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In between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles. | ||
| We are speaking to the country. | ||
| C-SPAN, democracy unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Agriculture is the main life in Sussex County, and I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I felt like we were being left behind. | ||
| Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. | ||
| When I found out that Comcast was coming, I ran down the road and I said, welcome. | ||
| High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. | ||
| And now future generations will thrive here in Sussex County. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Next, a discussion on national security and the role of resiliency with former government officials and policy experts. | ||
| Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to those of you here in person and online. | ||
| I'm Jenna Benyahuda, Executive Vice President here at the Atlantic Council. | ||
| Today's event, Boosting Security Through Resilience Amid New Threats, will help to launch the flagship report of our Adrian Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative, Resilience First. | ||
| Before we begin, I would like to thank Adrienne for her generous support of the Adrian Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative. | ||
| Without Adrienne's vision and generosity, this great body of work really would not have been possible. | ||
| Resilience is now trending, but there's a growing recognition with that of the need to harness and cultivate this powerful tool. | ||
| But before there were cabinet-level officials charged with resilience or NATO strategies to build resilience or local communities working this into their strategic plans over the last several years, Adrian decades ago was calling attention to its power and imperative, not just for societies as a whole, but for the individuals who comprise them. | ||
| So thank you, Adrienne, for pushing us to do more and for inspiring us with the example of your own resilience. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I also want to recognize Beth Seisland, the executive director of the Adrian Arch National Security Resilience Initiative Task Force, who's helped to spearhead the work of this group over the last year and who's developed a really terrific report that will serve as the foundation, really, or the founding document for the initiative. | ||
| At a time of tremendous national security, geopolitical uncertainty, and upheaval, developing strategies to navigate and meet moments of global challenge is really where the Scowcroft Center and the Geostrategy Initiative thrive. | ||
| And the work of the Resilience Initiative is central to those efforts. | ||
| It aims to advance resilience as a core tenet of U.S. and allied national security policy and practice from the individual to the whole of society. | ||
| This initiative defines resilience as the ability of individuals, societies, and systems to anticipate, withstand, recover from, adapt to, and bounce forward from shocks and disruptions. | ||
| This is a national security imperative in an increasingly contested world in which there are few guarantees save for an increasingly dynamic and chaotic environment, environments which necessitate resilience as the foundation of readiness. | ||
| So, to help the United States and its allies better prepare for and succeed amid 21st century challenges, this initiative examines sources of and develops strategies for enhancing resilience across key pillars of individual, community, national, and global resilience. | ||
| Over the last year, the members of the Adrian Arsh National Security Resilience Initiative Task Force have defined key issues and challenges in the resilience space and sought to help the Atlantic Council really decide where we should focus our efforts going forward. | ||
| And in just one year, this initiative has spearheaded the development of our Reporters at Risk series, launched a new work stream focused on individual resilience, and continues to further work on state and local resilience issues. | ||
| The group's mission and the work that has been accomplished embodies the Atlantic Council's mission of shaping the global future together with partners and allies. | ||
| Today's panel, focused on the findings and takeaways from Resilience First, will really help lay the groundwork and provide insights into how to grow national security resilience. | ||
| What are our strengths and weaknesses? | ||
| What areas should we be investing in? | ||
| I want to take a moment to recognize the horrific moment in Texas Hill Country and surrounding areas that reminds us in really tragic ways of the importance of resilience. | ||
| And I think we'll be talking a bit more about what all of that means today. | ||
| Truly a horrific time for that community and raises big questions nationally about how we address such crises. | ||
| It's really my honor to introduce Adrian Arsht, Executive Vice Chair of the Atlantic Council and the founder of the Adrian Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative. | ||
| Adrian, thank you. | ||
| The floor is yours. | ||
| Is this better or is there a feedback on it? | ||
| Thank you, Jenna, and thank you all for coming. | ||
| And those who are on Zoom, welcome. | ||
| I founded and launched the Adrian Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative a little over a year ago, in part because resilience as a concept was often missing in discussions around national security and really around anything else. | ||
| Resilience does not just mean bolstering the military ability to move forward from a tough mission or ensuring it has the right capabilities to counter a series of emerging threats. | ||
| It also means we need to bolster our critical infrastructure, making pipelines secure from cyber attacks, ensuring our power grids, making sure everybody can have cell phone service and operate in all weather situations. | ||
| This was written before we have that sad recent example of the flash floods in Texas. | ||
| At the individual level, we must do better at building resilience among our service members, national security professionals, in diplomacy, intelligence, law enforcement, and among everybody in this room. | ||
| It was just over 50 years ago this past that my younger sister committed suicide. | ||
| And when she did, I tried to understand how two of us from the same environment felt death was less worthwhile than life, and I could not imagine not living. | ||
| What are the differences? | ||
| Where did it come from? | ||
| And so I started with that. | ||
| And by today's report, it's really spectacular where we've taken that small topic. | ||
