AnalysisGovernment's Katrina failures offer opportunities for business
The White House report on the government’s Katrina failure concludes that deep flaws in the administration’s planning for major disasters led to rampant confusion during the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The report, written by presidential adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, describes poor communications systems, delays in delivering supplies, and overall tumult within the Bush administration. Historians will judge whether the Bush administration’s vast failure to prepare properly and respond effectively to this most predicted, analyzed, studied, and anticipated natural disaster ranks as the worst government failure in U.S. history, or merely one of the two or three worst failures. For businesses, however, the administration’s inadequate performance opens new opportunities.
House Republicans issued their own scathing report of the administration’s performance, singling out information sharing as a major problem in the post-Katrina response. These communication failures open up major markets for command and control expertise. By highlighting failures in information sharing and command and control systems, the House has presented a “screaming market opportunity” for defense contractors, Lawrence Prior, president of SAIC’s Intelligence Group, said during a keynote speech at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) conference. SAIC’s Intelligence Group has more than 7,000 employees working on intelligence and information operations for national defense, at home and abroad, and Prior said that in the wake of command failures such as Katrina, he expects DHS “to take on more responsibility as a war-fighting command.”
Townsend’s report contains 125 recommendations on how to improve government performance in the face of disaster. A few of her recommendations echo those of DHS secretary Michael Chertoff: Have DHS exert more control in emergency situations, and even get the military more involved, and earlier, during catastrophic disasters. These recommendations, in one way or another, mean that over the next eighteen months, command and control expertise from companies dealing mainly with the military could well be a valuable commodity for DHS, Prior said during a keynote speech at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association conference. “That’s the business opportunity, that is the core mission of [AFCEA] — as we bridge to support the Department of Homeland Security and the [Department of Defense] that serves them,” Prior said.
As the various reports about the Katrina response note, Michael Brown was not only incompetent, patently unqualified for the role of the nation’s chief disaster officer, but his conduct during the early phase of Katrina amounted to rank insubordination. He refused to call his boss, Michael Chertoff, with information about the disaster, saying such calls would be nothing but “a waste of time.” It is yet to be precisely determined what contribution this particular aspect of Brown’s irresponsibility made to an already bad situation, but all reports concluded that DHS must streamline the federal reporting structure so there is a clear line of command during an emergency. Prior said that what was at issue was command, control, communications, and intelligence, a process which, when done right, keeps the appropriate people informed in a timely manner. “DoD has wonderful capabilities that have taken 30 years to evolve … and a lot of money and a lot of lessons learned …. And many of those can be applied when you’re in a crisis situation where all your infrastructure is in chaos.”
-read more in Benton Ives-Halperin’s CQreport (sub. req.); read Townsend’s report at this White House Web site; see summary of the report at this Web site
