U.S. Resilience Summit 2008

Rapid, Agile, Health, Humanitarian and Disaster Management Teams

During the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, national and world renowned experts convened in Washington D.C. to improve the resilience of the United States in light of impending financial crises and global change. A breakthrough solution to maintaining health and human prosperity at lower cost during emerging socio-ecological crises, based upon a Focus, Agility, and Convergence (FAC) paradigm, was explored and tested during the Summit. This breakthrough in FAC-enabled health, humanitarian assistance, and disaster management, supplements, and in some cases, replaces blunt and brittle command and control methods with far more agile and effective methods of management and governance based upon advanced communication and intelligent social networking. This new approach enables the Obama Administration to demonstrate significantly more effective solutions in facing America’s greatest challenges during President Obama’s two years in office.

The emerging U.S. Resilience System – using FAC team approaches – provides new, more efficient mechanisms for maintaining the viable flow of food, energy, clean water, health services, and collaborative human enterprise within the U.S. and abroad, providing widespread sustainable security in highly local and customized ways at a fraction of current costs using tradition incident command approaches. The 2008 Resilience Summit FAC teams identified mission critical gaps from its simulation, and working groups outlined plans to reach the following objectives:

1) Identify and organize 600 FAC-capable health, humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams by August 9, 2009, to face crises (such as a severe pandemic);
2) Engage 10,000 FAC-enabled teams optimized for community health, humanitarian, ecosystem, renewable energy, and disaster management in an interoperable system by March 9, 2011;
3) By August 9, 2009, provide the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council with access to nodes of the U.S. Resilience System. Although not directive in nature, these nodes can enhance sense-making and help the NSC and HSC improve their situational awareness of mission critical gaps, FAC team movements, and events beyond the boundaries of current closed government systems; and
4) Execute 10 levels of exercises by March 9, 2011 to test and refine the capabilities of U.S. Resilience System FAC-enabled teams against the high probability / high severity threats we now face.

The mission critical gaps reported by the FAC teams participating in the 2008 Summit simulation and the Working Group reports describing the nature of rapid FAC-enabled health, humanitarian, and disaster management are contained below. The final Summit report is proposed for release at the Press Club in early 2009. Details of how the 2008 Summit objectives will be achieved can be found in Chapter 5. This Report also outlines a plan to build FAC-enabled capabilities throughout American society achieving a unity of effort when unity of command is not feasible or advantageous.

The U.S. Resilience System (including rapid response FAC Teams, Resilience Networks, Trust Networks, ALADIN adaptive logistics systems, and Trust Networks) is being designed to achieve these objectives with the robustness and flexibility of the internet and market economies through engaging intelligent social networks fully optimizing all sectors of American society at home and abroad. The ultimate end goal of the U.S. Resilience System is to optimize resilience and sustainability while preventing and managing large-scale social crises associated with economic discontinuities and global change. We are starting with a focus on transformations leading the way out of the current U.S. and global economic downturn, using FAC-enabled health, humanitarian, renewable energy, ecosystem, and disaster management teams.

The U.S. Resilience System is proposed as one of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure’s three multi-organizational enterprises, developed early on to test principles and to yield rapid returns of investment under the National Security Reform, stemming from the Project on National Security Reform (pNSR).

Those interested in observing or participating in the ongoing U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 deliberations can do so by going to:

http://resiliencesystem.net/?q=node/22 (registration and passwords are required)
For further information, please contact:
Michael D. McDonald, Dr.P.H.
President
Global Health Initiatives, Inc.
Coordinator
U.S. Resilience System
Cell: +1 202-468-7899
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