| The task force set up under the Resilience Initiative has worked to define what resilience is, how we can approve it, improve it across multiple levels, and chart a path forward for the initiative as it seeks to define its work over the coming years. | ||
| I want to thank Beth Seisland, the executive director of the task force, and all the members of the staff for their great work. | ||
| Resilience First is truly a groundbreaking document. | ||
| And as we think about resilience in terms of national security, many of you are probably familiar with the works of Daniel Silva. | ||
| And for those of you who are junkies, his book comes out next Tuesday. | ||
| And his lead character really defines resilience. | ||
| Now, I want to digress for two topics. | ||
| And I warned everybody that I would do this. | ||
| My dear friend, Megan O'Sullivan, who's the director of the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School, was interested in resilience. | ||
| We were talking the other day, and she said, well, let me ask ChatGPT, she said, I can't verify what they say, but let's just go and ask them to give us some quick answers of what's out there. | ||
| This is really a list of sources. | ||
| One, resilience in research, cross-domain usage, resilient psychological, psychological resilience in mental health. | ||
| Resilience in individuals, genes, environment, epigenetics, and learning. | ||
| And the last question, resiliency research in military and national security. | ||
| What I was pleased is that in every one of these topics, which we have been thinking of as a task force, what was reported was pretty much the direction we had already gone. | ||
|
unidentified
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I will make one comment that this is not started by myself. | |
| I just have to read that in this last one, listing of sources of resilient studies, the Atlantic Council's Resilient Center. | ||
| The Atlantic Council launched the Adrian Arsh National Security Resilience Initiative. | ||
| The initiative examines resilience across multiple pillars. | ||
| And so Chat GPT brought it to everyone's attention. | ||
| And I'm going to do one other thing, which is tell you about a few of the books. | ||
| I try to think about resilience a great deal. | ||
| And I'm a collector of book reviews and books. | ||
| And so I want to share with you Against the Gods, Peter Bernstein, the whole concept, the remarkable story of risk. | ||
| Now, risk, uncertainty and enterprise by Amar Bide. | ||
| The difference between uncertainty and risk. | ||
| And then you go to the granddaddy of them all, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and Our Biases. | ||
| And so when you're thinking about what people are going to do, you really have to factor in a lot about what they bring to it. | ||
| And then you try to understand, how can I make sense of this? | ||
| And Nisam Talim did the black swan, and what is randomness? | ||
| And anti-fragile is the exact opposite. | ||
| Now, if you want to go align and test your own resilience, this is a spectacular book. | ||
| And he has online a test that you can take about are you resilient. | ||
| Now, here's where I went down. | ||
| I couldn't understand the review. | ||
| I have to tell you, the book was more complicated. | ||
| Uncertainty and enterprise, venturing beyond the unknown. | ||
| And truly, that's where resilience comes into being. | ||
| We can actually prepare for something that we know. | ||
| How do we prepare for the unknown, whether it's our systems or our individuals? | ||
| Just for the heck of it, global risk and agility and decision-making. | ||
| And that is my point as I talk to people today as they are saying, let's just take an example, Hamas and Israel. | ||
| Well, what about individuals? | ||
| What about what's going through Netanyahu's mind? | ||
| What is his history of risk? | ||
| Or suppose Goldemair had been the prime minister. | ||
| Would you come to a different conclusion? | ||
| And these are the last two, just because that's all that fit in the bag. | ||
| This one, you are what you risk, the new art and science of navigating an uncertain world. | ||
| And as many of you can see, the bag says, this is the way we roll. | ||
| It's about pandas. | ||
| Pandas, 50 years ago, were the great diplomatic relationship builder between China and the United States. | ||
| We still have the pandas. | ||
| And they brought them to us to help them be preserved, evolve, and continue. | ||
| And the resilience of animals. | ||
| And so we now have pandas for us to study and help them be more resilient. | ||
| And in about a year or two, we're going to have leopards from Saudi Arabia. | ||
| There are less than 200 left, and we have to preserve them. | ||
| And so that's my personal digression. | ||
| I'm going to take my books. | ||
| And if anybody can really understand this, please come and talk to me. | ||
| There's another just June 30th. | ||
| I'm deeply in trouble. | ||
| The evolution of imperfection. | ||
| Why do we evolve not perfectly? | ||
| We evolve to fix a particular problem at that moment. | ||
| But evolution is really natural selection with whatever bump in the road there is. | ||
| Does it make you or something more resilient? | ||
| I'm going to leave that to my friend Sam and the panel to answer them. | ||
| Adrian, thank you. | ||
| Good afternoon, everybody. | ||
| I'm Samantha Vinograd. | ||
| I'm a fellow here at the Atlantic Council and is honored to be part of the task force to work with such esteemed colleagues. | ||
| I want to start with Beth. | ||
| Beth, you chaired this task force, and you've served in senior roles in the UK government, most recently Deputy National Security Advisor. | ||
| I don't know about you, but resilience when I first started in government was nowhere on the list of priorities in the situation room. | ||
| It just didn't make it onto the agenda. | ||
| And I'm curious where we are today, why you felt a task force out of all the issues there are. | ||
| It was so important to spend a year studying this subject. | ||
| And finally, what is resilience power? | ||
| You write about that in the report, and how do I get some? | ||
| Well, with an 11-week old baby, you're going to need some. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And yeah, I spent a long time in government working on a whole range of national security issues. | ||
| I worked on counterterrorism, I've worked on state threat, I've worked in intelligence and analysis. | ||
| And stepping out of government three years ago, coming out to DC, I had a lot of time to reflect as I developed a course at Georgetown on national security risk and managing crises on what I take from my whole career, what the themes have been, and what learning I wanted to pass on. | ||
| And I was surprised, actually, that resilience was the thing that surfaced through all of that thinking and all of that planning for my teaching. | ||
