August 5, 2025 • 21 mins
Today, Brian Hancock talks with Ian Thigpen on Disaster Management.Cpt Ian Thigpen is a Captain in the U.S. Army, 353 Civil Affairs Command and works disaster management in his professional career.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to the One Civil AffairsPodcast.
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host
for this session. Today we have Captain Ian Figpen
with us to discuss disaster management.
Captain Figpen, welcome to the show.
Hey, it's so great to be here with you, Sir.
It's. Let's tell the audience a little
bit about you. Captain Ian Figpen is a civil
affairs officer with 26 years ofservice.
(00:25):
He joined the 351st Civil Affairs Command in 2019.
He was commissioned in the spring of 2024 as a 38 Gulf
Captain specializing in Emergency Management.
Thigpen has two combat deployments to Afghanistan.
He holds a master's in EmergencyManagement.
On the civilian side. Thigpen has over a decade of
(00:46):
experience in Emergency Management.
We first met when you volunteered as a Master Sergeant
to join the mad scientists of Civil Information Management.
Started First Class Francis Regan and myself at the 301st
Civil Affairs Command. You remember those old days?
Oh, absolutely. I got an opportunity to do that
for roughly 4 years, which is longer than anybody should do a
(01:08):
job. But it was just such a great
time. I was working with such great
people and working for you and started first class Regan.
I mean greatest minds and civil affairs, but everybody at 351 I
felt like I was going to an academic symposium every time I
went to drill. So it was a enlightening for me
and I'm I had a a delight. Those were some amazing days
(01:28):
when we definitely made a changetogether.
It was great for me because I got to sit back and and watch
you and start first class Regan just literally do magic before
my eyes. And then I get somehow by
association, get some benefit from that.
So we really did have a dream team.
And I know you know, many of ourideas were incorporated by the
CA proponency at that time. And we helped usher in civil
(01:52):
knowledge immigration, that evolution from civil information
management. So those were amazing times.
I look back on finally, probablymy best assignment to this day.
We're working with you guys. You know, one of the things that
is always interesting about Civil affairs, non commissioned
officers, civil affairs officersis just the diversity among our
members and among our branch. So let me ask you a little bit
(02:15):
about this. Given your amazing background,
what made you decide to join theCivil Affairs branch?
When I was early in my Reserve career, roughly after finishing
up my undergraduate and political science and getting
ready to go on a deployment Afghanistan, I was trying to
figure out which direction I wanted to go.
And a buddy of mine in the Seaburn world had switched over
(02:36):
to Emergency Management and said, take a look at this.
And I started working in the Emergency Management stuff and I
would have was switching over toPSYOP about the same time.
And I just kind of went in the direction of Emergency
Management. And as I kind of developed in
the Emergency Management world, I learned more about civil
affairs and I was like, this is very similar to Emergency
(02:57):
Management and not want to squander an opportunity.
I just said, well, let's learn alittle bit more about it.
Eventually ended up joining Civil Affairs and I've loved it
ever since. I've really found that civil
affairs is kind of where I belong in the Army, right?
And and it does help that civil affairs and Emergency Management
are so complimentary. Let's talk a little bit about
(03:18):
your career in Emergency Management in Klamath County.
For better or for worse, Emergency Management is a
booming business. Whether it's natural disaster
from climate change or other issues or man made disasters
like we're seeing in Ukraine, inmany areas around the world,
there is more a need than ever for disaster management
(03:41):
services. And yet this is something I
don't think is particularly wellunderstood.
Yeah, I kind of think of Emergency Management at the
county level running a county department.
It's kind of like being maneuverbattalion or brigade commander
in a combat theater. Very tactical.
Yeah, it's it's kind of on a borderline between operational
(04:02):
tactical, especially if you're thinking more brigade with a lot
of the ways that we fought wars over the past couple years with
like counterinsurgency and whatnot.
But unlike most professions, that's really kind of the
pinnacle of the operational level.
Most careers you try to climb the ladder and the higher the
ladder you get, the better, the more prestigious the position of
(04:25):
being the CFO for some nationwide company or whatever.
But in Emergency Management, it's really the county emergency
manager that gets the job done. There's two common sayings in
Emergency Management. The first statement is disaster
response is federally funded, state managed and locally LED.
