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Preparing for the Next Emergency

Andrew Lakoff

This essay describes the emergence and extension of “pre-paredness” as a form of rationality for approaching questions of domestic security in the United States. Preparedness provides security experts with a way of grasp-ing uncertain future events and bringing them into a space of present intervention. An analysis of this form of rationality helps to address a puzzling aspect of state-based security practices in the contemporary United States: how a series of seem-ingly disparate types of events — ranging from terrorist attacks, to hurricanes and earthquakes, to epidemics — have been brought into the same framework of “security threats.” More broadly, such an analysis allows us to address the ques-tion, what is the logic through which potential dangers to collective life are being taken up as political problems?

In order to show what is distinctive about preparedness, this essay begins by comparing it to a different form of security rationality: insurance. Preparedness becomes an especially salient approach to perceived threats when they reach the limits of a rationality of insurance. These are threats that are not manageable through techniques of probabilistic calculation: preparedness typically approaches events whose probability is not calculable but whose consequences could be cata-strophic. The essay then traces the history of preparedness as a rationality of domestic security, beginning in the early period of the Cold War and following it to its current articulation in the Department of Homeland Security. The analysis

Public Culture 19:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-2006-035 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press

The research on which this essay is based is part of a collaborative project on contemporary security expertise conducted under the auspices of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory. Many of the ideas in the essay developed in conversation with the co-principal inves-tigators on this project, Stephen J. Collier and Paul Rabinow. It has also benefited from comments by members of the 2005 – 6 International Center for Advanced Studies seminar at New York University, led by Tim Mitchell, as well as the suggestions of Craig Calhoun, Nils Gilman, Gregoire Mallard, and Christopher Otter.

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is framed by a discussion of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which revealed both the centrality of preparedness to the contemporary politics of security and its limitations as an approach to catastrophic threats.

We Are Not Prepared

One evening the week after Hurricane Katrina struck, the intrepid news anchor Anderson Cooper was featured on the Charlie Rose Show. Cooper was still on the scene in New Orleans, the inundated city in the background and a look of harried concern on his face. He told Rose that he had no intention of returning to his comfortable life in New York City any time soon. Cooper had been among the reporters to challenge official accounts that hurricane relief operations were func-tioning smoothly, based on the stark contradiction between disturbing images on the ground and governmental claims of a competent response effort. He seemed shocked and dismayed by what he had seen in New Orleans, but was also moved, even transformed, by his role as witness to domestic catastrophe. He had covered disasters in Somalia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, he said, but never expected to see images like these in the United States: widespread looting, hungry refugees, corpses left on the street to decompose. Toward the end of the interview, Rose asked him what he had learned from the event. Cooper paused, reflected for a moment, and then answered: “We are not as ready as we can be.”

Insofar as the hurricane and its aftermath could be said to have had a shared lesson, it was this: we are not prepared — whether for another major natural disas-ter, a chemical or biological attack, an epidemic, or some other type of emergency. This lesson has structured political response to the hurricane in terms of certain kinds of discussions and not others. This is one reason why Katrina has arguably failed to be a politically transformative event, despite widespread expressions of outrage at the role of structural inequality in making certain citizens vulnerable to catastrophe. Instead, the event has intensified and redirected processes that were already under way. To see this, it is necessary to analyze the development of preparedness as a guiding logic for domestic security in the United States.

Preparedness provides a way of understanding and intervening in an uncer-tain, potentially catastrophic future.1 Unlike other issues that were initially raised by the hurricane and its aftermath, such as racial inequality, concentrated urban poverty, the social isolation of the elderly, or the short-sightedness of environ-

1. Stephen J. Collier, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow, “Biosecurity: Towards an Anthropol-ogy of the Contemporary,” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (2004): 3 – 7.


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mental planning, the demand for preparedness is a matter that enjoys widespread political agreement on the necessity of governmental intervention. In other words, in the norm of preparedness, we find a shared sense of what collective security problems involve today. The need to be prepared is not in question; what can be a source of dispute is, rather, how to prepare and what we need to prepare for.

In the aftermath of Katrina, it was common to see comparisons made between the failed governmental response to the hurricane and the more successful response to the attacks of September 11. To an observer a decade before, it might have been surprising that a natural disaster and a terrorist attack would be con-sidered part of the same problematic. And the image, three weeks after Katrina struck, of George W. Bush flying to the headquarters of USNORTHCOM — a military installation designed for use in national security crises — to follow the progress of Hurricane Rita as it hurtled toward Texas might have been even more perplexing. The aftermath of Katrina also pointed forward to other possible emer-gencies, such as a novel and deadly infectious disease. In announcing its $7.1 billion pandemic preparedness program the following month, the Bush adminis-tration declared avian flu an urgent matter of national security.2 This grouping of various types of possible catastrophe under a shared rubric of “security threats” is exemplary of the rationality of preparedness. Preparedness marks out a limited but agreed-upon terrain for the management of collective life. Its techniques focus on a certain set of possible events, operating to bring them into the present as potential future catastrophes that point to current vulnerabilities.

The Probabilistic Future: Insurance

In its mode of future orientation and in its way of approaching threats, prepared-ness can be usefully contrasted with another form of security rationality — insur-ance. As Francois Ewald points out, insurance is an “abstract technology” that can take concrete form in a variety of institutions, including mutual associations, private insurance firms, and state-based social welfare agencies. It is a means of distributing risk. Here the term risk does not refer to a danger or peril, Ewald specifies, but rather to a “specific mode of treatment of certain events capable of happening to a group of individuals.”3 This treatment involves, first, tracking

2. See Monica Schoch-Spana, “Post-Katrina, Pre-Pandemic America,” Anthropology News, January 2006, 32.

3. Francois Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 199.

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the occurrence of such events over time across a population and, second, apply-ing probabilistic techniques to gauge the likelihood of a given event occurring over a given period of time. Insurance is thus a way of reordering reality: what had been exceptional events that disrupted the normal order become predictable occurrences.

In this way, insurance takes up certain kinds of external dangers and trans-forms them into manageable risks. The events that insurance typically takes up are dangers of relatively limited scope and statistically regular occurrence: ill-ness, injury, accident, and fire. When taken individually, such events may appear as contingent misfortunes, but when their occurrence is plotted over a population, they show a normal rate of incidence. Knowledge of this rate, gained through care-fully plotted actuarial tables, makes it possible to rationally distribute risk. Thus, insurance removes accidents and other misfortunes from a moral-legal domain of personal responsibility and places them in a technical frame of calculability.