| So it's always been a passion of mine because I think quite often in the national security community we are guilty of gravitating towards the biggest geopolitical issue or the shiniest bit of military kit. | ||
| But actually, when I look at what really makes a difference to the safety and security of a nation and to the well-being of citizens and of families, it's often the hard slog of resilience work. | ||
| And I think one of the things that the panel, I mean, the task force instantly coalesced around was that we do not think resilience actually occupies the status that it should in national security conversations. | ||
| So coming out of that was this idea of trying to reconceptualize resilience. | ||
| So we're all very well aware of the concepts of hard power, military capability that we can project forward, soft power, diplomacy, intelligence, economic statecraft, all of these things that give a nation power and security. | ||
| And what we're arguing here is that actually resilience should be considered a third pillar of power in national security terms and should be taken as seriously and treated with the same level of importance as those two other areas. | ||
| So we're trying to prompt people to think differently about resilience and what it means and the value of it in order to promote the debate more broadly. | ||
| And what were some of the key recommendations on how to do that? | ||
| Policymakers and operators are really busy. | ||
| Getting them to pay attention to something that's not the closest crocodile to the tent takes a lot of convincing. | ||
| How do you recommend, how does the task force recommend that we get policymakers to pay attention? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, if I had a copy of the report, I would wave it around. | ||
| But I think taking a look at that, it is really hard to ignore the risk environment we are in at the moment. | ||
| I don't think the task force is alone in assessing that we are in an unprecedented era of risk, both in terms of the threats that we're facing, and we set those out in the paper, the assumptions that we make about what democracies and what the US will be facing over the next few years, but also in terms of our vulnerabilities. | ||
| We are more vulnerable than we were 20 years ago. | ||
| The ubiquity of technology, the societal reliance on it, an era of globalization, some of the things that we hold dear in democracies, free speech, free and open markets, these are all strengths, but they are also vulnerabilities. | ||
| And our adversaries see them as vulnerabilities and they are seeking to exploit them. | ||
| So we are in an era of risk, which is to say that resilience is not a side room activity. | ||
| It's not a nice to have. | ||
| It is an essential, central component of national security. | ||
| And that is where we're trying to position it in this paper. | ||
| And that's what I would be saying to reluctant policymakers. | ||
| It makes economic sense. | ||
| Much, much cheaper to manage risk well through the whole cycle, from identification to managing crises to learning lessons and recovery. | ||
| It's much cheaper to do that well than it is to do it badly. | ||
| So it makes economic sense. | ||
| It makes human sense. | ||
| Effective resilience strategies, they save lives. | ||
| I mean, it's no exaggeration, they save lives. | ||
| And for me, our conception of national security as protecting territory is kind of out of kilter with where I think we are now. | ||
| Our citizens, our society expects people to be looked after. | ||
| And I think that's what resilience strategies focus much more on. | ||
| So that would be my pitch to the reluctant policymaker. | ||
| And I will just note that for folks that are dialing in via Zoom, you can submit questions on askac.org and we'll come to those. | ||
| I want to turn to Jean because when I was at the Department of Homeland Security, so much of our work was not just at the national level, but working with state and local governments. | ||
| You've literally been there doing this at the state level, serving as a Homeland Security Advisor. | ||
| How does a state become more resilient? | ||
| What are the practical steps a state can take and how did the task force address that question? | ||
| First of all, I was excited to be part of this task force, just to be part of the global network and national network of subject matter experts coming in from a local, state, and an HSA. | ||
| I spent my entire career doing just that. | ||
| I started off with planning. | ||
| We didn't call it resiliency back there, and I don't want to date myself. | ||
| It was preparedness. | ||
| Everything we had to do was preparedness. | ||
| I didn't really hear the words resiliency until about 2015, right, when I started to do pandemic planning. | ||
| So I went from public health preparedness to pandemic planning to counterterrorism to Homeland Security. | ||
| And it was interesting to see as my career navigated through the different sectors. | ||
| the different fiefdoms of funding that came through to these agencies doing similar things but not collaborating at all. | ||
| And it really all came to a head when I was with Governor Baker, who put me in charge of the COVID because of my background, but yet we ended up doing it in a unified command where there were some folks that were doing it for all non-public safety. | ||
| I was a public safety. | ||
| We had two different stockpiles. | ||
| We had two different warehouses. | ||
| Funding was coming in from two different sources. | ||
| So for me coming in as in this task force, the most important, I believe, and from my career and from the successes I've had, is the individual, right? | ||
| So we've got to take that individual and start to train them early on with the resources that we have because a community is only as resilient and robust in their recovery and their response as the individuals, okay? | ||
| So you start with the individuals, which I did with back in the early days of creating these plans and then training them. | ||
| But there are, you know, and I kind of wrote this down first because it's something that I take with me on every job site, on every policy, every meeting I've had with, you know, governors and secretaries about what makes your community resilient, right? | ||
| How do you do this? | ||
| Well, you know, the first thing we do is we take that local risk data and we analyze it. | ||
| We overlay it with the hazardous plans and the maps with the vulnerable population. | ||
| And then we start to identify the neighborhoods in our communities that are most vulnerable before any of the disasters. | ||
| You know, we have disasters all the time. | ||
| We need to get to them before the disasters and plug those holes. | ||
| We also, and I started to do this during COVID. | ||
| I hadn't done it before. | ||