(04:45):
So you can think of it as state augments and supports who's
leading it at the low level. And that kind of ties to the
second common statement, which is all disasters start and end
locally, which basically means that everything is always local
in Emergency Management. And we generally divide things
(05:05):
up by the counties. We got some city emergency
managers, depending on the size of the city.
We got tribal emergency managers.
There's other local emergency managers.
But the kind of part and parcel frontline leader that runs the
show is the county emergency manager.
And much like with battalion or brigade commanders, what you
really want is to go to an area where they're significant.
(05:28):
If you're going to a theater of operation to be a maneuver
commander, you want to get the choice location that's got the
most consequence to achieving victory in the battle space.
I find that very interesting because I don't think a lot of
people realize how broad the scope of disaster management is.
So let me ask you this question.You talked a little bit about
(05:49):
how you gravitated towards disaster management, how it was
kind of a natural parent with civil affairs.
I noticed years ago when I work for the state of California,
many of the Governor's Office ofEmergency Service employees,
they had military experience, I'd say probably 70% of them.
It was hugely statistically significant.
(06:10):
Is that common in your experience in Disaster Manager,
or was there something unusual about the demographics of where
I was in California? Long story short, we have way
more like retirees in law enforcement Emergency Management
than we do a former military. Some of that's because veterans
have been known to come in and kind of like destabilize things
(06:31):
because the way that we do business in the Emergency
Management world rhymes so closely with how the military
functions. And it's easy to kind of plug
and play military processes in. But also a lot of emergency
managers tend to be a little bitmore touchy feely, especially at
like the state federal level. And they don't necessarily like
having the alpha male personalities that you can get
(06:52):
from the infantry. They're coming in and disrupting
that feeling because when a disaster happens about like
coddling people to a certain extent, they're in extreme
stress. We need to give them comfort.
So kind of like running things like a senior NCO would isn't
necessarily the right way of approaching it.
So what we end up having is a lot of people that are from the
military typically start at the bottom and work their way up as
(07:15):
a second career and acculturate over time.
Do you see people in the military transitioning to like
mid or senior level positions asan equivalency for their
military career? But it's not nearly as common as
you would think, unless they're in like a National Guard Bureau.
That makes sense to me. One of the foundational values
(07:35):
or sensitivities that you would have to have to be successful in
disaster management is a well developed sense of empathy,
because you're going to put yourlife on the line potentially at
that tactical level, going to very dangerous places.
I've been in combat zones, some of them pretty hot, but I'll
tell you some of the work that say the Coast Guard does in
(07:57):
terrible weather conditions and some of the rescues just crazy
dangerous. And you have those aspects of it
in disaster management dealing with the aftermath of something
like a 911. I think you just really have to
have a well developed sense of empathy and and I understand
that not everyone in the military might have that.
(08:17):
Yeah, I think that Emergency Management is very similar to
civil affairs work and a maneuver brigade staff.
If you're a staff worker at a brigade or division level as ACA
officer or CA staff, it's almostidentical to what you're doing
and Emergency Management. But the big difference is, is
the Emergency Management has fundamentally different
(08:40):
approaches to the work. So one of the big things that I
see quite frequently when I haveemergency managers and military
working together is there's totally different concepts of
what command is. So to kind of unpack this,
Emergency Management in the United States uses the National
(09:01):
Incident Management System or NIM.
And NIMS has five components that kind of like doctrinally
define what it is, but only three are related to operations
and those three are communication and information
management. So like information sharing and
managing data sets, knowledge management type stuff, command
and coordination, which has a couple systems I'll talk about
(09:23):
here in a second, and then resource management.
So it's like logistics and personnel and whatnot.
OK. So those are the things that the
military folks would probably have some experience and be
skilled at. But you said there's two more.
Yeah, there's two more preparedness and ongoing
maintenance. It's basically program
management type stuff. Got it.
But those 3 will be used during operations.
(09:43):
Now to kind of clarify the difference between how military
command works versus how it works and the National Instant
Management System. Inside that component of command
and coordination are four different systems.
You've got what's called the multi agency coordination group
or Mac group, your policy level group.
Sometimes they'll even call it apolicy group.
(10:04):
The second one is the Joint Information system or your your
gist. That's where all of your P, I/O,
S&P, AOS all kind of make a bullpen and get all their public
messaging and two way communications with the public
straight. Then you have an emergency
operations center, which is kindof like how ABSB functions.
