How Tactical Capacity Bridges The Gap Between Strategy And Execution

Thank you Sir. It sounds like we caught this article lying because they quote: "had run the drill on a major hurricane in New Orleans months before Katrina hit". Just can't trust anyone these days.

SFC (Join to see) - I was really disappointed with the pandemic response. I read a Katrina AAR. Like 200 pages of it. I don't remember all of it. But essentially there was no planning at the federal, state, and city level. In a joint environmet like that with so many parties it requires developing a Task Force team comprised with representation from all the disparate entities. That is the most efficent way of planning and communicating in order to support the state(s). However, since that team was not created the planning and communication was disjointed. Let me use a US Army Corp Commander in Iraq in the daily BLUF meeting as an analogy. There could be a hundred representatives to include his his staff, units, Iraqi government, security team, contractors, State Dept, JAG, Iraqi military, etc for the Corps Commander to receive reports or ask questions. It is also a good venue for creating a common operating procedure. This is what Katrina needed.

Here are some problems I remember for Katrina:
- General lack of planning.
- New Orleans had hundreds of buses it could have used but nobody brought that up.
- The military was clueless what kind of support to provide.
- Critical patients needed to be moved from the hospitals before the catastrophic event.
- Too many people decided to stay in New Orleans.

I am very disappointed in the pandemic planning because we did not apply lessons learned from Katrina in regards to planning. FEMA was told to start planning on March 13, 2020. It was too late. What does this tell me? It tells me without a plan there was a void or a vacuum of understanding and communications between all relevant federal and state entities. The countries that faired the best with the pandemic are the countries that planned and executed in February.

I think I can fairly say Army North was forward leaning. LTG Laura Richardson has a huge staff of experts to guide her and she kept looking at how the military can support the pandemic response.

MAJ Ken Landgren - Thanks for all the information. If you have a PDF or anything else of the AAR, I would sure like to read it, that is can you send it to me? I always like to read the information stripped of the political bull to see where we went right, but especially where we went wrong so we can correct it, “if possible”. I’ve worked several natural disasters in varying positions from: PEMA (Pa. Emergency Management Agency) damage assessment teams, to PennDOT designer to open infrastructure, to Utility Relocation Administrator coordinating utility actions to recover from natural disasters.

If my memory serves me right, the 3 things that mostly affected Katrina response were:
1) A highly unpredictable land fall that delayed physically starting to move federal forces toward Katrina because there might have been a land fall hundreds of miles away, in addition to several blunders that could have speed up response.
2) A total breakdown in the City Emergency Management response from poor decision making, to having employees who ran instead of driving those busses you speak of. I don’t remember much of the state’s response.
3) The first political hit job for a natural disaster response that I can remember, that was a definite attempt to damage a sitting president. While this political hit job didn’t affect the response, it affects how we remember this natural disaster. In reality the federal administration at the time didn’t fare any better, or worse that previous administrations in similar situations.

In my official capacity(s) before I retired, I helped coordinate responses to natural disasters under many administrations and can say: in my opinion that it’s impossible to anticipate all contingencies, and even if we could there is no way we could be physically ready for them. These emergencies are outlying events for normal types of emergencies so much that it just wouldn’t be cost effective to have “everything ready to go for anything”. This Katrina storm didn’t even make the top 5 disasters History lists in their “The Deadliest Natural Disasters in U.S. History” article (link below).

In my opinion what we can do is be competent and have competent people in places of responsibility for when we need their talents; this includes having effective protocols in place that guides effective coordination of emergency responses, with the understanding that the protocol may need to be changed at a moments notice because of conditions. The weak link in the equation are politicians. We always get what we vote for, and if we have political hacks in positions of responsibility… then the situation just goes downhill from there. MHO
https://www.history.com/news/deadliest-natural-disasters-us-storm-flood-hurricane-fire

Very good perspective. However, I am adamant that the federal government should use the National Response Framework to create the federal government disaster planning team before it hits the country. Much administrative groundwork could have been accomplished like setting up communications between federal organizations with state officials. In February the team could have done these:
- Make an assessment to the threat.
- Used HHS or CDC to make public announcements.
- Order supplies and equipment early.
- Create a testing plan.
- Create a contact tracing plan.

Instead of planning and executing early Trump was saying don’t worry about COVID. This approach created a void that made us ill prepared for the pandemic.

Check out the AAR: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned/


SFC (Join to see)