| I learned from some of the best at FEMA how to do this. | ||
| Thank you, Chris. | ||
| But putting resiliency first, but embedding it into my governance, embedding it into my plans, designating somebody for that role, whether, and we all know out of COVID came the CROs, right, Chief Resiliency Officer. | ||
| This was well before then. | ||
| We needed to put resiliency into the governance and have either an entity, an authority, or even a coordinator that would bring in all the monies, as you heard me say earlier, all the fiefdoms of money doing the same thing. | ||
| Let's coordinate it, right, under a resiliency officer. | ||
| The third thing that we did in Massachusetts, and then I've learned from my strategic planning, was we really needed to, you know, increase our coding, our building codes. | ||
| And then the land use. | ||
| You know, we're selling lands in areas of our states and of our communities that are high risk, that are for flooding, fires. | ||
| Why aren't we taking that initiative to say, you know, no more building? | ||
| Because as that disaster happens, our resources from one area of the state goes to that area and takes away from other areas. | ||
| Like understanding your risks, understanding the building codes. | ||
| I know that Florida did it right after Andrew and increased their building code so they could withstand 100 miles of our wind. | ||
| Well, we need to do that going forward. | ||
| We have intense storming and we have buildings being rebuilt and retrofitted, but we're not addressing the storms of today. | ||
| So the buildings are going up the same, the storms are coming in more robust, the buildings don't last. | ||
| So that coding is so important as we go forward. | ||
| I also think that investing early in our critical infrastructure, and I think it's a no-brainer and people think that, you may not have that money, but you really need to collectively come together as leaders in your state and decide what are the areas of our state that are most critical that are going to have something happen during the disaster. | ||
| A washed-out bridge, a collapsed levee, a washed-out street. | ||
| These things need to be addressed right in the beginning of your planning. | ||
| And I think as we think of leaders, we think of where's that money going to come from, right? | ||
| But the compelling argument is that if we don't plug that now, the cost of repairing that post-disaster is something beyond our means. | ||
| So we really need to take a look at that. | ||
| And, you know, one of my favorite things to do that I've done for my whole life is empowering the communities, right? | ||
| So it's not everything I just mentioned, it's great. | ||
| You have to do it. | ||
| But if you don't take a look at your communities as a whole and train together with the state, invite some of those community leaders and the state EOC so they have a seat at the table so they can guide the response into the communities who they know the best, that's very important. | ||
| Training our individuals of our communities with Medical Reserve Corps, CERT, which is the citizens emergency response teams, VOADS, all of those agencies that I just mentioned were funded through public health and HHS. | ||
| But yet, they trained people for emergency management. | ||
| So again, pooling our resources, so important. | ||
| And the last thing that I will list is the most difficult for emergency managers to take on. | ||
| And I think you mentioned it in your speech, is the CHAT GBT, right? | ||
| So we have to, as emergency managers, leverage innovative technology. | ||
| And I think a lot of us are reluctant to do that, right? | ||
| Because do we trust the data? | ||
| If we get the wrong data and send our resources and our staff to an area of the state that was told that it's going to happen there and it doesn't and it happens somewhere else, then people die. | ||
| So it takes us to really truly come together and trust that data because we do need it. | ||
| We need it faster. | ||
| We need it more efficiently. | ||
| We need it accurately because we do have resources that are limited now. | ||
| We have staff that's limited. | ||
| We have funding that's being taken away. | ||
| So wherever we deploy, it has to be accurate of what we're doing. | ||
| So I think that the six steps together is only going to help a community become resilient, but as that community is resilient, the state becomes more resilient. | ||
| And that's our jobs. | ||
| And being part of this task force, we really were able to identify targets and case studies of what really matters in developing individual and community resiliency. | ||
| And again, it's really coming down to the training and exercising, identifying your risks, embedding the resilience in the governance. | ||
| All these things we can do, and we can do it right now with the waning off of FEMA. | ||
| These things need to be done every single day because the more resilient our individuals are, the better the community responds and recovers from a disaster. | ||
| The state overall is sustained. | ||
| And I want to come back to this evolution of resilience from the national level to the state and local level that we're witnessing right now. | ||
| And the Atlantic Council has done critical work in that area with Tom Warwick leading that. | ||
| And I want to talk a little bit more about the obstacles to states leading in that respect. | ||
| But first, I want to turn to Alex. | ||
| Alex, your former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, you have literally seen up close and personal the role that individuals play in resiliency. | ||
| And in the report, Beth, the task force writes: a nation cannot be resilient unless its people are resilient. | ||
| Individual resilience is a foundation of a resilient nation. | ||
| From your perspective, Alex, from a security perspective, what role do individuals play? | ||
| And then follow up: are individuals born resilient or can they become that way? | ||
| Well, I really appreciate this question, and I'm so thrilled to have reviewed the task force's report because the three interconnected elements of strong national security, comprising hard power, comprising soft power, and then comprising resilience, I think makes a lot of sense to me, but they're not mutually exclusive. | ||
| And from the position that I had, they're actually mutually reinforcing. | ||
| In the military context, and I spent the majority of my career at the Department of Defense, resilience is a component of what we call readiness. | ||
| And in the military departments, and the Department of the Air Force comprises two services, the Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, our goal was to build a ready, resilient force that is prepared to go tonight to take on some of the toughest challenges the United States has in the overall national security context. | ||
