"The truth is, acts of terror cannot always be prevented, and nature continues to show its fury in frighteningly unpredictable ways. Resiliency, argues Flynn, must now become our national motto. With chilling frankness and clarity, Flynn paints a vivid scenario of the threats we face within our own borders. The Edge of Disaster tells us what we can do about these threats, as individuals and as a society. The time to act is now."--BOOK JACKET.

Flynn gives an alarming and authoritative view of what America still hasn't done--and what it needs to do--to provide security in the face of new terrorist attacks.

This text offers comprehensive and principled, yet practical, guidelines to critical infrastructures resilience. Extreme events and stresses, including those that may be unprecedented but are no longer surprising, have disproportionate effects on critical infrastructures and hence on communities, cities, and megaregions. Critical infrastructures include buildings and bridges, dams, levees, and sea walls, as well as power plants and chemical factories, besides lifeline networks such as multimodal transportation, power grids, communication, and water or wastewater. The growing interconnectedness of natural-built-human systems causes cascading infrastructure failures and necessitates simultaneous recovery. This text explores the new paradigm centered on the concept of resilience by approaching the challenges posed by globalization, climate change, and growing urbanization on critical infrastructures and key resources through the combination of policy and engineering perspectives. It identifies solutions that are scientifically credible, data driven, and sound in engineering principles while concurrently informed by and supportive of social and policy imperatives. Critical Infrastructures Resilience will be of interest to students of engineering and policy.

The March 2006 furor over a Dubai firms attempt to purchase the company managing some U.S. ports illustrates the difficult homeland security challenges that exist at the nexus of privately owned critical assets as well as global interdependence. Unfortunately, nearly five years after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., federal efforts to enlist the private sector in bolstering homeland security remain largely stillborn. Neglected Defense offers a thoughtful and tightly reasoned analysis of why that is so. It presents a way forward for strengthening cooperation between the private sector and government on homeland security. The report begins by laying out the policy dilemma in detail. It offers a recent history of the security role of the private sector, and highlights specific problems that have kept public-private security partnerships from maturing. It concludes with a series of recommendationsfor Congress, the Bush administration, and the private sectorto better secure the homeland.

The central finding of this report is that federal government has had a naïve view of what the market is able to do when left largely on its own to protect critical infrastructure.

The author argues that the U.S. emphasis on drug control in its support of Plan Colombia is misguided and akin to prescribing an antibiotic regime to combat a disease not caused by bacteria or similar micro-organisms. The illegal drug industry in Colombia is not the cause of that country s fragile socio-political system, but a symptom of and a contributor to the fragility of the Colombian state. Continuing the analogy, Flynn argues that U.S. and Colombian emphasis on combating illicit drug cultivation and trafficking leads to several undesirable side effects.