According to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security in 2017, millions of Americans-perhaps the majority of the population-would die if the electrical grid went down for a significant period of time. Not only is this disturbing fact is well known to Congress, it is also well known to America's enemies. The United States today remains extremely vulnerable to a wide variety of man-made and natural threats, such as electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, cyber-attack, geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), terrorism, weather and many other threats. In November of 2017, the FEMA Administrator noted in his testimony to Congress that "we do not have a culture of preparedness in this country." The majority of Americans are unaware of the magnitude of the threats to the electric grid and our communities are completely unprepared. We have seen from recent disasters such as hurricanes Katrina, Maria, Harvey and Irma that communities can be on their own for a long period of time until help arrives - and these are regional disasters where massive outside resources are still available. Here is the fatal flaw of the emergency management system in the United States: it depends on our ability to bring outside resources into a disaster area. But what if the majority of the country was the disaster area? What if cities and towns across the country were on their own for a long period of time? Survival will be a local issue. The cavalry will not be coming. The real key to having prepared and resilient communities lies in the communities having a civil defense plan and being prepared for a worst-case scenario, such as a national-scale power outage. This book is about taking pre-disaster mitigation to the next level, so that your town can be ready for any disaster, large or small. It is possible for a town to survive if the grid goes down long term. But only if a few of its citizens act now. This book takes you through the steps to prepare your town for a worst-case national disaster. And in being prepared for a worst-case scenario, you and your town can be prepared for anything from a minor power outage to a hurricane to an electromagnetic pulse, solar flare or cyber-attack taking out the entire power grid. This is the Civil Defense Book!

Security governance in the second decade of the 21st century is ill-serving the American people. Left uncorrected, civic life and national continuity will remain increasingly at risk. At stake well beyond our shores is the stability and future direction of an international political and economic system dependent on robust and continued U.S. engagement. Outdated hierarchical, industrial structures and processes configured in 1947 for the Cold War no longer provide for the security and resilience of the homeland. Security governance in this post-industrial, digital age of complex interdependencies must transform to anticipate and if necessary manage a range of cascading catastrophic effects, whether wrought by asymmetric adversaries or technological or natural disasters. Security structures and processes that perpetuate a 20th century, top-down, federal-centric governance model offer Americans no more than a single point-of-failure. The strategic environment has changed; the system has not. Changes in policy alone will not bring resolution. U.S. security governance today requires a means to begin the structural and process transformation into what this book calls Network Federalism. Charting the origins and development of borders-out security governance into and through the American Century, the book establishes how an expanding techno-industrial base enabled American hegemony. Turning to the homeland, it introduces a borders-in narrative—the convergence of the functional disciplines of emergency management, civil defense, resource mobilization and counterterrorism into what is now called homeland security. For both policymakers and students a seminal work in the yet-to-be-established homeland security canon, this book records the political dynamics behind the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing development of what is now called the Homeland Security Enterprise. The work makes the case that national security governance has heretofore been one-dimensional, involving horizontal interagency structures and processes at the Federal level. Yet homeland security in this federal republic has a second dimension that is vertical, intergovernmental, involving sovereign states and local governments whose personnel are not in the President’s chain of command. In the strategic environment of the post-industrial 21st century, states thus have a co-equal role in strategy and policy development, resourcing and operational execution to perform security and resilience missions. This book argues that only a Network Federal governance will provide unity of effort to mature the Homeland Security Enterprise. The places to start implementing network federal mechanisms are in the ten FEMA regions. To that end, it recommends establishment of Regional Preparedness Staffs, composed of Federal, state and local personnel serving as co-equals on Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) rotational assignments. These IPAs would form the basis of an intergovernmental and interdisciplinary homeland security professional cadre to build a collaborative national preparedness culture. As facilitators of regional unity of effort with regard to prioritization of risk, planning, resourcing and operational execution, these Regional Preparedness Staffs would provide the Nation with decentralized network nodes enabling security and resilience in this 21st century post-industrial strategic environment.

"This book is based primarily upon, and mainly consists of, matter contained in articles [published] ... in the Metropolitan magazine during the past fourteen months. It also contains or is based upon an article contributed to the Wheeler Syndicate, a paper submitted to the American Sociological Congress and one or two speeches and public statements. In addition there is much new matter."--Introductory note.