| My boss looked at me and he said, How do we prepare our people, and that's our total force, active duty, guard, and reserve, and then our Department of the Air Force civilians to be ready to go to defend, to deter, and if necessary, deny China's incursion into the Taiwanese Strait. | ||
| That was the guiding focus of my role, which was to create a warfighter who was prepared with the right equipment, with the right training, and with the right culture from their installation to get on a plane, to get on a ship, and to be ready to go. | ||
| All of this requires readiness to be seen as a parallel to resilience. | ||
| And so I break it down into three primary buckets when I'm thinking about resilience. | ||
| I think the most intuitive is what we called in the department our Offices of Force Resiliency, led by my spectacular colleague Beth Foster, and I'm so glad she's here today in the audience. | ||
| That office was principally concerned with creating an inclusive environment where people could succeed to reduce instances of sexual assault, to reduce instances of suicidal ideations and suicides, and to make sure that victims of things like domestic violence had a culture and a community where people were held accountable so they felt like they could come forward. | ||
| That principally is how DOD uses the term resilience. | ||
| But when I think of it, I also think of the other responsibilities that I had. | ||
| And when I went out into the field and talked to airmen and guardians and their families about what their concerns were, very often at the top of the list was access to health care. | ||
| We have to make sure that our people in uniform have access to not only health care for all the things in your body that can go wrong after a deployment, but also the most important organ in the body, the brain. | ||
| And so valuing mental health as the military already focuses on physical health is a key criteria. | ||
| And then making sure that that access is available not only for service members, but also for their spouses and for their kids. | ||
| And then finally, creating an environment where everybody can succeed, where everyone can bring forth all of their talents in communities that are inclusive, in communities that are characterized by good schools with adequate child care resources, is a key component of resilience as well. | ||
| And so if I could put that triangle together of a command culture that was focused on protective factors and mitigated risk factors, I could reduce sexual assault, I could reduce instances of domestic violence, and I could reduce suicides. | ||
| Every single day, any time throughout every installation in the world that the Air Force or Space Force had people, I would get reports of instances of suicide, car crashes, domestic violence, and it was sobering, sexual assaults. | ||
| It was sobering. | ||
| But when you have a workforce of nearly 700,000 people, these things happen. | ||
| What we have in the Department of Defense is better data than any other part of society to understand why these things are happening. | ||
| And we also were blessed with the resources to put in interventions to reduce them. | ||
| So reduction of harmful behaviors, adequate and accessible health care, both for physical and for mental health, and then, of course, inclusive communities where people and their families can thrive. | ||
| Because if I've got folks in uniform focused on their mission, they're not worried about whether or not their kids have childcare. | ||
| They're not worried about the quality of education in their schools. | ||
| And they're not worried about whether or not they can have their spouses shop in the community without being victims of racism. | ||
| Alex, thank you. | ||
| I want to take one question from the audience and then turn back to some questions from me. | ||
| I think we can see it displayed. | ||
| Xavier Gonzalez asks, how can public-private partnerships improve the nation's cyber defense capabilities in sectors like energy, water, and finance? | ||
| And I'll just tack on to that and take some editorial permissions and say, as we think about resilience generally, what role does the private sector play? | ||
| That's a really crucial question, Sam. | ||
| And I think in the paper, we use the example of Ukraine, actually, in relation to cyber resilience, cyber security. | ||
| And that was an absolutely critical partnership between the Ukrainian government and two American companies in this instance, Amazon and Microsoft. | ||
| So that partnership meant that Ukraine had offshored a lot of its data and was much more resilient once they were under attack. | ||
| So it's a really good example of thinking ahead of time, acknowledging the risks that you face and proactively putting in place the measures that you need to protect your nation in those extreme circumstances. | ||
| You touch on the role of the private sector. | ||
| I mean, I think one of the things this report really draws out is that it's a very different situation from 50 years ago. | ||
| Governments do not own the risk as centrally as used to be the case. | ||
| So much of the critical national infrastructure assets are in private sector ownership. | ||
| And we have to, one of the conclusions coming out of the report, one of the suggestors' areas of work, is to look at how we can better incentivize, compel, potentially, or engage the private sector in partnership. | ||
| This is a shared risk, and we've got to find some different and innovative ways of partnering with the private sector to improve our resilience across the board, as well as just in cybersecurity. | ||
| And as a follow-up, Beth, thinking about the role of the private sector, role of governments, what are enablers to resilience and what are obstacles? | ||
| That's something I know the task force looks at. | ||
| Yeah, quite often they are the same thing. | ||
| They can be both at the same time. | ||
| So, you'll see in the paper, we spent a bit of time as a task force discussing what we thought the building blocks of resilience were. | ||
| So, we've touched already on this layered ecosystem. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Jean's talks a little bit about, and Alex, about the individuals and communities and state level. | ||
| There is then also a national level and international level as well. | ||
| But we then get into, okay, what underpins all of this resilience work? | ||
| What should we be focusing on? | ||
| And that is things like technology. | ||
| Jean's touched on it already, which can be both a threat but also an enabler of resilience. | ||
| Sustained political threat. | ||
| Let me just push you on that a moment. | ||
| Well, I mean, so offensive cyber is a very good example of that. | ||
| There are, I'm sure, many others as well. | ||