If you could think of a BSB that's just CA type.
(10:26):
Still, you've got a general ideaof how EO CS function.
OK, so similar to a military EOC?
Yeah. I mean, ultimately you have
what's called the incident command system, and that's the
first time you hear about command.
ICS or the incident command system is the only place where
you have a commander. And unlike in the military where
we have lots of commanders, everywhere you look there's a
(10:47):
commander. Commanders all the way up from
the company level all the way upto the President of the United
States. And ICS, there's one command
level, just one. In extremely rare circumstances,
you might have something called an area command where you have
one layer of your main line commanders, but it's not
commanders all the way up. ICS is intended to have a
command at the tactical level only.
(11:09):
So a lot of times I see an Emergency Management
communities, states will be like, OK, we have the statewide
disaster, we're going to have a state level commander.
And frequently that occurs because Emergency Management is
underneath the National Guard and the governor doesn't
understand how ICS works. So they appoint the guard
(11:31):
commander as the commander for the incident command for the
entire state. And that technically that should
never happen according to Nemstock.
So to be a commander in ICS world, you need to have
jurisdiction, authority and responsibility.
And most of the time one person doesn't have that.
(11:52):
So unlike in the military and incident command systems, you
could have multiple commanders all creating a command team.
You could have law enforcement, firefighters, public health,
public works, whoever as the authority, jurisdiction,
responsibility for the scope of the incident.
They'll just team out until all of the incident scope is
(12:14):
covered. You know, that's who's in your
command team. And then they'll collectively
write one set of objectives likethe mission statement.
It it comes from that team of unified command.
You don't ever see that in the military.
How long do these things usuallygo?
By the way, military operations over in Afghanistan went over 20
years, right? I suspect disasters probably
(12:36):
don't last that long, so the command relationships have to be
more fluid and probably come together faster.
What's the typical duration of adisaster?
So that gets into what's the definition of the disaster?
Yeah, probably. My coffee isn't hot.
That's a disaster for me in the morning.
(12:58):
Yeah, I would say that a better answer to that is supposed to
how long it is. It's like what scale of response
do we need? OK.
And that probably is related to the magnitude of the disaster,
right? How much work needs to get
accomplished and how complex is that work to get to some level
of normalization? Like hazard is out and basic
(13:19):
remediation is done, then the incident command team leaves and
then you transition basically into recovery.
Similar to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,
you're not restoring to originalconditions, you're making sure
that there is not an imminent loss of life and health hazards
and returning to some sense of normalcy.
(13:40):
Telecommunications run, medical facilities are open, kids can go
back to school, that type of stuff.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's just kind of like as
one thing fades out, the the legacy things continue until you
get to basically back into preparedness mode.
Now, how could Civil Affairs getinvolved in those disk missions?
(14:01):
Is disaster management a path tothat?
Over the years, I've kind of learned that Heidel 10
deployments for federal militarysuch as active duty and reserve,
they're the last to be requested.
They're the last to come in and then the 1st to go.
And when they bring in DISK, they're typically looking for
logistical resources such as helicopters, bridging assets,
(14:23):
communication systems, or just plain old muscle.
So bringing Civil affairs in, although I see a great
opportunity for civil affairs towork in emergency operation
centers or maybe do some tactical information collection
or something of that nature, that's really not something that
other surge capabilities can't already fill.
(14:44):
But as far as DISK is concerned,I do think that we're way more
likely to be needed an international disaster response,
especially when there's like a complex situation.
So there's 2 examples that kind of come to mind.
One is the 2015 Nepal earthquake, where we had to
bring all the resources for the disaster response into the Nepal
(15:05):
airport. And they just had a major
logistical problem right there. And I know that we had CA guys
go in there and help do some assessment because they had some
familiarity with Nepal. In 1970, there was A Bola
cyclone that impacted East Pakistan, what's now called
Bangladesh, and West Pakistan decided to take that as an
opportunity to invade East Pakistan and basically genocide.
(15:30):
There was a massive humanitariancrisis with that conflict, both
from the Bhopal cyclone but alsowith the war that ensued.
I do think there's a concern of conflict post natural disaster
in the future and we need to have people that can go and do
that work and civil affairs may be the only real organic asset
we have to help deal with. That yeah, I think so too.