As an abstract technology, insurance can be linked to diverse political objec-tives. Beginning in the nineteenth century, insurance was harnessed to a politics of solidarity in the development of state-based social welfare programs — what can be called “population security.” Population security aims to foster the health and well-being of human beings understood as members of a national popula-tion. It works to collectivize individual risk — of illness, accident, or infirmity. Paul Rabinow describes the distinctiveness of this approach to future threats: “A security apparatus takes up the problem of how to manage an indefinite series of elements that are in motion. This motion is understood within a logic of probable events.”4 Through calculation of the rates of such events across populations over an extended period, population security seeks regularities, such as birth and death rates, illness prevalence, and the occurrence of accidents. Planners can then target intervention into the social milieu that will improve collective well-being.5 Exam-ples of population security mechanisms include mass vaccination, urban water and sewage systems, guaranteed pensions, and health and safety regulations.

As analysts of the European welfare state have argued, this “social” form of

4. Paul Rabinow, “Diffusion of the Human Thing: Virtual Virulence, Preparedness, Dignity,” (working paper, Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, 2005), anthropos-lab .net/documents. See also Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France (1977 – 1978), ed. M. Sennelart (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004).

5. As Foucault writes, “Security mechanisms have to be installed around the random ele-ment inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.” “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975 – 76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fon-tana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 246.


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security was based on the premise that technical rationality would be increas-ingly capable of managing collective risk.6 By the mid-twentieth century, such risk management had taken on a relatively stable form in the West in the various forms of collective security provision associated with the welfare state. Develop-ments in science and technology — such as food production or industrial hazard mitigation — promised to further improve and stabilize the health and well-being of the population. Toward the end of the century, however, this stability began to break down, and many of the population security mechanisms associated with social welfare either were dispersed outside of the state or were allowed to fall into disrepair.

Meanwhile, another challenge to the capacity of insurance mechanisms to provide adequate security came from the emergence of novel threats. A series of environmental and health hazards appeared whose scale and incalculability seemed to push them beyond the scope of insurability. In some cases, these new vulnerabilities were generated by the extent, power, and uncontrollability of the life-supporting systems that had been developed in the context of population security. These new hazards were characterized by their unpredictability and by their catastrophic potential.

The Limits of Insurance: Precaution

Ulrich Beck contrasts the optimism associated with the development of the Euro-pean welfare state — that one could fully manage risk and plan for the future through technical calculation — with current perceptions of these new forms of vulnerability: “The speeding up of modernization has produced a gulf between the world of quantifiable risk in which we think and act, and the world of non-quantifiable insecurities that we are creating.”7 According to Beck, society has entered a condition of “reflexive modernity,” in which the very industrial and technical developments that were initially put in the service of guaranteeing human welfare now generate new threats. Our very dependence on critical infra-structures — systems of transportation, communications, energy, and so on — has become a source of vulnerability. His examples include ecological catastrophes

6. Francois Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An Outline of the Philosophy of Precaution,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 273 – 301; Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

7. Ulrich Beck, “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,” Theory, Culture and Soci-ety 19, no. 4 (2002): 40.

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such as Bhopal and Chernobyl, global financial crises, and mass-casualty terrorist attacks. Such hazards can cause global, irreparable damage, and their effects may be of unlimited duration. These dangers shape a perception that “uncontrollable risk is now irredeemable and deeply engineered into all the processes that sustain life in advanced societies.”8 They outstrip our ability to calculate their probability or to insure ourselves against them. According to Beck, the noninsurability of these megahazards is exemplary of a new social world in which technical exper-tise cannot calculate and manage the risks it generates.9

Building on Beck’s analysis, Ewald suggests that this new sense of vulner-ability has led to the rise of “precaution” as a new logic of political decision under conditions of uncertainty. From the European vantage, environmental and health hazards such as global warming, mad cow disease, and genetically modified food indicate that technical expertise has lost its certain grasp on the future. These are cases in which decisions cannot be made on the basis of a cost-benefit bal-ance, which remains unknown. Ewald writes of the limits of an insurance-based approach in such cases: “One cannot foresee what one does not know, even less what one cannot know.”10 And further, catastrophic and irreparable events cannot be adequately compensated. If the likelihood of the event is not measurable and its extent is not assessable, it is not a “risk” in the technical sense of a danger that has been brought into the realm of calculative decision.11

How do political actors assume responsibility for dealing with this new form of threat? Catastrophic threats that seemingly cannot be mitigated may enjoin decision makers to avoid taking risks. Whereas, in an insurantial regime, risk is normal and the question is how to distribute it, under a regime of precaution potential catastrophe is to be strictly avoided rather than seen as a risk that might be taken. The catastrophe, as Niklas Luhmann writes, is “the occurrence that no

8. Beck, “The Terrorist Threat,” 46.9. The criterion of noninsurability is a matter of some controversy, since practical solutions have

in fact emerged to what initially appears as the limit point of insurance — e.g., reinsurance, catastro-phe securities, or governmental “backstops.” See Philip D. Bougen, “Catastrophe Risk,” Economy and Society 32 (2003): 253 – 74. Nonetheless, it is clear that certain novel threats have posed chal-lenges to an actuarial rationality of security.

10. Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon,” 282.11. What constitutes a catastrophic event is, of course, a matter of perception. An event whose

extent would be catastrophic (and therefore outside of cost-benefit logic) for some may be manage-able to others. The field of catastrophe modeling seeks to bring events of uncertain probability but potentially catastrophic extent — e.g., natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and new epidemics — into a space of insurability. See Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, “Catastrophe Risk, Insurance and Terrorism,” Economy and Society 33 (2004): 135 – 73.


