When catastrophe hits—a hurricane bearing down on a coast, an epidemic filling hospitals to the brim, or a toxic spill contaminating a city—the United States military determines what the country does in response to the catastrophe. Its activities extend well beyond the Hollywood vision of troops taking tactical positions behind sandbags or handing out food to starving people.
What the military provides is planning, logistics, and urgency combined in a way that no other agency possesses, learned over decades of warfare and crisis management. Built on this foundation is a professional relationship between the military and civil government agencies like FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This coordination is facilitated by the National Response Framework, an action-oriented step-by-step guidebook on who does what when disaster strikes. Less than one more layer of government bureaucracy in a chain of them, which gives the direction and control to put the right assets in the right location at the right time and in a productive capacity. The system combines the military technical capability into a larger, civilian-led effort. The military action in this case is colossus.
Its logistics arrangement is legendary, from the Berlin Airlift that sustained a city for almost a year to its more recent endeavors where medical supplies and physicians were air-dropped into medical crises. With armadas of ships, aircraft, and land vehicles, the military can deliver material, equipment, and human beings into areas of disaster more quickly than any other civilian agency. That kind of mobility is a matter of life and death, where some areas of the country have roads impassable or destroyed neighborhood infrastructures. And added value is more than it taking freight around.
The military medical teams are trained to operate under worse conditions than hospitals can provide, setting up field hospitals that are equivalent to emergency rooms downtown. Engineer units are another type of skill that is useful, repairing bridges, highways, and electrical power grids in an effort to get the services back online.
They are not abstract skills—these skills are tested daily by practice and use. When villages are isolated, the military can be the lifeline. Deciding to commit military personnel to a crisis environment in itself is a complicated process.
They are the commanders who decide the extent of the catastrophe, how desperate the population is, and how much they can give. Not only are troops trained to carry out technical missions, but they are also trained to execute under adverse conditions, survive open-ended scenarios, and work with other organizations. That discipline and culture of preparedness allow them to enter domains of confusion and impose order on them immediately. Stories there are, but.
Logistically, it’s not simple to transport equipment to places where roads are narrowed to rubble or the airports are shut. It’s as physically demanding as any military operation to deliver the proper assistance to the proper place at the proper time. Communication will fail when organizations possess incompatible systems or when bureaucracy induces confusion in coordination.
In order to avoid this from occurring, the army has spent on interoperating systems and joint exercises with other non-military organizations, such that in case something does occur, they will all work immensely well together. The effect of this coordination is stunning.
Militarily supported engagement injects speed, coordination, and legitimacy into relief. Individuals are rescued in the moment but weeks and months afterward, when military engineers construct more solid, harder infrastructure. Above all, perhaps, they bring reassurance and confidence to individuals when stability is needed most.
At large, bringing military assets into federal emergency planning is a security issue of national import. Spontaneous, effective response to disaster saves irreplaceable facilities and keeps critical services going even in unfavourable situations. Being able to do so is as much an emergency preparedness issue in the here and now—it’s building a better, more resilient nation capable of delivering on whatever tomorrow has in store.