(15:52):
Department of State has some amazing people, but there's only
so many of them and they're not necessarily a man trained and
equipped for these dangerous environments that are not or
only semi permissive. So I could definitely see us
doing that. We've talked a lot about
disaster management at the statelevel.
Let's shift for a moment to the federal level and we have the
(16:13):
Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.
What is the relationship? National Guardsmen are working
disasters. And more importantly, when Compo
3 reserve soldiers, if they say have medical skills and are
called up to COVID, what is their relationship with FEMA?
What does that look like? Well, I think it's important to
(16:35):
identify what FEMA actually is. It's like a lot of people think
that FEMA is like this response organization that comes in with
staff and manages things are hurt after the what was it the
Asheville flooding event that took place after the hurricane
hit. Where's FEMA at?
That's the question I hear quitefrequently.
Where's FEMA? Right.
(16:55):
Well, I think Katrina probably set the stage for that because
there was an expectation that they weren't just a policy and
funding organization, that they were actually like boots on the
ground battalions of federal agents or something that they
could just deploy to get this done.
So, yeah, I think that that misinterpretation is is still
(17:17):
fairly widespread about what FEMA is.
Yeah, FEMA largely came out of aproblem set the federal
government had, because every time they had a natural disaster
before FEMA was created, when they passed some legislation to
provide financial aid to the disaster, they had to create a
whole new organization. So FEMA actually is mostly
(17:38):
comprised of grant managers. There's an army of accountants.
These accountants are going to descend on your disaster area
and audit you. Yeah.
And there's so many of them thatis dealing with FEMA grants is
not, it's notoriously bad experience.
But that being said, they do have some search staff for
support. Most of that support comes in
(18:00):
the form of Emergency Managementfor emergency operations centers
to have these things called incident management assistance
teams, which basically are teamsthat surge support staff to
state EO, CS or whatnot. And then they've got a couple
staff for like a joint field office.
Most of the support as far as like coat wearers, that's where
(18:22):
you're going to see is staffing for these shops.
Later, as you kind of like get more into recovery a little bit,
you're going to see some guys walking around in coats going
and getting some names and putting people into the money
system. But that's much later.
Yeah, these aren't people who are handing out Walmart cards or
stuff like that. Yeah, the people that are making
(18:43):
the change are the local Emergency Management and an army
of local volunteers. You might get some state or
regional or nationwide volunteers like at the Red
Cross, but let me tell you man, we need more disaster volunteers
across the board and every nicheof disaster response has an
organization to go join. Team Rubicon is a great
(19:06):
organization. It's a veteran LED organization
and they kind of self-proclaimedwe fill every hole that all the
other volunteer organizations don't do.
Wow. If they wanted to volunteer, how
would they do that? First, I would start with going
to your county's Emergency Management website and seeing if
you have in your community what's called community
organizations active in disasters or Co add.
(19:26):
They might call it something other than a Co add.
Sometimes there are a couple counties together like a
tri-county Co add or something like that.
But basically what a Co add is aconglomeration of voluntary
organizations that work togetherfor local disaster response.
These guys, I mean, everybody from Civil Air Patrol to Boy
Scouts to Red Cross to United Way, Salvation Army, local
(19:51):
volunteer recovery organizations, you're going to
have animal shelter type stuff. You're going to have so many
different types of organizationsthat can join these Co ads.
And then at the state, you typically have a state VOAD,
which is basically a collection of those same organizations just
at a state level. And then there's the national
VOAD, national voluntary organizations active in
disasters. The National VOAD has a website
(20:13):
you can go to. States typically don't have
websites and the local Co eds are typically kind of
communicated through the organization through the county
Emergency Management. OK, so that makes sense.
Someone is involved. They could probably go to the
National VOA and just kind of trickle down from there.
Thank you for your time. Really appreciate you coming on
(20:33):
the show today and I look forward to a session with you in
the future. Captain Pig Pen.
Thanks. Thank you very much for your
time today. Thanks for listening.
If you get a chance, please likeand subscribe and rate the show
on your favorite podcast platform.
Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an
episode, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com.
(20:56):
I'll have the e-mail and CA Association website in the show
notes. And now, most importantly, to
those currently out in the field, working with a partner
nation's people or leadership toforward US relations.