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one wants and for which neither probability calculations nor expert opinions are acceptable.”12 In the context of possible catastrophe, notes Ewald, calculation is no longer relevant — one must take into account not what is probable or improbable, but what is most feared: “I must, out of precaution, imagine the worst possible.”13 Thus, a principle of precaution in the face of an incalculable threat enjoins against risk-taking — for example, the implementation of new and uncertain technologies such as genetically modified food. In this manner, it seeks to keep the dangerous event from occurring.14

From Risk to Preparedness

The precautionary principle has been an influential response to certain novel forms of threat in Europe, especially those linked to the environment. Although it is addressed to the limit point of insurance, precaution still operates within an insurance type of rationality — that is, it concerns the probability of future events. In contrast, a very different way of approaching uncertain but potentially catastrophic threats has emerged and extended its reach first in the United States and increasingly transnationally: the rationality of preparedness. Like precau-tion, preparedness is applicable to events whose regular occurrence cannot be mapped through actuarial knowledge and whose probability therefore cannot be calculated. In contrast to precaution, however, preparedness does not prescribe avoidance; rather, it enacts a vision of the dystopian future in order to develop a set of operational criteria for response. Preparedness does not seek to prevent the occurrence of a disastrous event but rather assumes that the event will hap-pen. Instead of constraining action in the face of uncertainty, preparedness turns potentially catastrophic threats into vulnerabilities to be mitigated.

Both insurance and preparedness are ways of making an uncertain future available to intervention in the present, but they demand different types of exper-tise, and they call forth different forms of response. Preparedness assumes the

12. Niklas Luhmann, “Describing the Future,” in Observations on Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 70.

13. Ewald “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon,” 286.14. The 1992 Rio Declaration articulated this new relation between uncertainty and risk avoid-

ance: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to pre-vent environmental degradation.” U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 3 – 14 June 1992),” 1999, www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm.

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disruptive, potentially catastrophic nature of certain events. Since the probability and severity of such events cannot be calculated, the only way to avert catastrophes is to have plans to address them already in place and to have exercised for their eventuality — in other words, to maintain an ongoing capability to respond appro-priately. Although the probability and severity of a given event are not known, one must behave as if the worst-case scenario were going to occur — that it is not a ques-tion of if, but when. The point is to reduce current vulnerabilities and put in place response measures that will keep a disastrous event from veering into unmitigated catastrophe. Moreover, the two forms of rationality differ in their object of protec-tion: whereas insurance focuses on individuals and groups, preparedness protects the operations of “critical infrastructures.” These latter are systems — such as infor-mation and communications, finance, transportation, and energy — whose continu-ous functioning is understood to be vital for economy and polity.

Preparedness organizes a set of techniques for maintaining order in a time of emergency. First responders are trained, relief supplies are stockpiled, and the logis-tics of relief distribution are mapped out. During the event itself, real-time “situ-ational awareness” is critical to the coordination of response. The duration of direct intervention by a preparedness apparatus is limited to the immediate onset and aftermath of crisis, but the requirement of vigilant attention to the prospect of crisis is ongoing, permanent. Techniques such as early warning systems make possible such sustained attention. An apparatus of preparedness comes to know its vulnera-bilities through practices of imaginative enactment: tools such as scenario planning and simulation exercises test the response system and reveal gaps in readiness.

Here is a partial list of types of preparedness techniques:

• Scenarios and simulations• Early warning systems• Stockpiling of relief supplies• Plans for coordinating response among diverse entities• Crisis communications systems• Metrics for readiness assessment

It should be emphasized that these techniques are not unique to U.S. domestic security: scenarios and simulations, early warning and detection systems, and plans for coordinating response can also be found in areas such as humanitarian relief, environmental planning, and international health — in any field oriented toward managing potential emergencies. Thus, like insurance, preparedness is an abstract form that can be actualized in diverse ways, according to diverse politi-cal aims.


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Table 1 indicates some of the basic distinctions between insurance and pre-paredness as forms of security rationality.

A Continuous State of Readiness

While techniques of preparedness are now applied to a variety of potential disas-ters, they were initially assembled in the Cold War United States, in response to the threat of a surprise nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. This was the context for the rise of the U.S. national security state, in which a huge military buildup arguably took the place of what in Western Europe became the welfare state. At this stage, “preparedness” referred to massive military mobilization in peacetime in order to deter or respond to an anticipated enemy attack. The nation would

Table 1 Forms of Security Rationality

Insurance Preparedness

Type of event addressed Regularly occurring, of Not calculable, potentially limited scope: one can catastrophic scope: one can say predict how often it will that it is likely to happen, but not occur, but not to whom when or where

Knowledge required Archival Narrative, imaginedabout event

How the possible event From external danger to From unpredictable threat tois transformed manageable risk vulnerability to be mitigated

Technical operation Calculate probability using Gauge current vulnerabilities tables of frequency through imaginative enactment

How to alleviate threat Spread risk over Build capabilities for response to population multiple threats

Temporal orientation Continuing, modulated Ongoing vigilant alertness; intervention sporadic intervention, lasting only

for duration of event and recovery

Initial site of application Seventeenth-century Cold War threat of atomic attack shipping and navigation Extension to new sites Property, illness and Natural disaster, ecological mortality, accident, catastrophe, emerging infectious infirmity disease, terrorism

Note: This comparison table was developed in collaboration with Stephen Collier.

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have to be permanently ready for a nuclear catastrophe, requiring ongoing crisis planning in economic, political, and military arenas. Civil defense was one aspect of such preparedness. Although the most ambitious aspects of civil defense were never fully implemented, many of its elements gradually came to take on broader significance as they migrated into new domains of threat, such as natural disasters and environmental accidents.

Cold War civil defense plans were developed in response to the rise of novel forms of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: first, air attacks on population and industrial centers in World War II, and then the prospect of nuclear attack after the war. As World War II came to an end, U.S. military planners sought to ensure that the country did not demobilize after the war as it had after World War I. They argued that a weak military had invited the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now the Soviet Union presented a new existential threat. To meet it, argued strategists, the United States would have to remain in a state of permanent mobilization. What historian Michael Sherry calls “an ideology of preparedness” thus emerged even before the Cold War had begun.15

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted between 1944 and 1946, reported on the consequences of air attacks in England, Germany, and Japan and the effectiveness of these countries’ civil defense measures. It recommended shel-ters and evacuation programs in the United States, “to minimize the destructive-ness of such attacks, and so organize the economic and administrative life of the Nation that no single or small group of attacks can paralyze the national organ-ism.”16 The report pointed to the need to disperse key industries outside of dense urban areas and to guarantee the continuity of government after attack.17 As Peter Galison notes, the survey led military strategists to envision the United States in terms of its key sites of vulnerability — to see the national territory and population in terms of a set of targets whose destruction would hamper future war efforts.18

Given their anxiety about U.S. vulnerability, military planners sought to make

15. Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941 – 1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).

