An exploratory study of U.S. civil-military relations in federal emergency management
Date
2023
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The United States military plays a prominent and important supporting role in the nation’s response to disasters and other domestic emergencies. Arguably, no event in recent history has shined a brighter spotlight on the role of the military in domestic disaster response than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The widely criticized federal response to Katrina attracted significant attention from scholars and other observers, and also became a focusing event for many of the organizations involved. Lessons learned from the Katrina response, along with external pressure for greater military involvement in emergency management, led the Department of Defense (DoD) to make significant organizational investments to improve civil-military coordination and enable the U.S. military to provide Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) more efficiently and effectively. One of the major investments made by DoD was aimed at strengthening the Department’s partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). To achieve that aim, DoD personnel were permanently assigned and embedded within each FEMA Regional Office and within the FEMA National Headquarters to provide opportunities for regular engagement with local, state, and federal officials to plan and coordinate DSCA. ☐ Department of Defense personnel have been working closely with FEMA for nearly two decades now. Yet, there is a dearth of research on how the assignment of Defense Coordinating Officers, Defense Coordinating Element personnel, and Military Coordination Officers have led to any improvements in DSCA. More broadly, in fact, civil-military relations in the emergency management domain remains an under-explored area of study. Beyond the interest sparked in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, scant academic attention has been paid to the role of the military in domestic incident response since; notwithstanding the occurrence of several major events in recent years that have involved significant civil-military coordination and collaboration. ☐ This dissertation addresses a gap in the scholarly literature by using a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the conceptions of senior civilian and military officials about civil-military relations and collaboration in federal emergency management. Data was obtained from twenty-one research participants, collected during in-person and video interviews between April and August of 2022. As a result of this study, a framework for what is referred to in this dissertation as “The Expectations Gap Theory” is introduced to help extend understanding of civil-military relations in the emergency management domain. In addition, challenges to civil-military coordination and collaboration that research participants identified and described during the study are presented and discussed. ☐ To establish a foundation for the reader, this dissertation begins with an introduction to the key authorities and concepts related to Defense Support of Civil Authorities. This is followed by descriptions of how the Department of Defense is organized to conduct DSCA, and how DoD personnel are integrated into Federal Emergency Management Agency structures and processes. To provide context for the reader, a statistical summary of the requests for military assistance received by the Department of Defense between 2011 and 2021 is also presented.
Description
Keywords
Civil-military coordination, Civil-military relations, Department of Defense, Disaster response, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Defense Support of Civil Authorities