| But in terms of enablers and inhibitors, I think political consensus is a really big one because in democracies we are operating on short electoral cycles. | ||
| It can be really hard to get sustained political leadership and investment into some areas of resilience. | ||
| So, we need to do some thinking about how to change that. | ||
| We looked at international collaboration as underpinning all of our national resilience work. | ||
| And I think one of the really interesting things that surfaced from the task force conversation is that we don't think we have the right international mechanisms for collaborating with the pace or the agility that the threats and the risks are demanding. | ||
| So, we want to have a look at what the existing landscape of collaboration looks like and how we might innovate and improve that. | ||
| There are a whole range of others as well, but I will stop there, otherwise, I will talk for a full hour on enables. | ||
| Yeah, I think that the task force report does lay out some case studies of countries at the national level that do this well and countries that have some room to grow. | ||
| And I think there's a really big opportunity for this report to inform governments globally. | ||
| Jean, as I mentioned, as we were discussing before, there is currently a shift underway in emergency management under the current administration whereby what FEMA used to do is being shifted to the states as FEMA is shedding SAF and other core mission sets. | ||
| Do you view that as a net enabler of resilience? | ||
| And if states have more power from an emergency or more authority from an emergency management perspective, and what are the vulnerabilities in that? | ||
| Well, that seems to be a loaded question in that, you know, as a state that relied on FEMA and their and again, being in the northeast coast of this country, we didn't have the major mega storms and the floodings that other states have had, but we certainly relied on FEMA for a lot of their strategies, their resiliency planning, | ||
| the public-private partnerships that our governors took very seriously in really collaborating with our private sector partners to help us respond to disasters. | ||
| But I think there is no looking back. | ||
| This is the reality. | ||
| So, what do we do? | ||
| We look at this as an obstacle, or are we going to look at this as how do we get through it? | ||
| And I think we have some enablers in that. | ||
| You've touched upon healthy community, healthy individuals, so important going into a disaster season to make sure that those folks can withstand another stress in their lives. | ||
| So, we have to look at that, and we have to do that. | ||
| Each state has to do that, right? | ||
| I mean, this is when we look at we're self-reliant now on our resiliency. | ||
| But, you know, I think people may forget, and I don't want them to, but over the last 15 years plus that I've been really heavily involved with FEMA, I've received a lot of playbooks by them, frameworks, planning. | ||
| We have those. | ||
| One of the biggest things emergency managers use is the FIRA, right? | ||
| And it really takes a state to look at their risks, to identify their vulnerabilities, to state their assets, where they're deployed, how are they going to be deployed. | ||
| I think we have to take a look at all that FEMA shared with us, all that FEMA tested us with, and then educated us on, and use it within our states and localize that strategy even more so than ever before. | ||
| And so we also have to take a look at our funding. | ||
| We have to be innovative about our funding. | ||
| The private-public partnership absolutely has to take forefront. | ||
| Our state budgets have to look differently next year on how do we protect our critical infrastructure, how do we take a look at our vulnerable populations and how do we address it. | ||
| We have to take a look at that as a local, as a community, and as a state where to plug them in. | ||
| We have to coordinate our funding. | ||
| And there's no doubt about it. | ||
| There's funding FIFTEMs all over our state. | ||
| We have to coordinate, which a lot of the times FEMA tried to make us do with their planning, their exercises. | ||
| We were always able to do New England exercise due to the FEMA's funding for us. | ||
| Now we have to take that and do it ourselves. | ||
| We have to take the money because what we did with FEMA, we saw success. | ||
| So there's a plan. | ||
| We have to take that success and take it inward and find that funding because cross-training during any before any disaster is necessary to a successful response to a disaster. | ||
| And I know that I'll do a quick little story. | ||
| I'm sure that you've read about this, but back in November 2012, when we got money from FEMA, we cross-trained, trained for the first time our public safety agencies six months before the bombing. | ||
| First time ever did we bring in Boston PD, Boston Fire, Boston EMS, hospitals, public health, SWAT teams. | ||
| We had 50 entities, 600 responders come to that three-day exercise. | ||
| And we did it in November. | ||
| And what the training was about? | ||
| An active shooting, the end of the marathon. | ||
| And so we did that in 2012, fast forward 2013, Boston bombing. | ||
| That was the first time we ever came together. | ||
| We had the funding from FEMA. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| We saved lives. | ||
| We managed fatalities because we trained our individuals of our communities in first aid, stop the bleed, psychological first aid, all because of the funding we had. | ||
| So individuals were trained. | ||
| So you saw those pictures when they jumped in and started taking and triaging those runners. | ||
| Training was done with those folks. | ||
| So I think that it is going to be a big change for all of us, but I think we have to take what we've learned from FEMA. | ||
| We have to carry it through to our states. | ||
| We have to localize our data and our risks. | ||
| And we have to tap the private sector. | ||
| If I could just jump in at the end of that, from a hard power perspective, the changing nature of war is going to necessitate resilient communities at the state and local level. | ||
| It's unlikely as we shift from fighting disorganized, disaggregated, non-state actors in the Middle East to focusing back on great power competition with China or Russia that the beginning of hostilities will look like anything that we've seen before. | ||
| Far more likely is disruptions in the power grid, disruptions in traffic light signaling, disruptions in the food chain and food supplies, so that when an incursion happens and America is called to act, our enemies will see us as disorganized and not prepared, and our national unity will be undermined. | ||
| So we're looking inwards rather than looking outward. | ||