16. Lawrence J. Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense in the U.S.A., Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet Union: The Evolution of Policies since 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 58.

17. Andrew Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Develop-ment during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 145 (see n. 57).

18. Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4 (2001): 6 – 33. For a detailed discus-sion, see Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness: Space, Security and Citizenship in the United States,” in War, Citizenship, and Territory, ed. Deborah Cowen and Emily Gilbert (New York: Routledge, 2007).


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sure that the nation could quickly generate an efficient war machine in the midst of emergency.19 The 1947 National Security Act, perhaps the first explicit artic-ulation of the concept of “national security,” established the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), which centralized domestic war preparedness efforts. The NSRB laid the foundation for much Cold War civil defense planning. The agency organized its programs assuming the need to anticipate a massive surprise attack by the Soviet Union: “The national security requires continuous mobili-zation planning and, to maximum possible degree, a continuous state of readi-ness.”20 Anxiety about the threat of attack intensified following the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first nuclear weapon in 1949. The United States responded with an immediate threefold increase in its defense budget.

National security in the face of the Soviet threat comprised three interrelated strategies: containment, deterrence, and preparedness. While containment and deterrence focused on ways of managing and confronting the enemy, prepared-ness referred to continuous war mobilization on the home front. For the nation to be ready for a surprise attack, it would be necessary to have an economic and military infrastructure for waging full-scale war already in place. The strategy of preparedness involved a number of interrelated measures: gauging the vulner-ability of U.S. forces to a first strike, putting attack detection systems in place, and ensuring that the civilian infrastructure would continue to function even in the face of a massive first strike. The latter, civil defense, would remain the least developed of these measures.

An early definition of civil defense was “the mobilization of the entire popula-tion for the preservation of civilian life and property from the results of enemy attacks, and with the rapid restoration of normal conditions in any area that has been attacked.”21 Based on a proposal from the NSRB, President Harry S. Tru-man established the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1950. Congress then passed the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which distributed a series of civil defense tasks to state and local offices: coordinate volunteers, hold training exer-cises, mount public awareness campaigns. However, the most ambitious and costly civil defense program — a nationwide shelter system — was never implemented, as officials remained ambivalent about civil defense. Insofar as the military’s

19. As Sherry writes, “If attack were to come without warning, the war machine had to be ever ready.” Preparing for the Next War, 235.

20. Cited in Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red, 36.21. Thomas J. Kerr, Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust? (Boulder, Colo.: West-

view Press, 1983), 20.

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nuclear deterrence strategy was based on mutually assured destruction, strategists saw civil defense either as ineffectual or as destabilizing to the strategic balance. Moreover, the military did not want responsibility for the protection of the civil-ian population. Further, civil defense was, and would continue to be, politically unpopular: the public tended to see it as a futile — and dangerous — way of plan-ning for nuclear war.22

In the early 1960s, President Kennedy made a strong case for the development of a nationwide fallout shelter system, arguing that it would provide a form of protection against accidental nuclear exchange. The Cuban Missile Crisis lent some urgency to his proposal, but by the mid-sixties these plans had once again fallen flat.23 Thus, efforts to fully implement civil defense measures as an element of nuclear attack preparedness were mostly blocked over the course of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the underlying logic of civil defense — the need to anticipate a surprise attack — as well as many of the institutions and forms of expertise that were developed as part of civil defense, provided the basis for what would eventu-ally be a more fully articulated form of security rationality.

Techniques of Preparedness I: Scenario Development

While mutually assured destruction was the predominant nuclear strategy within the Department of Defense in the 1950s, experts outside of the military were rethinking the basic tenets of deterrence. Civilian defense intellectuals with the RAND Corporation, with backgrounds in technical fields such as physics, math-ematics, and economics, honed methods for simulating the conduct of war in order to advise military planners on weapons systems, arms control issues, and other strategic questions.24 Advocates of this approach argued that in the case of thermonuclear war, modeling the stages of confrontation and conflict was critical, since no one had any actual experience with this new form of war.

Using game theory, the RAND strategists tried to foresee the moves of the adversary in the lead-up to superpower confrontation. On this basis, they argued

22. Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense.23. By this time, the key debate in nuclear defense strategy concerned antiballistic missiles

(ABMs). An ABM system had two possible implications for civil defense: either it would render civil defense unnecessary, or civil defense would be a “backup” to the ABM strategy, given that some incoming missiles would be missed and that exploding them would generate fallout against which civilians would need shelter.

24. Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon: Strategists of the Nuclear Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).


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that mutually assured destruction was not credible as a strategy for deterrence against Soviet aggression in Europe. The Soviets might well decide that even if their tanks rolled into West Germany, the United States was unlikely to unleash global nuclear annihilation in response. The RAND strategists’ alternative was to develop plans for a limited nuclear engagement in which there would be the opportunity for intrawar negotiation between stages of escalation. From this van-tage, civil defense measures such as rapid evacuation plans and shelter systems became an important aspect of deterrence strategy: first, having these measures in place would discourage enemy attack on an otherwise temptingly unprepared target; second, it would reinforce the enemy’s belief in U.S. willingness to use strategic retaliatory power.25

The problem civil defense approached was how to maintain the nation’s war-fighting and postwar recuperation capacities even in the face of a devastating attack. For RAND strategists such as Herman Kahn, this issue was imperative given U.S. military doctrine: in order for the strategy of deterrence to work, the enemy had to be convinced that the United States was prepared to engage in a full-scale nuclear war and had thus made concrete plans both for conducting such a war and for rebuilding in its aftermath. Kahn criticized military planners for their failure to concretely envision how a nuclear war would unfold. If plan-ners were serious about the strategy of deterrence, he argued, they had better be prepared to actually wage nuclear war. It was irresponsible not to think in detail about the consequences of such a war: What civil defense measures would lead to the loss of only fifty million rather than a hundred million lives? What would human life be like after a nuclear war? How could one plan for postwar reconstruction in a radiation-contaminated environment? Prewar preparation was necessary for continued postwar existence.

