAR-TIDES) that addresses non-commercial demand for health- and life-sustaining products and services in stressed populations (post-war, post-disaster or impoverished), while moving them into a position of self-sustainability by enabling them to participate productively in local markets more sensitive to the needs, culture, and aspirations of local communities.
- Networks of cross-cultural teams, that can work efficiently to anticipate and dissipate the roots of conflict that undermine civil society and, if unchecked, lead toward war.

Actions to Be Taken Now

The U.S. Resilience System is now ready to be rapidly scaled up to meet the challenges of global change and large-scale social crisis. The U.S. Resilience System is not a new system that requires new bureaucracy. Instead it is a new way of reconfiguring and organizing American resources and capabilities throughout the United States and allied nations, in a manner that reduces costs, while expanding services.

Resilience Systems have the ability to correctly anticipate emerging challenges, and bring to bear the world’s best minds to solve the problems at hand. Resilience Systems engender fast action to provide new economic opportunities, as we make the changes that are necessary to build resilient and sustainable 21st Century solutions, which transcend the limited viability of 20th Century policies and infrastructures. The U.S. Resilience System addresses today’s world, and the circumstances of rapid global change in the years and decades ahead, with a pragmatism that can only be achieved now with common off-the-shelf, open source technologies combined with human-to-human networks.

Our nation’s readiness to face rapid and dynamic complexities will yield greater resilience and sustainability by more fully and effectively utilizing exponentially expanding knowledge assets and more effectively engaging our still vastly underutilized human resources within community services. By empowering more Americans and their communities to engage in more healthy, prosperous, resilient, and sustainable solutions, we can all become less dependent upon nonrenewable resources, non-responsive bureaucratic forms of governance and manipulation by enemies of the United States, and the worst abusers within the marketplace. As a result, our new-found sustainability and balance can spawn the development of new markets and economic activities – such as through the green economy and knowledge services economy.

There is a natural human tendency to try to preserve what has worked in the past, even though it is now faltering. In terms of 20th Century systems, overly dependent on non-renewable sources that are beyond the point of diminishing returns in our current times of rapid change, our green economy and knowledge services economy opportunities are becoming far more rewarding than attempting to extend 20th Century industrial age practices beyond their effective utility. By engaging 21st Century innovations inherent within the capabilities of the sciences of complexity and extending the technologies associated with the rapidly globalizing intelligent networks (such as the world-wide web), we can systematically expand our economic sectors and reduce our susceptibilities to catastrophic manmade and natural discontinuities that threaten our health, well-being, and prosperity.

We can more effectively manage the security of our nation, within an emerging National Sustainable Security Infrastructure. With the U.S. Resilience System (USRS) as a key new element of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure (architected to address the challenges set out in the Project for National Security Reform (pNSR), we will continually be able to verify our readiness to meet extraordinary (as well as commonplace, repetitive} challenges. We will enhance our sustainable security, while reinforcing the healthy socio-ecological factors that build the capacities of our communities, fully prepared for whatever the 21st Century may bring.

U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 Report, 2009 FAC Team Initiative and the USRS

The present Summit report details how the Summit objectives above will be achieved, using a breakthrough in management and governance, stemming from DOD Command and Control’s paradigm of “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC).” The 2008 Summit report below outlines a plan to build FAC-enabled capabilities throughout American society, within the continental U.S. and globally. The 2008 Summit report will be further supplemented in 2009 with a report on the U.S. Resilience System and the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure report.

The implementation of the 2009 FAC Team plan, stemming from the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, will engage a unity of effort when unity of command is not feasible or advantageous. The 2009 FAC Team initiative is proposed to be a rapid test of the principles of the pNSR with a high return on investment in terms of health status and human security measures. The U.S. Resilience System will, within five years, enable this initial FAC Team initiative to be broadly achieved with the robustness and speed of the internet and market economies.

The USRS will achieve new levels of responsiveness and effectiveness through the use of highly customized and localized intelligent social networks, fully optimizing all sectors of American society at home and abroad. Our goal is to achieve resilience and sustainability while preventing and managing large-scale social crises and global change. We plan to start with a focus on transformations at home and abroad that demonstrate the greatest promise of leading the way out of the current U.S. and global economic downturn through the development of a 21st Century (green) economy, that improves the resilience and sustainability of all Americans..

America at the Turning Point
In conclusion, although significantly challenged at this time in history, America’s promise remains bright with a fully engaged U.S. Resilience System. FAC teams and Resilience Networks are rapidly becoming essential 21st Century critical infrastructure components. They are architected to be rapidly replicable to help all Americans, our allies, and others working together to face daunting health, sustainable security, and economic crises, as well as the global changes ahead.

The National Sustainable Security Infrastructure, with the U.S. Resilience System as its newest enterprise element, provides us with a strong foundation, from which to engage our collective leadership on sustainability and a broadened definition of security within a more collaborative resilient American social ecology resonant with the conditions of a challenging, yet promising, 21st Century. From this base, we need not shrink from the challenges of global economic crisis and global change, because we now have tools and methodologies within the U.S. Resilience System, providing us with essential resilient and sustainable solutions. By engaging the U.S. Resilience System, as an essential infrastructure component of National Security Reform, U.S. Health System Transformation and our nation’s enhanced renewable energy systems, Americans cannot only overcome problems inherent in 20th Century systems; we can again lead the way toward a more positive future evolution of our collective humanity, with the rest of the world participating with the U.S., while understanding and engaging their own platforms for cooperation, resilience, and sustainability.