Local Team Response Communication Hitches Essay

There were incidences of the army having supplies but no requests came in for the supplies from FEMA which was supposed to be initiating that.

The lack of the CIA activation also meant there was no unified command on the ground hence the delay of the arrival of the active duty-federal troops in New Orleans. Even though there were in excess of 50,000 troops sent with resources from over 49 states, the operations did not proceed efficiently due to lack of the command from federal Northern Command, which was overseeing the large-scale deployments and operations of the active-duty military (Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2006:Pp11).

3. Politics and decision making process

In the event of any disaster, be it natural or an act of terrorism, there is always an attempt to politicize the process of making decisions particularly relating to the search and rescue and general response after the disaster. The frequency of this trend is exacerbated by the fact that most of those involved in the decision making process are there thanks to elective process. This complicates issues as they would all want to make or push a decision on the popularity grounds with the next electioneering process in mind. The danger with this is the resultant short-term solutions that are confined to the election cycle and most of the decisions die with the exit of the politician upon failure to be re-elected.

There are several dangers associated with politicization of decision making process. There is a likelihood of compromising the standards of the services to be offered or the procedures to be followed in the event that an emergency is encountered, this will mean the interest differing political stands will not adhere to the standard way of operation and in effect interfere with the entire process (Sherman Kent Center, 2007).

Politicization of the decision making process will also lead to compromise the quality of the operations by introducing personal and biased views of the SAR process. This suffices when an individual influences the process so that it appears as though they are the masterminds behind the process which in effect compromises the quality.

The political decisions in an emergency are also bound to introduce biasness in the entire process. Politics by nature always positions one group in opposition to another, if this is carried into SAR process or even the humanitarian process, it will inevitably lead to the most deserving cases missing out on the help that they should get.

Political decisions are also known to be short termed and as hitherto mentioned confined to the election period, yet the humanitarian situation that results from the disasters across the U.S.A. need long-term decisions that will enable a prevention or avoidance of mistakes made in the previous disaster management. This therefore implies the two are incompatible and politicization of the disaster response and decisions made therein will definitely lead to distortion of the management of emergencies.

References

Department of Homeland Security, (2004). Catastrophic Incidence Annex. National Response

Plan. Pp1. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/cg534/nsarc/Catastrophic_Incident_Annex.pdf

Homeland Security, (2005). Catastrophic Incident Supplement to the National Response

Plan. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://publicintelligence.net/catastrophic-incident-supplement-to-the-national-response-plan/

National Geographic news, (2010). Hurricane Katrina: The Essential Time Line. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0914_050914_katrina_timeline_2.html

Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security, (2012). Interoperable Communications Planning in Oklahoma. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://www.ok.gov/homeland/Interoperable_Communications/index.html

Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, (2006).

Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared. Executive Summary. Pp11. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://www.disastersrus.org/katrina/senatereport/ExecSum.pdf

Sherman Kent Center, (2007). Improving CIA Analytic Performance: Analysts and the Policymaking Process. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from https://www.cia.gov/library/kent-center-occasional-papers/vol1no2.htm

The Oklahoma Department of Civil Emergency Management, (1995). After Action Report

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Bombing 19 April 1995 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Retrieved October 2, 2012 from http://www.ok.gov/OEM/documents/Bombing%20After%20Action%20Report.pdf