popular logistics

I’m sorry I hadn’t learned of The Conjecturer until today. A blog - on initial reading - mostly about public affairs and political science by Joshua Foust and Dan Allen. I was moved by an excerpt from, and Foust’s review of, Rosanne Klass’s Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good.

From Klass:

What was lost could never be truly restored. The land had been depopulated, its people were dead, fled, or enslaved… The scholars were gone, the artists were gone, the poets, the heroes, the kings were gone, the land was stripped of life, the fields were ruined and barren. My horrors die with me, yours with you, but such horrors as these are ineffaceable, and heal, when they heal, like an amputation.

From Foust’s post:

What comes out the strongest, perhaps unintentionally, is grief. As the above passage indicates, Afghanistan has a particularly tragic past, an almost continuous record of horrendous loss and catastrophic destruction over the history of Man—what’s worse, such devastation was wrought by the hand of Man, and not Nature. It is the story of a land eternally torn back and forth by its more powerful neighbors (except for the brief, glorious Moghul empire), even if the first three-quarters of the 20th century were particularly calm.

Equally strong in Ms. Klass’ book, however, is the overwhelming sensation of beauty. Afghanistan is, she says, the face of the world—it’s people are of all colors and ethnicities (though, of course, Gul Baz Khan is worthy of particular merit). The landscape is unforgiving and painstakingly beautiful; at one point her endless commentaries upon the “glittering crystal landscape” of the mountains outside Jalalabad after a snowstorm prompt her husband to harshly rebuke her in recognition of the very real danger they were in of plummeting off a cliff to their deaths. Her description of the Buddhas of Bamiyan are of a similar ilk, as were the recordings of her trips into Paghman, Laghman, the Hazarajat, Charikar, and Bagram. Even in desolation, Afghanistan is a land of haunting beauty.

Foust is also a regular contributor to Registan, which “covers Eurasian politics and news, seeking to draw more attention to issues and news rarely covered in much depth, if at all, by Western media. Our focus is primarily on the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, with an eye to domestic politics, relations with with rest of the world, and foreign policy as well as the occasional report on pop culture.”

From The Conjecturer.

My hometown paper, The New York Times, routinely publishes obituaries of people one has likely never heard of - but upon reading the obituary are glad the Times has written about them.  (I’ve heard bits and pieces about the editorial process by which the Times  identifies people, during their lifetimes, and keeps a “morgue” file - but I don’t know enough to explain it).  From their obituary of   Andrée de Jongh, of the Belgian resistance, who ran the “Comet” escape line for downed Allied fighters - so named because it was so fast.

Andrée de Jongh, whose youth and even younger appearance belied her courage and ingenuity when she became a World War II legend ushering many downed Allied airmen on a treacherous, 1,000-mile path from occupied Belgium to safety, died Saturday in Brussels. She was 90.

Her death was announced by a Web site for former resistance fighters, verzet.org. There was no information about survivors.

Derek Shuff, in his book ”Evader” (2007), told of three British crewmen whose bomber made a forced landing in 1941. They found their way to the Underground and were ensconced in a safe house when a slip of a young woman appeared.

”My name is Andrée,” the 24-year-old woman said, ”but I would like you to call me by my code name, which is Dédée, which means little mother. From here on I will be your little mother, and you will be my little children. It will be my job to get my children to Spain and freedom.”

She left and the three sat in stunned silence. One finally spoke. ”Our lives are going to depend on a schoolgirl,” he said.

Two of the men survived the grueling trek along what became known as the Comet escape line, because of the speed with which soldiers were hustled along it.

Ms. de Jongh eventually led 24 to 33 expeditions across occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. She herself escorted 118 servicemen to safety. At least 300 more escaped along the Comet line.

When the Germans captured her in 1943, it was her youth that saved her. When she truthfully confessed responsibility for the entire scheme, they refused to believe her.

The citation of her Medal of Freedom With Golden Palm, the highest award the United States presented to foreigners who helped the American effort in World War II, said Ms. de Jongh ”chose one of the most perilous assignments of the war.”

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.

One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?

Gunnar J Kuepper, Chief of Operations for the consultancy Emergency Disaster Response, Inc., is the author the the paper, “Emergency Management Symbols, History – Meaning – Relevance. A Commentary to the Symbol introduced by NEMA as the New National Logo for Emergency Management.”

Kuepper thinks one of these three logos is quite problematic.

Paper available here.

David Stephenson , who has done outstanding work on the issues which concern Popular Logistics, has noticed that in a report using 23 criterai to evaluate the Department of Homeland Security, GAO entirely omits the promotion and recruitment of citizen responders.

Here’s Stephenson’s post.  I’m now not sure if reading this particular GAO report is worth the candle.

I regret not earlier posting about Stephenson’s important piece, written with Eric Bonabeau, Expecting the Unexpected: : The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, published in the Homeland Security Affairs Journal.

Our position on citizen response is this - any plan that doesn’t regard citizen response as central might contain useful tactics - but we submit that no such plan conceivably constitutes a useful strategy. 

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.”

This essay, “Prepare for Disaster,” by Tom LaTourrette and Ed Chan of the RAND Corporation, was written in 2005 following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But it could have been written yesterday or ten years ago. Weighing in at 812 words, it’s a concise statement of a reasonable framework for discussing disaster planning and response. With Stuart Brand’s account of the San Francisco earthquake, this essay would be an ideal starting point.

Reducing risk entails long-term investment in planning, prevention, and protection. Emergency response is the last resort and should never be relied on as a primary strategy for preventing disasters.

- snip -

As with local response, there is a point beyond which the cost of maintaining standby resources exceeds their benefit. Although it is not clear where this point is, if we accept that this point exists we need to look to alternative approaches. The better prepared a community is to deal with a disaster, the lower the emergency response needs.

We didn’t say current GOP President.

Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace Speech

Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. A CROSS OF IRON…Seeking some concrete way to dramatize the futility of the Cold War, President Eisenhower hit upon the idea of comparing peaceful expenditures with the expenditures both the United States and the Soviet Union were making for armaments. Then he capped the comparison with a brilliant allusion to William Jennings Bryan’s famous phrase “a cross of gold”.

In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.