| And I think that changing nature of war will require us to be prepared for those initial preparation steps for military conflict that could involve the United States. | ||
| And Alex, just to add to that, you talked a little bit about the connected nature of hard power, soft power, and resilience power. | ||
| A non-resilient nation trying to deploy military capability and project hard power in a crisis moment like that will find it very hard if the domestic environment is facing that level of overwhelming disruption. | ||
| So that's a really good example, I think, of resilience power underpinning all of the other national security capabilities. | ||
| And don't be fooled, our adversaries are fully aware of our vulnerabilities when we're divided rather than united. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That actually brings us to there's a segment of audience questions about the role that information and disinformation play in resiliency. | ||
| And a quick lightning round for the panelists. | ||
| I'm curious how you feel, particularly Beth, is in the report you write about democracy being both an enabler and an obstacle to resiliency. | ||
| What role information and disinformation play in ensuring resiliency from a national security perspective? | ||
| Yeah, I mean we point to many, many examples of misinformation, disinformation being damaging, both in terms of public understanding of risk. | ||
| If you look at health sector is a very good example of that, vaccines, for example. | ||
| But I think there's a lot to learn from other countries about how to approach misinformation, disinformation, because countries that are at the very, very front line of some of this aggressive hybrid threat, | ||
| so countries like Taiwan and countries like Estonia have done really excellent work on trying to equip populations to be able to identify the difference between quality information and misinformation disinformation. | ||
| And there are lots of really good models out there. | ||
| Some of them involve the entire education system. | ||
| So Estonia, for example, starts with children, how you discern one source from another. | ||
| So there are lots of good things to look at there. | ||
| And I think it's one of the recommendations in the paper as well. | ||
| And Jean and Alex, question for both of you. | ||
| Hypothetically, if you were sitting in the governor's office right now, and Alex, if you were sitting at the Pentagon, and you had a magic wand, what would you urge the governor and the SECTF respectively to do to enhance resiliency? | ||
| I think that the first thing I would have the governor do is to create a resiliency office and authority and start to streamline all the funding, all the metrics underneath that one entity and stand it up as if it's a secretariat, because resiliency crosses all of their secretariats, all of their entities, all the 351 communities in Massachusetts. | ||
| Resilience is we just talked about if our state isn't resilient in any capacity, we can't withstand a natural disaster, a public health disaster, or a man-made disaster because we're ill-equipped. | ||
| And where we're going now with the more robust disasters we have, the threats against our country that we have, the public health crisis that's going to continue happening since we've cut down a lot of our research. | ||
| We have to really look at resiliency as a whole as that's a separate entity. | ||
| That is a thriving mechanism to ensure that we are capturing the metrics and the data from all the communities and those states can go from one state to the next to bring up. | ||
| We're bottom-up, right? | ||
| We're bottom-up to the national security. | ||
| What's New England facing? | ||
| What's the Southeast facing? | ||
| What's California Group facing? | ||
| Resiliency as a whole, if he could do anything or she could do anything, was to put that in place immediately and then funnel the funding under there and start working with the private sector. | ||
| Can I just add one layer onto that at the national level? | ||
| Because we've talked about these things being intertwined and interdependent. | ||
| I think if there's one thing that could happen at the national level at a period of time where resource is more scarce and responsibility is being passed more to states, is really looking at a national level at what federal government only can do. | ||
| So there are some tasks that have to sit at the top of the chain. | ||
| And I think it's really important to understand what they are and to focus, have a really laser focus on the things that federal government should be doing. | ||
| Yes, should only federal government can do. | ||
| You know, Sam, I'm a little biased because of the last job that I had focused on the people of the U.S. military. | ||
| But I can tell you, I really believe that our people is what distinguishes the United States from every other country in the world and how we train them and the quality standards that we put in place and how we build resilience and how we build connectivity and how we build a sprit de corps. | ||
| And I think that's what our adversaries see. | ||
| If they can attack our people, that exploits one of our strategic advantages. | ||
| And so to get to your question, I'm smiling because I find myself in an unusual position. | ||
| I think I disagree with nearly every single thing the current Secretary of Defense has done, with one exception, and that fills a huge gap that I have seen both in my time in the office of the Secretary of Defense, my roles in the Army, and then in the Department of the Air Force. | ||
| And that's the lack of communication, the lack of effective communication with the force as a whole. | ||
| And it appears that the current Secretary of Defense is trying to be more accessible, to use and leverage means of communicating with the force that a historically anti-communication communicative organization, one that would wrap its hands around information and guard it closely, there's a spirit right now of attempting to communicate better. | ||
| So why does that matter? | ||
| It matters because that's the reason why in the Department of Defense TikTok is banned. | ||
| Our principal age range is for the vast majority of the military is 18 to 25. | ||
| And yet those are the people who are on TikTok. | ||
| So if we could leverage means and methods of communication to better inform our force about what they're doing and why, to help them understand just how valuable they are, and to make sure that those communications, if they came from the Secretary of Defense, were fact-based and credible, I think that is the one thing I would say. | ||
| Do more of what you're doing, Secretary Hagseph, but do it with credibility and facts rather than propaganda. | ||
| Alex, thanks. | ||
| And one final question for Beth. | ||
| And again, Beth, thank you for leading such critical work. | ||