Thank you all for what you're doing.
This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great
episodes. 1 California podcast.
Welcome to the One Civil AffairsPodcast.
I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host
for this session. Today we have Captain Ian Figpen
with us to discuss disaster management.
Captain Figpen, welcome to the show.
Hey, it's so great to be here with you, Sir.
It's. Let's tell the audience a little
bit about you. Captain Ian Figpen is a civil
affairs officer with 26 years ofservice.
(00:25):
He joined the 351st Civil Affairs Command in 2019.
He was commissioned in the spring of 2024 as a 38 Gulf
Captain specializing in Emergency Management.
Thigpen has two combat deployments to Afghanistan.
He holds a master's in EmergencyManagement.
On the civilian side. Thigpen has over a decade of
(00:46):
experience in Emergency Management.
We first met when you volunteered as a Master Sergeant
to join the mad scientists of Civil Information Management.
Started First Class Francis Regan and myself at the 301st
Civil Affairs Command. You remember those old days?
Oh, absolutely. I got an opportunity to do that
for roughly 4 years, which is longer than anybody should do a
(01:08):
job. But it was just such a great
time. I was working with such great
people and working for you and started first class Regan.
I mean greatest minds and civil affairs, but everybody at 351 I
felt like I was going to an academic symposium every time I
went to drill. So it was a enlightening for me
and I'm I had a a delight. Those were some amazing days
(01:28):
when we definitely made a changetogether.
It was great for me because I got to sit back and and watch
you and start first class Regan just literally do magic before
my eyes. And then I get somehow by
association, get some benefit from that.
So we really did have a dream team.
And I know you know, many of ourideas were incorporated by the
CA proponency at that time. And we helped usher in civil
(01:52):
knowledge immigration, that evolution from civil information
management. So those were amazing times.
I look back on finally, probablymy best assignment to this day.
We're working with you guys. You know, one of the things that
is always interesting about Civil affairs, non commissioned
officers, civil affairs officersis just the diversity among our
members and among our branch. So let me ask you a little bit
(02:15):
about this. Given your amazing background,
what made you decide to join theCivil Affairs branch?
When I was early in my Reserve career, roughly after finishing
up my undergraduate and political science and getting
ready to go on a deployment Afghanistan, I was trying to
figure out which direction I wanted to go.
And a buddy of mine in the Seaburn world had switched over
(02:36):
to Emergency Management and said, take a look at this.
And I started working in the Emergency Management stuff and I
would have was switching over toPSYOP about the same time.
And I just kind of went in the direction of Emergency
Management. And as I kind of developed in
the Emergency Management world, I learned more about civil
affairs and I was like, this is very similar to Emergency
(02:57):
Management and not want to squander an opportunity.
I just said, well, let's learn alittle bit more about it.
Eventually ended up joining Civil Affairs and I've loved it
ever since. I've really found that civil
affairs is kind of where I belong in the Army, right?
And and it does help that civil affairs and Emergency Management
are so complimentary. Let's talk a little bit about
(03:18):
your career in Emergency Management in Klamath County.
For better or for worse, Emergency Management is a
booming business. Whether it's natural disaster
from climate change or other issues or man made disasters
like we're seeing in Ukraine, inmany areas around the world,
there is more a need than ever for disaster management
(03:41):
services. And yet this is something I
don't think is particularly wellunderstood.
Yeah, I kind of think of Emergency Management at the
county level running a county department.
It's kind of like being maneuverbattalion or brigade commander
in a combat theater. Very tactical.
Yeah, it's it's kind of on a borderline between operational
(04:02):
tactical, especially if you're thinking more brigade with a lot
of the ways that we fought wars over the past couple years with
like counterinsurgency and whatnot.
But unlike most professions, that's really kind of the
pinnacle of the operational level.
Most careers you try to climb the ladder and the higher the
ladder you get, the better, the more prestigious the position of
(04:25):
being the CFO for some nationwide company or whatever.
But in Emergency Management, it's really the county emergency
manager that gets the job done. There's two common sayings in
Emergency Management. The first statement is disaster
response is federally funded, state managed and locally LED.
(04:45):
So you can think of it as state augments and supports who's
leading it at the low level. And that kind of ties to the
second common statement, which is all disasters start and end
locally, which basically means that everything is always local
in Emergency Management. And we generally divide things
(05:05):
up by the counties. We got some city emergency
managers, depending on the size of the city.
