America’s emergency response system is entirely ineffective. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a typical bureaucracy. It can deal with small problems, but it has no capacity to quickly move enough assets to respond to big crises.
This is not a new problem. Almost 20 years ago, I was co-chairman of a Business Executives for National Security Study Group which spent a year studying how to dramatically improve our emergency response effort. We warned about our systems’ deficiencies in a 2007 report requested by Congress after the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Our report, “Getting Down to Business: An Action Plan for Public-Private Disaster Response Coordination,” had nine major recommendations for a better emergency response system. We recommended an approach which relied on existing large private logistics systems, such as Walmart, FedEx, UPS, Costco, Target, Amazon, and others. These companies have substantial resources — and they practice delivering huge volumes of goods to the American people every day.
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