popular logistics

James Glanz has another good piece about the Iraqi power grid:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 — Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

- snip -

The Iraqi Electricity Ministry, which Mr. Wahid heads, is one of the few in the central government that has received praise for successfully spending much of the money allocated to it in the Iraqi budget for reconstruction projects. Because of security problems, a shortage of officials who are skilled at writing and executing contracts, and endemic corruption, many of the ministries have either left their rebuilding money unspent or poured it into projects that have had a marginal impact on the quality of life for Iraqi citizens.

One point here seems to be that the Iraqis are ungrateful and unreliable, and are encouraging our our competitors (China) and enemies (Iran), and and giving them footholds in Iraq. This may be so, and it may come at the expense of American contractors like Bechtel. My observations:

• If Iran and China build or rebuild the power grid, isn’t likely that hey’ll start being blamed for its failures, now worse than it was under Saddam.
  
• The essential strategic error of a centralized power brig remains. The only way to guarantee a relatively steady supplyy power is a heavily decentralized network, such as that proposed by the Naval Postgraduate School with its “Solar Eagle” proposal- essentially a solar array on each building in the country, connected to the grid. If what you need to keep going is some battery charging for flashlights, a referigator and fans. To attack the grid you need to attack every building. Which means that effectively attacking the power grid becomes much more difficult - maybe not worth doing.

Here’s our earlier post on “Solar Eagle:” One thing Texas has in common with Iraq - “Solar Eagle” - the Navy Plan to beat the insurgents and help Iraq go solar.    (The Times doesn’t appear to have noticed the “Solar Eagle” proposal - not surprising, in an environment with  to few people and not enought time - the proposal was to learn about except by accident).

Now back to our excerpt from James Glanz’s October 18th piece:

Asked how he had managed to make progress within the bureaucratic morass of much of the Iraqi government, Mr. Wahid said he had simply learned to go it alone. Aside from financing, his main need from the central government was guarantees that Iraqi security forces would protect his workers and the electricity infrastructure.

“Do not annoy me,” Mr. Wahid said was his main message to the government. “Let me do my work.”

Another outstanding resource from Brian Steckler from the Naval Postgraduate School and the Center for the Study of Hastily Formed Networks for Humantarian Assistance/Disaster Relief    -

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been compiling a Responder Knowledge Base, much of which is non-classified,  has what appears to be an encyclopedic collection of information about:

• equipment
• equipment grants
• standards
• best practices

If you’re a registered user (first responder, paid or volunteer, planner - someone with a verifiable legitimate use), there’s an “ask an expert” submission form - and the staff promises to try to answer questions, via email, within a week. I’m going to submit a couple of questions that have been, of late, frustrating my attempts to do some communications planning and budgeting.

Donahue and Tuohy , in Lessons We Don’t Learn, identify recurring problems in emergency management which are identified – repeatedly – in “lessons learned” and “after-action” processes:

• lack of commitment to plans
• cached materials “often inadequate to meet actual need”
• mutual aid assets being counted by different agencies as part of their resource bases, creating a net overstatement of capabilities
• tracking systems for volunteers and donated resources are weak, causing assets to be underutilized
• “short shrift to pre-incident public education”
• inadequate followup on identified problems
• the use of simulated “table-top” exercises to the detriment of inter-agency field exercises – “agencies fail to derive perhaps the most important benefit of the exercise process: relationships with other agencies, jurisdictions, and disciplines”
  

Donahue and Tuohy note that “[t]he wildland fire community uses a very effective nationwide resource ordering and deployment system, but this approach has not been replicated by other disciplines.”