We got tribal emergency managers.
There's other local emergency managers.
But the kind of part and parcel frontline leader that runs the
show is the county emergency manager.
And much like with battalion or brigade commanders, what you
really want is to go to an area where they're significant.
(05:28):
If you're going to a theater of operation to be a maneuver
commander, you want to get the choice location that's got the
most consequence to achieving victory in the battle space.
I find that very interesting because I don't think a lot of
people realize how broad the scope of disaster management is.
So let me ask you this question.You talked a little bit about
(05:49):
how you gravitated towards disaster management, how it was
kind of a natural parent with civil affairs.
I noticed years ago when I work for the state of California,
many of the Governor's Office ofEmergency Service employees,
they had military experience, I'd say probably 70% of them.
It was hugely statistically significant.
(06:10):
Is that common in your experience in Disaster Manager,
or was there something unusual about the demographics of where
I was in California? Long story short, we have way
more like retirees in law enforcement Emergency Management
than we do a former military. Some of that's because veterans
have been known to come in and kind of like destabilize things
(06:31):
because the way that we do business in the Emergency
Management world rhymes so closely with how the military
functions. And it's easy to kind of plug
and play military processes in. But also a lot of emergency
managers tend to be a little bitmore touchy feely, especially at
like the state federal level. And they don't necessarily like
having the alpha male personalities that you can get
(06:52):
from the infantry. They're coming in and disrupting
that feeling because when a disaster happens about like
coddling people to a certain extent, they're in extreme
stress. We need to give them comfort.
So kind of like running things like a senior NCO would isn't
necessarily the right way of approaching it.
So what we end up having is a lot of people that are from the
military typically start at the bottom and work their way up as
(07:15):
a second career and acculturate over time.
Do you see people in the military transitioning to like
mid or senior level positions asan equivalency for their
military career? But it's not nearly as common as
you would think, unless they're in like a National Guard Bureau.
That makes sense to me. One of the foundational values
(07:35):
or sensitivities that you would have to have to be successful in
disaster management is a well developed sense of empathy,
because you're going to put yourlife on the line potentially at
that tactical level, going to very dangerous places.
I've been in combat zones, some of them pretty hot, but I'll
tell you some of the work that say the Coast Guard does in
(07:57):
terrible weather conditions and some of the rescues just crazy
dangerous. And you have those aspects of it
in disaster management dealing with the aftermath of something
like a 911. I think you just really have to
have a well developed sense of empathy and and I understand
that not everyone in the military might have that.
(08:17):
Yeah, I think that Emergency Management is very similar to
civil affairs work and a maneuver brigade staff.
If you're a staff worker at a brigade or division level as ACA
officer or CA staff, it's almostidentical to what you're doing
and Emergency Management. But the big difference is, is
the Emergency Management has fundamentally different
(08:40):
approaches to the work. So one of the big things that I
see quite frequently when I haveemergency managers and military
working together is there's totally different concepts of
what command is. So to kind of unpack this,
Emergency Management in the United States uses the National
(09:01):
Incident Management System or NIM.
And NIMS has five components that kind of like doctrinally
define what it is, but only three are related to operations
and those three are communication and information
management. So like information sharing and
managing data sets, knowledge management type stuff, command
and coordination, which has a couple systems I'll talk about
(09:23):
here in a second, and then resource management.
So it's like logistics and personnel and whatnot.
OK. So those are the things that the
military folks would probably have some experience and be
skilled at. But you said there's two more.
Yeah, there's two more preparedness and ongoing
maintenance. It's basically program
management type stuff. Got it.
But those 3 will be used during operations.
(09:43):
Now to kind of clarify the difference between how military
command works versus how it works and the National Instant
Management System. Inside that component of command
and coordination are four different systems.
You've got what's called the multi agency coordination group
or Mac group, your policy level group.
Sometimes they'll even call it apolicy group.
(10:04):
The second one is the Joint Information system or your your
gist. That's where all of your P, I/O,
S&P, AOS all kind of make a bullpen and get all their public
messaging and two way communications with the public
straight. Then you have an emergency
operations center, which is kindof like how ABSB functions.
If you could think of a BSB that's just CA type.