| I will say, Adrian, you and I have discussed this, but I haven't seen any other task force report like this. | ||
| I think it's really a first of its kind in charting an incredible path for further work to follow. | ||
| What surprised you the most during the course of this work from a findings perspective? | ||
| And for everyone in this room, from everyone watching, we all play a role in resilience as a core tenant of national security, hard power, soft power, resilience power. | ||
| What can individuals do to enhance resiliency from a national security perspective? | ||
| Oh, there's a lot to answer in two minutes and 53 seconds. | ||
| What surprised me about this, I actually think, and this is very much down to Adrian and her real intellectual focus on the role of the individual and psychology, that actually as a strategic national security leader, I had not thought enough about that and working with Jean, really the detail of understanding the community and very local level of response. | ||
| And I think that's why this task force has been such a rich environment for this discussion, because we have had experts that have spanned all elements of resilience, all types of risk. | ||
| And that's enabled us to take a step up and actually get beyond resilience being a meaningless buzzword and actually set some strategic intellectual foundations for the work of the ARSH initiative going forward. | ||
| So yeah, I can't remember what your other question is now. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| What can everyone in this room, people watching, what can individuals do to enhance resiliency? | ||
| Well, again, read the excellent resilience report of the task force, shamelessly promote that. | ||
| I think there's a lot individual, and actually I should turn to Jean, who's more of an expert on this, but there is a lot that you can do at an individual level within your families, within your communities, as a business. | ||
| We've touched on some of the stories of this already. | ||
| I think the first thing to do is to understand the nature of the risks that you face. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because you can't do anything unless you know what you are trying to be resilient against. | ||
| And I'll pass to you, Jean Claude. | ||
| Well, I think you mentioned it earlier that individuals are the enablers are social and psychological, biological, and economic, right? | ||
| So it is to that level that we have resilient individuals, right? | ||
| Because they're educated, they're trained, they are healthy, they have networks within their communities. | ||
| As you had mentioned, how important that is that people feel safe and they feel like they have their backs. | ||
| It is the community's job to make sure that their citizens and residents are safe. | ||
| And so when you give those peer-to-peer meetings, if you give those trainings for Medical Reserve Corps to come in and train these individuals to manage shelters, you feel empowered and you also feel part of the solution, not as the victim. | ||
| And individuals who find themselves empowered make communities empowered. | ||
| But it is the community's job to make sure that they're healthy, that they have networks to go to, that they have people, that there's some psychological issues going on. | ||
| Maybe they've had multiple crises and don't really know how to handle one more. | ||
| Well, the community provides that type of service to them to help these individuals get over things, get through things. | ||
| So you had mentioned that in the service and how important that is. | ||
| With one, with negative 22 seconds left, I'll just add the one element that I hadn't heard, but I think we'll all agree is absolutely critical, is trust. | ||
| Trust in community leaders, trust in state and local leaders, trust in national leaders. | ||
| And this erosion of trust when it comes to vaccine misinformation, when it comes to other issues where Americans aren't sure who to trust, whether to trust, is not only an accident of a society that's been divided on partisan basis or a political basis, but it's actively being worked by our adversaries. | ||
| And so I'd say communities that are characterized by high degrees of trust in their leadership will be ready and resilient when these crises come. | ||
| Really important point. | ||
| And again, this report is a foundation for critical work ahead, and it's been an honor to work with all of you on it. | ||
| I want to turn things over to my colleague Matt Kroenig for some closing remarks, but kudos, Beth, on an incredible year of work. | ||
| And I just want to say, well, while Matt enters the stage, thank you so much to all of the task force members. | ||
| It has been a genuine pleasure, and I've learned a huge amount working with you all. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, good afternoon. | ||
| I'm Matthew Kroenig, a vice president at the Atlantic Council and Senior Director of the Council Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. | ||
| And that was a terrific discussion. | ||
| Sam, thank you very much for moderating. | ||
| Beth, Jean, Alex, thank you so much for your insights today. | ||
| And why don't you please join me in giving our experts a round of applause for a terrific discussion. | ||
| So I think what we heard today is that resilience is going to remain critical to meeting the challenges in the decades ahead. | ||
| We heard about strategies to bolster resilience across the individual state, local, national, and global levels. | ||
| And as you also heard, this is really a first step because this will be launching our new Adrian Arch National Security Resilience Initiative. | ||
| And so there is going to be a lot of important work to come. | ||
| And so, Adrian, thank you very much for your vision and leadership and for making this important work possible. | ||
| Thanks to all of you for joining us. | ||
| We know your time is valuable and we appreciate you deciding to spend it with us here today. | ||
| For those of you joining online, have a terrific day. | ||
| And for those of you here in person, we have a reception set up outside. | ||
| So please join us to continue the conversation. | ||
| But once again, thank you all very much. | ||
| And thanks again to Beth in particular for leading this effort over the past year. | ||
| It's a terrific report. | ||
| But thanks also to the rest of our speakers. | ||
| Thank you, Keith. | ||
| On Wednesday, members of Congress and the press corps will compete in the congressional women's softball game. | ||
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| You can see that live at 7.30 p.m. Eastern on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Also on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. | ||
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. |