At first the call to pulverize the Federal Emergency Management Agency and start over from scratch sounds like normal political overkill, the kind of scratching and clawing for high ground that normally comes out of Washington in the face of obvious ineptness or when hands are caught suddenly in the cookie jar.
But this time the voices of post-apocalyptic hysteria may be right.
I come to that conclusion after reading account after account of neighborhoods in New Orleans that today are no better off than they were a week after Katrina hit.
Despite the millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours spent cleaning up, there remain large areas of the American south untouched by human hands in the aftermath of Mother Nature’s wrath.
This is particularly true (here’s a shocker) in poor and minority neighborhoods where every day people walk outside and look to the sky but no manna is in the forecast.
Many political leaders from those neighborhoods blame white establishments getting theirs first along with general bureaucratic malaise, but it leads one to wonder:
If we can’t figure out how to get help to the poor in our own country, just what is happening to the billions of dollars we spend around the world each year under the banner of humanitarian aid?
And we wonder how tin cup dictators get the money to arm their thug armies?
Whether the enemy strikes in the form of terror attacks or winds and floods, the response must be swift and efficient, two things are that are usually in short demand when a huge bureaucracy is in crisis.
But there is a solution, and believe it or not, it’s found in the military.
After the Cold War, the U.S. Army had to adapt from a massive, personnel-heavy strategy for holding Europe to lighter, faster forces that could conduct several regional conflicts at the same time.
The result was Rapid Deployment, the Delta Force, units that would use superior technology and better mobility to put out the world’s fires as they erupted.
The Army, a massive bureaucracy faced with new realities, learned to turn on a dime.
That’s the transition emergency managers need to undertake and that may require a near total dismantling of the structure as it exists.
The next disaster is coming.
We owe it to the people in the next neighborhoods to be ready.