(10:26):
Still, you've got a general ideaof how EO CS function.
OK, so similar to a military EOC?
Yeah. I mean, ultimately you have
what's called the incident command system, and that's the
first time you hear about command.
ICS or the incident command system is the only place where
you have a commander. And unlike in the military where
we have lots of commanders, everywhere you look there's a
(10:47):
commander. Commanders all the way up from
the company level all the way upto the President of the United
States. And ICS, there's one command
level, just one. In extremely rare circumstances,
you might have something called an area command where you have
one layer of your main line commanders, but it's not
commanders all the way up. ICS is intended to have a
command at the tactical level only.
(11:09):
So a lot of times I see an Emergency Management
communities, states will be like, OK, we have the statewide
disaster, we're going to have a state level commander.
And frequently that occurs because Emergency Management is
underneath the National Guard and the governor doesn't
understand how ICS works. So they appoint the guard
(11:31):
commander as the commander for the incident command for the
entire state. And that technically that should
never happen according to Nemstock.
So to be a commander in ICS world, you need to have
jurisdiction, authority and responsibility.
And most of the time one person doesn't have that.
(11:52):
So unlike in the military and incident command systems, you
could have multiple commanders all creating a command team.
You could have law enforcement, firefighters, public health,
public works, whoever as the authority, jurisdiction,
responsibility for the scope of the incident.
They'll just team out until all of the incident scope is
(12:14):
covered. You know, that's who's in your
command team. And then they'll collectively
write one set of objectives likethe mission statement.
It it comes from that team of unified command.
You don't ever see that in the military.
How long do these things usuallygo?
By the way, military operations over in Afghanistan went over 20
years, right? I suspect disasters probably
(12:36):
don't last that long, so the command relationships have to be
more fluid and probably come together faster.
What's the typical duration of adisaster?
So that gets into what's the definition of the disaster?
Yeah, probably. My coffee isn't hot.
That's a disaster for me in the morning.
(12:58):
Yeah, I would say that a better answer to that is supposed to
how long it is. It's like what scale of response
do we need? OK.
And that probably is related to the magnitude of the disaster,
right? How much work needs to get
accomplished and how complex is that work to get to some level
of normalization? Like hazard is out and basic
(13:19):
remediation is done, then the incident command team leaves and
then you transition basically into recovery.
Similar to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,
you're not restoring to originalconditions, you're making sure
that there is not an imminent loss of life and health hazards
and returning to some sense of normalcy.
(13:40):
Telecommunications run, medical facilities are open, kids can go
back to school, that type of stuff.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's just kind of like as
one thing fades out, the the legacy things continue until you
get to basically back into preparedness mode.
Now, how could Civil Affairs getinvolved in those disk missions?
(14:01):
Is disaster management a path tothat?
Over the years, I've kind of learned that Heidel 10
deployments for federal militarysuch as active duty and reserve,
they're the last to be requested.
They're the last to come in and then the 1st to go.
And when they bring in DISK, they're typically looking for
logistical resources such as helicopters, bridging assets,
(14:23):
communication systems, or just plain old muscle.
So bringing Civil affairs in, although I see a great
opportunity for civil affairs towork in emergency operation
centers or maybe do some tactical information collection
or something of that nature, that's really not something that
other surge capabilities can't already fill.
(14:44):
But as far as DISK is concerned,I do think that we're way more
likely to be needed an international disaster response,
especially when there's like a complex situation.
So there's 2 examples that kind of come to mind.
One is the 2015 Nepal earthquake, where we had to
bring all the resources for the disaster response into the Nepal
(15:05):
airport. And they just had a major
logistical problem right there. And I know that we had CA guys
go in there and help do some assessment because they had some
familiarity with Nepal. In 1970, there was A Bola
cyclone that impacted East Pakistan, what's now called
Bangladesh, and West Pakistan decided to take that as an
opportunity to invade East Pakistan and basically genocide.
(15:30):
There was a massive humanitariancrisis with that conflict, both
from the Bhopal cyclone but alsowith the war that ensued.
I do think there's a concern of conflict post natural disaster
in the future and we need to have people that can go and do
that work and civil affairs may be the only real organic asset
we have to help deal with. That yeah, I think so too.
