Despite pronouncements suggesting the contrary, a resilient America cannot be built upon a theoretically protected yet decayed, highly exploitable and consequence amplifying infrastructure foundation.

In January 2006, noting that protection had proven itself a “brittle condition” that throughout history failed nearly every time it was seriously tested, The Homeland Security Advisory Council’s Critical Infrastructure Task Force (CITF) publicly submitted its principal recommendation: “Promulgate Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CIR) as the top-level strategic objective—the desired outcome—to drive national policy and planning.” That recommendation -- and resilience itself -- was rejected on February 3, 2006.  The subsequent addition of the word resilience to the CIP/NIPP lexicon has proven itself to be a poor substitute for implementing the CITF’s recommendation.

While an essential starting point, current iterations of Cold-War era Critical Infrastructure Protection policies and programs have repeatedly proven themselves inadequate in preventing or even efficiently mitigating “all-hazards” infrastructure-based failures and consequences.  The most fundamental of these inadequacies is found in the fact that CIP is an objectively un-measurable preparedness goal.  It is impossible to coherently answer the question:  How much infrastructure protection is enough?  Accordingly, how do families, small businesses, publicly traded corporations, communities, states, regions, and even the Federal Government itself efficiently invest in or measure progress towards an objective that cannot be coherently defined?

While leveraging CIP efforts, Critical Infrastructure Resilience metrics and processes advance far beyond them and are:

• Proactive
• Responsible
• Both empowering and pragmatic
• Objectively measurable, manageable, achievable and sustainable
• The foundation for coherent investment in infrastructure capacities
• Green/sustainable technology empowering
• Risk based and consequence mitigating, and
• Comprehensive and compatible across all elements of American (and global) civilization

With the guarantee of more CIP failures in America’s future, it is time to implement resilience as America’s 21^st Century infrastructure preparedness condition and goal.  The proven expertise, technologies and imperative to efficiently and effectively make resilience America’s infrastructure preparedness realty have been and remain at hand.  All that is needed is a national leadership decision to fully apply them.

See above