Unfinished Business at FEMA: A National Preparedness Perspective

Delivered at The Heritage Foundation on May 14, 2009, this lecture frames the post–Cold War debate over domestic national-security priorities, roles, responsibilities, and resources, accelerated by recent terrorist and natural catastrophic incidents. The basic question is simple to state and hard to answer: how does the nation collaborate and allocate resources to effectively prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic incidents?

Schrader argues that recovery doctrine remains the unfinished business of national preparedness, the case later developed in his Domestic Preparedness Journal article "National Recovery Doctrine: The Next Preparedness Frontier."