In the quest to be prepared for the eventuality of thermonuclear war, Kahn counseled, every possibility should be pursued. “With sufficient preparation,” he wrote, “we actually will be able to survive and recuperate if deterrence fails.”26 Kahn honed a method for “thinking about the unthinkable” that would make such planning possible: scenario development.27 For Kahn, scenarios served two

25. A key moment in this was the 1957 Gaither Report, which recommended the construction of a large-scale fallout shelter system. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon.

26. Cited in Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Arts of Ther-monuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 231.

27. Here Kahn was building on the use of the “attack narrative” technique that was part of early civil defense planning. See U.S. National Security Resources Board, United States Civil Defense (Washington, D.C., 1950); see also Collier and Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness.”

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purposes. One was to assist in designing role-playing games in which decision-makers would enact the lead-up to war with the Soviet Union. In the absence of the actual experience of a nuclear standoff, these exercises provided officials and military planners with something close to the sense of urgency such a crisis would bring. The second use of scenarios was to force both planners and the public to seriously face the prospect of nuclear catastrophe as something that must be planned for in detail.

Through the development of scenarios, Kahn envisioned a range of postwar conditions whose scale of catastrophe was a function of prewar preparations, especially civil defense measures. Unfolding these scenarios generated knowledge about the nation’s current vulnerabilities and led Kahn to proposals for mitigating them.28 For example, in the wake of nuclear war, a radioactive environment could hamper postwar reconstruction unless there was a way of determining individual levels of exposure. Thus, he recommended distributing radioactivity dosimeters to the entire population in advance of war, so that postwar survivors would be able to gauge their exposure level and act accordingly.

The general problem scenario development addressed was how to plan for an unprecedented event. Scenarios were not predictions or forecasts but opportuni-ties for exercising an agile response capability. They trained leaders to deal with the unanticipated. “Imagination,” Kahn wrote, “has always been one of the prin-cipal means for dealing in various ways with the future, and the scenario is sim-ply one of the many devices useful in stimulating and disciplining the imagina-tion.”29 Scenario planning liberated security experts from reliance on prediction or probabilistic calculation, making it possible to plan for surprise. In the wake of Kahn’s promotion of the technique, scenario planning radiated outside of defense strategy and began a prolific career in other arenas concerned with managing an uncertain future, ranging from corporate strategy to environmental protection to international public health.30

All-Hazards Planning

Although costly civil defense measures such as a national fallout shelter system were never successfully implemented, the state and local offices spawned by the

28. Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn, 248.29. Herman Kahn, “Some Strange Aids to Thought,” in Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable

(New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 145.30. See, for one recent example, Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time

of Turbulence (New York: Gotham Books, 2003).


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Civil Defense Act served as a springboard for the extension of the rationality of preparedness to new domains. Beginning in the early sixties, and with increasing momentum over the next decades, an alternate variant of preparedness developed in parallel to the federal government’s efforts to mobilize for nuclear war. State and local agencies sought to use federal civil defense resources to prepare for natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.31 Despite its dif-ferent set of objects, the field of emergency preparedness was structured by the underlying logic of civil defense: anticipatory mobilization for disaster.

Some governmental measures for alleviating the damage caused by natural disasters, especially floods and wildfires, were already in place. These programs included prevention efforts, such as levee construction and forest management, as well as recovery mechanisms, such as the declaration of federal disasters in order to release assistance funds. But beginning in the mid-1950s, state and local offi-cials took up a number of the techniques associated with nuclear war prepared-ness and applied them to natural disaster planning. These techniques included monitoring and alert systems, evacuation plans, first-responder training, scenario planning, and training drills to exercise the system.

The two kinds of preparedness did not easily coexist. First, there were ten-sions over whether locally based emergency management programs should focus their planning efforts more on nuclear war or on likely natural disasters. There were also tensions between the military dimension of civil defense, which implied norms of hierarchical command and control, and emergency management, which had a distributed, decentralized structure: while its broader vision was federally coordinated, natural disaster planning efforts took place at state and local levels and involved loosely coupled relations among private sector, state, and philan-thropic organizations.32

Despite these differences in mission and organization, civil defense and

31. As a leading figure in the development of emergency preparedness put it: “At the national level, a civil defense system developed earlier than any comparable disaster planning or emergency management system. However, at the local level, the prime concern after World War II became to prepare for and respond to disasters.” E. L. Quarantelli, “Disaster Planning, Emergency Manage-ment, and Civil Protection: The Historical Development and Current Characteristics of Organized Efforts to Prevent and Respond to Disasters” (Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, 1995), www.udel.edu/DRC/preliminary/227.pdf.

32. William L. Waugh, Jr., “Terrorism, Homeland Security and the National Emergency Manage-ment Network,” Public Organization Review 3 (2003): 373 – 85. These tensions foreshadow some of the issues raised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, e.g., the role of the military and the distribution of authority between federal and local agencies in emergency situations.

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emergency management shared a similar field of intervention — potential future catastrophes — which made many of their techniques potentially transferable. Moreover, complementary interests were at play in the migration of civil defense techniques to natural disaster planning. For local officials, federally funded civil defense programs presented an opportunity to support local response to natu-ral disasters. From the federal vantage, given that civil defense against nuclear attack was politically unpopular, natural disaster planning developed capabilities that could also prove useful for attack preparedness. The practice of using civil defense resources for peacetime disasters was institutionalized by a 1976 amend-ment to the 1950 Federal Civil Defense Act. Over the course of the 1970s, the forms of disaster to be addressed through emergency preparedness expanded to include environmental catastrophes, such as Love Canal and Three Mile Island, and humanitarian emergencies, such as the Cuban refugee crisis.

When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was established in 1979, the new agency consolidated federal emergency management and civil defense functions under the rubric of “all-hazards planning.” All-hazards plan-ning assumed that, for the purposes of emergency preparedness, many kinds of catastrophe could be treated in the same way: earthquakes, floods, major indus-trial accidents, and enemy attacks were brought into the same operational space, given certain common characteristics. Needs such as early warning, the coordi-nation of response by multiple agencies, public communication to assuage panic, and the efficient implementation of recovery processes were shared across these various sorts of disaster. Thus, all-hazards planning focused not on assessing specific threats, but on building generic capabilities that could function across multiple threat domains.33

National Security after the Cold War

The rationale for civil defense as an element of deterrence strategy, initially devel-oped at RAND in the 1950s, finally came into favor among high-level U.S. military planners in the 1970s. Among other reasons, this was because the Soviet Union had developed its own extensive civil defense program, so that civil defense was now a variable in the strategic balance. In 1975 the Defense Civil Preparedness

33. For FEMA’s institutional history, see “FEMA History” (March 21, 2006), www.fema .gov/about/history.shtm. On all-hazards planning, Quarantelli writes: “It is being more and more accepted that civil protection should take a generic rather than agent specific approach to disasters.” “Disaster Planning,” 17.


