You can go your own way: US diverges from world on emergency preparedness

Governments around the world are spearheading new campaigns to encourage the general public to be prepared for a host of emergencies that could disrupt essential services, including cyber-attacks and natural disasters. The United States, however, is taking a different approach: focusing on military preparation, as opposed to the general population.With an influx of global messaging regarding emergency preparedness, the Guardian spoke with emergency experts about the Pentagon’s latest initiative and the state of US disaster preparedness at large.The United Kingdom’s latest “Be Ready” campaign urges the public to stock up with supplies to last 72 hours, a warning that comes amid growing concern about the impact of the climate crisis, technological dependency and hostile state threats. Sweden also recently published updated guidance for its population in the case of “crisis or war”, as did Japan; Goshi Hosono, the disaster management minister, said the country would issue an emergency appeal to citizens on 2 November, when the country’s new disaster management agency begins operations. The plan will reportedly echo the UK’s advice that households should have supplies to remain self-sufficient for at least three days during a disaster.“The state of the world has worsened drastically in recent years. War is being waged in our vicinity,” writes the Swedish Civil Defense and Resilience Agency. “Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common. Terror threats, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns are being used to undermine and influence us.”On 30 September, Pete Hegseth released a memorandum to senior Pentagon leadership establishing “FORTRESS America”, an initiative to prepare US military bases to keep operating for at least 90 days without outside support. The initiative is structured around five pillars, according to the memo: “energy independence; supply-chain and defense-industrial base resilience; a strategic defense reserve; installation hardening and cyber resilience; and resilience in space and spectrum.”The creation of the initiative caused quite a bit of chatter on social media, from X to TikTok, with many wondering why this roll-out was happening right now.Lynn Budd, former president of the National Emergency Management Association (Nema), a nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to US emergency preparedness and current director of the Wyoming office of homeland security, believes that there is a growing understanding among leaders that cyber-attacks pose an increasingly powerful threat.“Our world has gotten very small, and threats are imminent,” she said.Budd also flagged the compounding threats of natural and human-made disasters, such as a cyber-attack taking place in the midst of a tornado.“Everybody’s paying attention to the tornado, so our adversaries take advantage of that time and decide: ‘Oh, they’re busy with something else. Now’s the time to do a cyber-attack or other types of attacks that may affect the critical infrastructure of a community,’” she said.While the Fortress initiative is not aimed towards the civilian sector, Budd argues that its existence should encourage everyday Americans to consider their own preparedness strategies: “People can think about [Fortress] and think, if our military is doing that, shouldn’t I be thinking about that too?”In contrast, Dr Tom Chandler, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, argued that the Pentagon’s plan illustrates the vast differences in needs for individual preparedness versus institutional preparedness.“This highlights the importance of planning for prolonged disruptions rather than just for short-term emergencies,” he said. “Military installations in the United States have very specific and unique operational responsibilities, and these requirements are oftentimes very different than what is required for ordinary households.”There has been no specific threat named in any of the recent campaigns from the US or UK governments, though both acknowledge the possibility of cyber-attacks. On 21 October, websites around the world went dark after a serious vulnerability was discovered in a common computer-programming language.James Trainor, former assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division and senior vice-president at LevelBlue, a global security services provider, said that continued outreach around cybersecurity reflects its growing role in disaster-preparedness initiatives.“The cyber problem never gets smaller. There’s more data, there’s more connectivity, there’s more innovation by the bad actor,” he said. “Now with AI, the speed at which these tools can find vulnerabilities, exploit them, draft better spear-phishing emails, the risk is only going to continue to grow.”While the US focuses on strengthening its military response to emergencies, experts say that individual emergency preparedness is lacking.“Preparedness levels are not where we would hope they would be for some of our more common hazards,” Dr DeeDee Bennett Gayle, professor of emergency management at University of Albany, said.Fema’s 2024 National Preparedness Report indicated that 51% of adults believed they were prepared for a disaster.“There’s still a lot of work to be done to get people to understand just how our emergency management system is run,” Bennett Gayle said.The US does run a similar program to the UK’s campaign, known as Ready.gov, which was launched in 2003 and operated by the Department of Homeland Security. The government website acknowledges 25 types of disasters, including flooding, wildfires, cybersecurity, earthquakes and explosions.Chandler acknowledged that while other countries may take on a more centralized approach to emergency preparedness, the United States has always relied on a multilevel method.“The US system is fairly unique in a lot of ways, and it has been structured since the beginning to be locally executed, state-managed and federally supported,” he said.But experts say that the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce have placed new pressures on state and local governments. More than 4,300 employees left Fema in fiscal year 2025, about 17% of the workforce, according to a recent US government accountability office (GAO) report.“We’re still trying to evaluate the effect of reduction in forces directly on communities,” Budd said. “When you say you want local and state jurisdictions to take on more responsibility, both in capability and and financially, it’s going to take some time for us to figure out how that’s going to work out. We can’t gain that capability tomorrow.”As the federal government seeks to offload some emergency management responsibilities to states and localities, it simultaneously seeks to establish the preeminent “nation’s insurance policy” through military resilience.“This is not a retreat,” the memorandum from Hegseth reads. “It is the foundation from which American strength is projected-a homeland that cannot be starved out, shut down, or cut off.”Experts suggest that while it can be overwhelming to parse all the various emergency-planning scenarios, individuals can begin by thinking about their personal risk, based on factors like geographic location or data exposure.“The first step is understanding your local hazards,” said Bennett Gayle. “I think that can’t be overstated enough, because the types of preparedness activities you would do for one [area] might be different than another one.”