Crisis Leadership and Military Community Resilience

This paper takes the current all hazards (with a special emphasis on the CBRNE) threat picture to military installations within and outside of the continental United States and their associated military communities, as well as evolving patterns of community vulnerability and changing preparedness concepts (community resilience, whole of community), as a point of departure for re-examining strategic leadership challenges (Boin et al, 2005) associated with crisis management and community-resilience development. The paper identifies two key modes of response to pervasive threat to military communities: evacuation and shelter in place. Both academic research and practical planning in both the civilian and military realms have tended to focus on evacuation to the relative neglect of shelter-in-place. The paper examines the pros and cons of each mode of response. While traditional shelter-in-place concepts have significant limitations, many of these are transcended by state of the art community-shielding strategies which provide a more robust and enhanced form of sheltering-in place. In fact, community shielding provides a potentially superior alternative in many contingencies in terms of force protection, mission assurance, and continuity of operations. The paper concludes with an agenda for improving the resilience (and crisis management) capacity of military communities.