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Office recommended “Crisis Relocation Planning” as part of a capacity for flex-ible nuclear response. Similarly, Samuel Huntington, adviser to President Jimmy Carter, argued that the United States’ lack of a “population relocation capability” was a strategic vulnerability that could be politically destabilizing. In the 1980s, defense strategists embraced the notion that without sufficient protection of the economy and government during a nuclear war, the rationale of deterrence was not credible.34

One aspect of Cold War national security that retrospectively stands out is the relative stability of the threat it sought to mitigate. For defense strategists, the Soviet Union seemed to be knowable and manageable through the rational actor model and game theory. With the end of the Cold War, U.S. national security thinkers were almost nostalgic for a time when, however dire the threat of nuclear catastrophe might have been, it was at least clear what one was supposed to be preparing for. As Colin Powell said in 1991, “We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for.”35 New security formations have since consolidated around this problem: what is the threat for which we must now plan?

The end of the Cold War undermined containment and deterrence as central national security strategies, since there was no longer a rational enemy whose likely actions could be calculated and managed. The key change in the nature of threat was from the stable enemy to the nonspecific adversary.36 This shift became even more palpable after the attacks of September 11. In a 2002 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Donald Rumsfeld counseled that the United States must vigilantly prepare for the unexpected: “September 11 taught us that the future holds many unknown dangers, and that we fail to prepare for them at our peril.” He elaborated, using the language of the anticipation of surprise famil-iar from scenario planning: “The Cold War is gone and with it the familiar secu-rity environment. The challenges of the new century are not predictable. We will probably be surprised again by new adversaries who may strike in unexpected ways. The challenge is to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, the unexpected.”37

34. See Vale, The Limits of Civil Defense.35. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking,

2004), 203.36. See U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, September 30, 2001,

www.defenselink.mil/pubs/qdr2001.pdf.37. Donald Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 3 (2002), www.foreign

affairs.org/20020501faessay8140/donald-h-rumsfeld/transforming-the-military.html.

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In the speech, Rumsfeld described the military’s strategic shift, after the Cold War, from a threat-based strategy to a capabilities-based approach. This strategy focused less on who might threaten the United States and more on how the United States might be threatened. Such an approach would allow the military to focus on the central new problem of “asymmetric threats”: instead of building armed forces around plans to fight this or that country, Rumsfeld argued, the United States needed to examine its own vulnerabilities — which would enable the mili-tary to deal with multiple, nonspecific forms of threat.

Techniques of Preparedness II: Simulation

In developing protocols for all-hazards planning, one security expert in the early 1980s described the importance of simulation exercises for training purposes: “Ideally, when a real crisis hits, no difference should exist, either operationally or emotionally, between the current reality and the previous training simulations.”38 To design such drills requires information about the situation to be planned for: the speed of a toxic cloud under given weather conditions, the pattern of outbreak of an epidemic, the scale of impact of a large earthquake in a specific urban setting. Scenario-based simulations not only exercise the system of emergency response and produce knowledge about needed capabilities, but also generate a sense of urgency among participants.39

In the 1980s, techniques of preparedness such as the simulation extended to transnational health and humanitarian organizations seeking ways to plan for possible emergencies. For example, in her book The Coming Plague, journalist Laurie Garrett describes a 1989 conference in which 800 tropical disease spe-cialists participated in a “war games scenario” in which an Ebola virus outbreak was simulated. Like such exercises in national security, the goal was to expose vulnerabilities: “The hope was that such a role-playing scenario would reveal weaknesses in the public health emergency system that could later be corrected.” The actual performance of the exercise pointed to a key function of simulation as a preparedness technique — its ability to produce anxiety in participants: “What the war games revealed was an appalling state of nonreadiness,” writes Garrett.

38. Robert Kupperman, “Vulnerable America,” in Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics, ed. James Woolsey (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1983), 202.

39. This had been one Kahn’s reasons for developing the scenario method. As Ghamari-Tabrizi writes: “This was Kahn’s problem: how to invest hypothetical vulnerabilities, particularly unknown and undetectable ones, with urgency.” The Worlds of Herman Kahn, 233.


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“Overall, the mood in Honolulu after five hours was grim, even nervous. The fail-ings, weaknesses, and gaps in preparedness were enormous.”40

In contemporary preparedness planning, the lesson of a successful simula-tion based on a scenario is typically the same as the one that Anderson Cooper gleaned from Hurricane Katrina: we are not prepared. However, such exercises typically focus on experts and leaders rather than the public. They are an incite-ment to action: hold meetings, develop plans, release funds. Security simulations involve enactments of scenarios of varying detail and scale, followed by reports on the performance of response. Often former public officials play the roles of lead-ers — presumably because they are both authoritative and available for several-day-long exercises. In 2001, “Dark Winter” was performed, a scenario depicting a covert smallpox attack in the United States. This was an “executive level simula-tion” set in the National Security Council over 14 days. Current and former public officials played the roles of members of the NSC, and members of the executive and legislative branches were briefed on the results. One outcome was the Bush administration’s decision to produce 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine.41

“Silent Vector” (2002) was an exercise in how to deal with the threat of an impending terrorist attack when there is not enough information to provide pro-tection against the attack. The president, played by former Senator Sam Nunn, was told of credible intelligence indicating an upcoming attack on the nation’s energy infrastructure, but was not given any information on where or when the attack would take place. Other examples include 2003’s simulated anthrax attack, “Scarlet Cloud,” and the biennial “TOPOFF” exercises held by the Department of Homeland Security. TOPOFF 3 was enacted in April 2005 and included a car bombing, a chemical attack, and the release of an undisclosed biological agent in New Jersey and Connecticut. It was the largest terrorism drill ever, costing $16 million and including 10,000 participants. The event also included a simulated news organization, which was fully briefed on events as they unfolded. The actual press was not invited.