(15:52):
Department of State has some amazing people, but there's only
so many of them and they're not necessarily a man trained and
equipped for these dangerous environments that are not or
only semi permissive. So I could definitely see us
doing that. We've talked a lot about
disaster management at the statelevel.
Let's shift for a moment to the federal level and we have the
(16:13):
Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.
What is the relationship? National Guardsmen are working
disasters. And more importantly, when Compo
3 reserve soldiers, if they say have medical skills and are
called up to COVID, what is their relationship with FEMA?
What does that look like? Well, I think it's important to
(16:35):
identify what FEMA actually is. It's like a lot of people think
that FEMA is like this response organization that comes in with
staff and manages things are hurt after the what was it the
Asheville flooding event that took place after the hurricane
hit. Where's FEMA at?
That's the question I hear quitefrequently.
Where's FEMA? Right.
(16:55):
Well, I think Katrina probably set the stage for that because
there was an expectation that they weren't just a policy and
funding organization, that they were actually like boots on the
ground battalions of federal agents or something that they
could just deploy to get this done.
So, yeah, I think that that misinterpretation is is still
(17:17):
fairly widespread about what FEMA is.
Yeah, FEMA largely came out of aproblem set the federal
government had, because every time they had a natural disaster
before FEMA was created, when they passed some legislation to
provide financial aid to the disaster, they had to create a
whole new organization. So FEMA actually is mostly
(17:38):
comprised of grant managers. There's an army of accountants.
These accountants are going to descend on your disaster area
and audit you. Yeah.
And there's so many of them thatis dealing with FEMA grants is
not, it's notoriously bad experience.
But that being said, they do have some search staff for
support. Most of that support comes in
(18:00):
the form of Emergency Managementfor emergency operations centers
to have these things called incident management assistance
teams, which basically are teamsthat surge support staff to
state EO, CS or whatnot. And then they've got a couple
staff for like a joint field office.
Most of the support as far as like coat wearers, that's where
(18:22):
you're going to see is staffing for these shops.
Later, as you kind of like get more into recovery a little bit,
you're going to see some guys walking around in coats going
and getting some names and putting people into the money
system. But that's much later.
Yeah, these aren't people who are handing out Walmart cards or
stuff like that. Yeah, the people that are making
(18:43):
the change are the local Emergency Management and an army
of local volunteers. You might get some state or
regional or nationwide volunteers like at the Red
Cross, but let me tell you man, we need more disaster volunteers
across the board and every nicheof disaster response has an
organization to go join. Team Rubicon is a great
(19:06):
organization. It's a veteran LED organization
and they kind of self-proclaimedwe fill every hole that all the
other volunteer organizations don't do.
Wow. If they wanted to volunteer, how
would they do that? First, I would start with going
to your county's Emergency Management website and seeing if
you have in your community what's called community
organizations active in disasters or Co add.
(19:26):
They might call it something other than a Co add.
Sometimes there are a couple counties together like a
tri-county Co add or something like that.
But basically what a Co add is aconglomeration of voluntary
organizations that work togetherfor local disaster response.
These guys, I mean, everybody from Civil Air Patrol to Boy
Scouts to Red Cross to United Way, Salvation Army, local
(19:51):
volunteer recovery organizations, you're going to
have animal shelter type stuff. You're going to have so many
different types of organizationsthat can join these Co ads.
And then at the state, you typically have a state VOAD,
which is basically a collection of those same organizations just
at a state level. And then there's the national
VOAD, national voluntary organizations active in
disasters. The National VOAD has a website
(20:13):
you can go to. States typically don't have
websites and the local Co eds are typically kind of
communicated through the organization through the county
Emergency Management. OK, so that makes sense.
Someone is involved. They could probably go to the
National VOA and just kind of trickle down from there.
Thank you for your time. Really appreciate you coming on
(20:33):
the show today and I look forward to a session with you in
the future. Captain Pig Pen.
Thanks. Thank you very much for your
time today. Thanks for listening.
If you get a chance, please likeand subscribe and rate the show
on your favorite podcast platform.
Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an
episode, e-mail us at ca.podcasting@gmail.com.
(20:56):
I'll have the e-mail and CA Association website in the show
notes. And now, most importantly, to
those currently out in the field, working with a partner
nation's people or leadership toforward US relations.
Thank you all for what you're doing.
This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great
episodes. 1 California podcast.
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