The U.S. Resilience Summit 2008

A Call to Action

An important element of preparing to deal with health and humanitarian crises, associated with natural and man-made disasters, is to increase the nation’s resilience, both in physical capabilities and in decision-making. Some of the challenges in times ahead will be domestic; others will emerge overseas. Whether at home or abroad, new types of initiatives are emerging that show great promise in improving our readiness and ability to act in any scenario with the best of American capabilities and innovation at reduced cost compared to current practices.

To identify these opportunities for doing better at health, humanitarian, ecosystem, and disaster management at lower costs, experts from around the United States, as well as from like-minded nations (including a Nobel prize winner, experts currently and historically involved in the White House, National Security Council, Homeland Security Council, Congress, the Defense Department, the State Department, USAID, advisors from President Elect Obama's transition team and others) met in Washington D.C. during the Fall of 2008 at the U.S. Resilience Summit. They identified problems and then focused on opportunities and solutions to help the United States and the international community to prevent and manage large-scale socio-ecological crises in this era of financial downturn and global change.

The Summit’s exercise centered on a simulated international catastrophe early in the new administration – a hypothetical category 4 typhoon (well within the realm of scientific probability given current meteorological trends) hitting the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and Cambodia on March 9, 2009. The approaches elaborated at the summit were designed to understand, and mitigate a series of cascading challenges that could destabilize not only Vietnam and Cambodia, but also the greater Southeast Asian region (such as the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia) and other associated U.S. global interests. Equally important, the Summit looked at ways to accelerate steps that could help manage man-made or natural disasters, as well as other social crises, within the United States by increasing resilience at all levels. These results can offer powerful tools to the Obama Administration to respond effectively to a wide range of challenges early in its tenure in the White House.

A key goal emerging from the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, is to enable the United States – through actions taken by the Obama Administration, within 60 to 90 days of taking office – to engage an experimental infrastructure able to achieve “unity of effort” in circumstances where “unity of command” is not feasible or desirable. Traditional, hierarchical approaches to “command and control” will not fully address the complex emerging 21st Century challenges, where disparate organizations (both governmental and non-governmental) bring varied traditions, loyalties and procedures into the health, security, energy, ecosystem, humanitarian, and disaster management situations.

The Project on National Security Reform has made the strategic nature of the problem abundantly clear. Concomitantly, the Department of Defense has been experimenting with a new, paradigm-shifting approach termed “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). In simulations that were run during the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, the FAC-enabled health, humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams from many sectors of society in the U.S. and abroad were able to respond in a manner that mitigated – using soft power approaches – potential violent conflict and catastrophic loss of life. In the 2008 Summit’s serious game simulation, a local/national crisis was prevented from growing to regional/international levels. Potentially catastrophic large-scale social crises and war were avoided, as a result of engaging the U.S.-led Resilience System.

For an introduction to FAC: See David S. Alberts, “Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control” in Vol 1, No. 1 of the Journal of C2. Dr. Alberts’ powerful concept has evolved to be expressed as: “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). It is built on ideas that emphasize the use of networks to share information which, in turn, allows participants to develop a shared awareness of the situation (“shared situational awareness”). When coupled with an understanding of the overall objectives (feed the people, rebuild the bridge), this allows the participants to Focus on solving problems collaboratively. The organization must be Agile enough to respond to the rapidly evolving challenges it is likely to face, and there must be mechanisms to Converge the resources needed to solve the problems. For the purposes of this paper, teams that have these characteristics are said to be “FAC-enabled.” Inherently non-hierarchical, and “self-synchronizing,” they can handle complex, adaptive challenges more rapidly and effectively than traditional bureaucratic approaches.

These FAC principles, now being developed by DoD and NATO, must also be tested thoroughly in more simulated and real world events. As series of objectives have emerged within the U.S Resilience System initiative to further engage and evaluate the FAC approaches as they may apply within health, sustainable security, humanitarian, energy, ecosystem and disaster management events. Four objectives were chosen to propose as activities the Obama Administration can use to engage the U.S. Resilience System, as early operational elements of a National Sustainable Security Infrastructure demonstrating the beginnings of U.S. National Security Reform, compatible with and reinforcing U.S. Health Care Reform, Energy Sector Reform, and upgrading U.S. disaster response capabilities.

The U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 Objectives

The 2008 Summit FAC teams identified mission critical gaps from the October Summit global change simulation, mission critical gaps analysis, and planning sessions. Plenary sessions and working groups outlined plans to reach the following objectives:

1) Identify and organize more than 400-600 FAC-capable health, humanitarian, and disaster management teams by March 9, 2009;
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 March 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 newly configured NSC and HSC under the Obama Administration to improve their situational awareness of mission critical gaps, FAC team movements, and events beyond the boundaries of current closed government systems.
4) Complete 10 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 will face during the years ahead, extending through the second decade of the 21st Century.

The U.S. Resilience Summit 2008 focused on our nation’s critical need to scale up rapid FAC-enabled humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams, given emerging threats in the most vulnerable months of the Obama Administration. The ambitious objective of identifying and organizing 400 to 600 FAC teams and providing a sense-making node to National Security Council by March 9, 2009, is in acknowledgment of the immediacy of the challenges we now face. Successful responses to these challenges can only be optimized by proactive engagement by the Obama Administration to anticipate and prevent the emergence of social crisis. Waiting for the consequences to emerge before responding will prolong the continuation of processes that have led our nation to its current position at the edge of the precipice of rapid decline.

The U.S. Resilience Summit 2009 will focus on scaling Resilience Networks nationally and internationally, along with summits held to explore and define the parameters of the National Sustainable Security Infrastructure and the U.S. Resilience System. The U.S. Resilience Summit 2010 will focus on the global distribution of STAR-TIDES-like logistics systems. The 2011 Resilience Summit will focus on Trust Networks and issues of human interoperability bridging potential cultural and resource chasms between communities and nations that share stressed socio-ecological commons.