Such simulations were not limited to the United States. In the January 2005 “Atlantic Storm,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright played the U.S. president in an exercise simulating a smallpox attack on multiple nations of the

40. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), 593 – 94.

41. For an anthropological analysis of bioterrorism scenarios, see Monica Schoch-Spana, “Bio-terrorism: US Public Health and a Secular Apocalypse,” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (October 2004): 8 – 13.

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translatlantic community. Istanbul, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, and multiple U.S. cit-ies were hit. In a mock summit, former prime ministers of European countries played the roles of heads of state. Questions of immediate response were posed: What kind of vaccination approach? Which countries have enough supplies of vaccine, and will they share them? Will quarantine be necessary? After the exer-cise, participants concluded that, first, there was insufficient awareness of the possibility and consequences of a bioterrorist attack, and second, no organization or structure is currently agile enough to respond to the challenges posed by such an attack. Structures of coordination and communication of response in real time must be put into place.

The conclusions were similar to those of other simulation exercises: govern-ments are not adequately aware or prepared. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said of TOPOFF 3: “We expect failure because we’re actually going to be seeking to push to failure.”42 Indeed, the experience of failure is part of a preparedness strategy. In producing system failure, simulation exercises gener-ate knowledge of gaps, misconnections, and unfulfilled needs. These can then be the target of intervention. In so doing, they forge new links — communicational, informational — among various agencies: local and national government, public health, law enforcement, intelligence. These simulations, by making infrastruc-tural vulnerabilities visible, are part of a method for designating priorities and allocating resources in a preparedness system.

DHS National Preparedness

In the decades after its founding, FEMA faced ongoing tension between its civil defense function and its task of natural disaster planning. While Republican administrations tended to emphasize the former, Democratic presidents focused on the latter.43 The demand for a coherent domestic security system that would consolidate multiple governmental prevention and response systems crystallized, after the attacks of September 11 and the anthrax letters, in the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The new department brought together security

42. Department of Homeland Security, “Transcript of Press Conference with Secretary of Home-land Security Michael Chertoff on the TOPOFF 3 Exercise,” April 4, 2005, www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/press_release_0650.shtm.

43. Robert Ward, Gary Wamsley, Aaron Schroeder, and David B. Robins, “Network Organi-zational Development in the Public Sector: A Case Study of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA),” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (2000): 1018 – 32.


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functions from a number of areas of government: civil defense, disaster response, border security, intelligence, and transportation security. FEMA’s assimilation into DHS once again shifted its orientation more toward enemy attack — in this case, toward preparation for terrorism. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that DHS characterized its overall mission in the terms of “all-hazards” planning familiar from emergency management. As Chertoff said in 2005 in unveiling the depart-ment’s new National Preparedness Guidance: “The Department of Homeland Security has sometimes been viewed as a terrorist-fighting entity, but of course, we’re an all-hazards department. Our responsibilities include not only fighting the forces of terrorism, but also fighting the forces of natural disasters.”44

The DHS plan elaborated a set of administrative mechanisms for making pre-paredness a measurable condition. The plan was a guide for decision making and self-assessment across multiple governmental and nongovernmental enti-ties concerned with problems of domestic security. It sought to bring disparate forms of threat into a common security field, articulating the techniques that had been honed over the prior six decades of planning for emergency. These included detection and early warning systems, simulation exercises, coordinated response plans, and metrics for the assessment of the current state of readiness.45

The goal of DHS preparedness planning was to “attain the optimal state of preparedness.”46 What is a state of preparedness, according to DHS? As the plan defined it, “preparedness is a continuous process involving efforts at all levels of government and between government and private-sector and nongovernmental organizations to identify threats, determine vulnerabilities, and identify required resources.”47 In other words, preparedness is the measurable relation of capabili-ties to vulnerabilities, given a selected range of threats.

44. “Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Second Stage Review Remarks” (House Security Committee, July 13, 2005), www.hsc.house.gov. For a critical discus-sion of the multiple types of events DHS seeks to prepare for, see Ann Laura Stoler and David Bond, “Refractions Off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 93 – 107.

45. Many of the technical elements of the National Preparedness plans were present in FEMA’s 1984 Integrated Emergency Management System, which operationalized all-hazards planning at the federal level. The system defined a set of common preparedness measures that would make integrated emergency planning possible: functions that were critical to a response to any disaster, such as communications, alert, command and control, and providing food and shelter. See “FEMA History.”

46. Michael Chertoff, quoted in Eric Lipton, “Homeland Security Chief Announces Overhaul,” New York Times, July 14, 2005.

47. Department of Homeland Security, Interim National Preparedness Goal, March 31, 2005, A-2. Contrast this with Foucault’s definition of population security, n. 5 above.

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National preparedness targeted vulnerabilities in the nation’s “critical infra-structure.”48 The term “critical infrastructure” referred to sociotechnical systems for sustaining economic and social life, many of which were initially developed as part of population security. The sectors included in the 2006 National Infra-structure Protection Plan were agriculture and food, public health and health care, drinking water and waste water treatment, energy, banking and finance, national monuments, defense industrial base, information technology, telecommunica-tions, chemical industry, transportation systems, emergency services, postal ser-vices, and shipping. From the vantage of national preparedness, collective depen-dence on these systems was an ongoing source of vulnerability.

In the Interim National Preparedness Goal, threats to these systems could come from a number of sources, including outside enemies, natural disasters, and infectious diseases. Given the many kinds of hazards to plan for, DHS approached threats through an emphasis on capabilities that ranged across multiple types of events rather than a focus on specific threats. “Capabilities-based planning” was based on Department of Defense methods developed in the wake of the Cold War but was also coherent with the central premise of all-hazards planning: that one should not focus on specific threats but on a range of possible responses that work across diverse threats. As the DHS planning document put it: “Capabilities-Based Planning is defined as planning, under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for a wide range of threats and hazards while working within an economic frame-work that necessitates prioritization and choice. Capabilities-based planning is all-hazards planning.”49

The plan did not claim to be able to prevent or mitigate all risks. As Chertoff commented, “There’s risk everywhere; risk is a part of life. I think one thing I’ve tried to be clear in saying is we will not eliminate every risk.”50 Since there were a multiplicity of risks and finite resources for approaching them, DHS would prioritize by focusing on the largest scale disasters: “DHS will concentrate first and foremost, most relentlessly, on addressing threats that pose catastrophic con-sequences.”51 Among the many dire possibilities, what were the criteria for select-

48. The National Infrastructure Protection Plan “provides a roadmap for identifying assets, assessing vulnerabilities, prioritizing assets, and implementing protection measures in each infra-structure sector.” According to DHS, 85% of the critical infrastructure is in the private sector. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Goal, 12.

49. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Goal, 4.50. Chertoff, quoted in Eric Lipton, “U.S. Report Lists Possibilities for Terrorist Attacks and

Likely Toll,” New York Times, March 16, 2005.51. “Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Second Stage Review

Remarks” (House Security Committee, July 13, 2005), www.hsc.house.gov.


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ing which threats were the most salient? “Risk-based” prioritization would guide the allocation of federal resources. This meant distributing funds according to the relative likelihood and catastrophic potential of a given attack or disaster in a given place. However, exactly how to do this given the uncertain occurrence of salient threats remained both a technical and a political problem.

The achievement of optimal preparedness did not require knowledge about the norms of living beings; unlike population security, it did not develop epidemiolog-ical or demographic knowledge. Rather, to assess and improve current prepared-ness required techniques for generating detailed knowledge of infrastructural vulnerabilities in relation to response capacities. Here is where scenario plan-ning proved useful. As we have seen, scenarios are not predictions or forecasts; rather, they map readiness for a wide range of threats. In its Interim National Preparedness Goal, DHS selected fifteen disaster scenarios as “the foundation for a risk-based approach.”52 These possible events — including an anthrax attack, a flu pandemic, a nuclear detonation, and a major earthquake — were chosen on the basis of plausibility and catastrophic scale.

The DHS scenarios made it possible to produce knowledge about current vul-nerabilities and the capabilities needed to mitigate them. As one expert com-mented: “We have a great sense of vulnerability, but no sense of what it takes to be prepared. These scenarios provide us with an opportunity to address that.”53 Using the scenarios, DHS developed a menu of the “critical tasks” that would have to be performed in various kinds of major events; responsibility for per-forming these tasks, in turn, was to be assigned to specific governmental and nongovernmental agencies.

The scenarios did not imply permanent agreement about the major threats; rather, they were to be regularly evaluated and, if necessary, transformed: “DHS will maintain a National Planning Scenario portfolio and update it periodically based on changes in the homeland security strategic environment.”54 The plan envisioned ongoing reflexive self-transformation in relation to a changing threat environment: “Our enemy constantly changes and adapts, so we as a department must be nimble and decisive.”55 National preparedness had to continually pose itself the question, are we preparing for the right threats?

52. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Goal, 6. 53. David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and

International Studies, quoted in Lipton, “U.S. Report Lists Possibilities.”54. DHS, Interim National Preparedness Guidance, 6.55. Chertoff, quoted in Lipton, “Homeland Security Chief Announces Overhaul.”

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While the above describes the underlying rationality of national prepared-ness planning, its actual operation was far from stabilized. DHS was fraught with bureaucratic infighting, budgetary struggles, and cronyism, leading to a wide-spread perception of its failure to achieve its mission — especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.56 It is worth emphasizing, however, that such criticism pre-sumed the normative rationality of preparedness.

Technical Reform

Scenario 10 of the DHS planning scenarios document was titled “Natural Disas-ter — Major Hurricane.”57 As has been widely noted, the city of New Orleans had run a hurricane simulation in 2004. Obviously, such exercises do not in them-selves ensure a state of preparedness. Nonetheless, the perception of a massively failed response by DHS to the actual hurricane one year later did not undermine the presumed utility of “all-hazards” planning. Rather, from the vantage of pre-paredness experts, it pointed to problems of implementation and coordination, of command and control. Thus, in response to the failure, we have seen the redirec-tion and intensification of already-developed preparedness techniques rather than a broad rethinking of security questions.

Reform proposals have been primarily technical: in the context of the Gulf Coast, rebuild the flood protection infrastructure; in large cities, improve evacu-ation plans; for preparedness planning in general, ensure that there are coherent systems in place for communication and coordination in crisis. More broadly, scrutinize the relationships among federal, state, local, private-sector, and non-governmental organizational responsibilities for dealing with various aspects of disaster preparedness.58 However, under the rubric of preparedness, questions surrounding the social basis of vulnerability are not posed. This issue should be distinguished from debates over the privatization of social services and the shrinking of governmental capacity. Rather, it raises the question of what kind of governmental techniques are most salient for looking after the well-being of citizens, and what the goals of knowledge and intervention in the name of security should be.

56. For a description of widespread malfeasance in DHS, see Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank, “Looting Homeland Security,” Rolling Stone, December 29, 2005, 44 – 54.

57. Homeland Security Council, Planning Scenarios: Executive Summaries, July 2004.58. See, e.g., the White House, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned

(February 2006), www.whitehouse.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned.pdf.


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Here we should note some of the differences between the objects and aims of population security and those of preparedness. In contrast to population security-based tasks such as public health and welfare provision, preparedness is oriented to crisis situations and to localized sites of disorder or disruption. These are typi-cally events of short duration that require urgent response.59 Their likelihood in a given place demands a condition of readiness, rather than a long-term work of sustained attention to the welfare of the population. The object to be known and managed differs, as well: for preparedness, the key site of vulnerability is not the health of a population but rather the critical infrastructure that guarantees the continuity of political and economic order. If population security builds infra-structure, preparedness catalogs it and monitors its vulnerabilities. And while preparedness may emphasize saving the lives of “victims” in moments of duress, it does not seek to intervene in the living conditions of human beings as members of a social collectivity.

To consider Katrina and its aftermath a problem of preparedness rather than one of population security is to focus political questions about the failure around a fairly circumscribed set of issues. For the purposes of disaster planning, whose key question is “are we prepared?” the poverty rate and the percentage of people without health insurance are not salient indicators of readiness or of the efficacy of response. Rather, preparedness emphasizes questions such as hospital surge capacity, the coherence of evacuation plans, the resilience of the electrical grid, or ways of detecting the presence of E. coli in the water supply. From the vantage of preparedness, the conditions of existence of members of the population are not a political problem.

59. Craig Calhoun, “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41 (2004): 373 – 95.

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