Anybody who's lived through the past few years of The Circumstances, Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and the shockwaves of natural disaster, war, and terrorism at various distances, probably has a sense that disasters are going to be permanent and ongoing. Kayyem has an interesting CV. While she's a professor at Harvard and a news talking head now, she was a counter-terrorism hipster, working in counter-terrorism before it became a major priority on 9/11, and she was Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, where she worked on the response to the Deepwater Horizon book. Unfortunately, this book is scattered and under-theorized, and has a bad tendency to drop fascinating fragments without properly following up on them.

In Kayyem's model of disasters, there's the boom, the moment of crisis, left of the boom where you are going about your life and hopefully preparing for disaster, and right of the boom, with recovery. The boom is inevitable, over a long enough time scale something bad is going to happen. The only question is how prepared you are, and how you can recover.

There's actually quite a lot of literature on preparation, from The Ostrich Paradox to your local government preparedness guide, to the paranoid fantasies of preppers. From an organizational context, a few key points we've been missing are that a plan that is not tested and rehearsed is not a plan you can use at all, that stockpiles have to be refreshed regularly, and that modern efficiency drives in just-in-time logistics, cell networks, and integrated cloud computing solutions have introduced distant and complex single points of failure that we have to be aware of. This is my own analysis, the book unfortunately buries its discussion of preparedness under a jargon laden diversion into black swans and gray rhinos.

Moving on, there is the moment of the boom itself. Daily leadership and crisis leadership are different skillsets, and Kayyem is a fan of the Incident Command System as a flexible and expanding model of the crisis. My favorite factoid of the book is that many organizations have created a position for Chief Security Officer, responsible for preparedness and disaster response, and staffed that position with an ex-FBI agent, and then wall the CSO off from the rest of the organization so that they have no actual power. Oops.

I buy that crisis leadership is a unique skillset, but this book doesn't make much of a case about what exactly it is. The first goal of an ICS is to "stop the bleeding", to make sure that as a few people as possible die, and that damage from the disaster is contained as much as possible. What makes this hard in 2022 is primarily a problem of information, of a brittle reporting chain from "on the ground" to the command center, and conversely from the command center to the public. Cell phones and the internet are a double-edge blade. While in theory, they allow tremendous transparency at all levels, the book has little to say about the obvious problems of picking a useful signal of information out of a mass of 911 calls and tweets, especially when seconds matter, and of getting official response information out to the public in an age of distraction and disinformation.

The final side is right-of-the-boom, the response. One of the tragedies is that many deaths in disasters are what Haitians have started calling "stupid deaths" (and I'm curious about the Haitian source of this, given that they're a poor people who have suffered deeply from colonialism, earthquakes, and hurricanes), avoidable losses well after the worst of the disaster has passed. In blizzards, these are the people who die of carbon monoxide poisoning from poorly placed generators, in hurricanes, the deaths due to breaks in water and electrical service, rather than wind and flooding, and in Covid, it's the millions who died after vaccines and masks became widely available. These deaths may be stupid, but they are also some of the hardest to prevent, ultimately caused by poverty, under-investment in infrastructure, and outright misinformation. In theory, a disaster is an opportunity to rebuild properly. In practice, it seems to be a chance to Shock Doctrine the last exploitable wealth from the victims. Kayyem notes that leaders believe that can survive disasters and in practice, they rarely remain in power afterwards. Of course, they also rarely actually die or even suffer from the disasters they supposedly are responsible for.

This book isn't awful, but it's a missed opportunity. Every major disaster of the past decade is touched on, which means that none of the case studies are in sufficient depth, or any depth beyond a retrospective news magazine article. Where there needs to be a proper theory and argument for preparedness, information, decision, and resilience, there are generalities and an appeal to common sense.