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As fundamental tests of presidential leadership and organizational capacity, crises can make or break an administration. This article presents a conceptual analysis of what makes any crisis situation challenging to deal with, and it develops a set of analytical steps that can help crisis managers diagnose particular crisis situations they might face. The proposed crisis navigation framework brings together case research studies and theories of organizational processes, so that those assuming responsibility for steering the government and society through crises—including the Obama administration—have a useful point of entry into the growing crisis management literature.

This article presents the case for a comprehensive and multidimensional security concept, including a prioritized environmental component. Following a brief overview of the current state of the security debate, two very different lines of criticism against the notion of linking environment and security are presented and critiqued. The `orthodox' view argues that a relatively restrictive definition of security should be maintained in order to protect the conceptual and substantive integrity of security studies as a discipline. The `radical' view reflects a distaste for the normative and ontological implications of the security discourse and argues that it is inappropriate to `securitize' non-military social or environmental issues. In the last part of the article, the advantages of a comprehensive security concept are outlined, in a context emphasizing the desirability of an intellectual partnership between academics and practitioners geared towards the generation of more balanced, integrated and environmentally sound security policy-making.

This paper takes the current all hazards (with a special emphasis on the CBRNE) threat picture to military installations within and outside of the continental United States and their associated military communities, as well as evolving patterns of community vulnerability and changing preparedness concepts (community resilience, whole of community), as a point of departure for re-examining strategic leadership challenges (Boin et al, 2005) associated with crisis management and community-resilience development. The paper identifies two key modes of response to pervasive threat to military communities: evacuation and shelter in place. Both academic research and practical planning in both the civilian and military realms have tended to focus on evacuation to the relative neglect of shelter-in-place. The paper examines the pros and cons of each mode of response. While traditional shelter-in-place concepts have significant limitations, many of these are transcended by state of the art community-shielding strategies which provide a more robust and enhanced form of sheltering-in place. In fact, community shielding provides a potentially superior alternative in many contingencies in terms of force protection, mission assurance, and continuity of operations. The paper concludes with an agenda for improving the resilience (and crisis management) capacity of military communities.

AbstractThis article examines the Trump Administration's inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID‐19 outbreak, despite ample warning. Through an empirical exploration guided by three explanatory perspectives—psychological, bureau‐organizational, and agenda‐political—developed from the strategic surprise, public administration, and crisis management literature, the authors seek to shed light on the mechanisms that contributed to the underestimation of the coronavirus threat by the Trump Administration and the slow and mismanaged federal response. The analysis highlights the extent to which the factors identified by previous studies of policy surprise and failure in other security domains are relevant for health security. The paper concludes by addressing the crucial role of executive leadership as an underlying factor in all three perspectives and discussing why the US president is ultimately responsible for ensuring a healthy policy process to guard against the pathologies implicated in the federal government's sub‐optimal response to the COVID‐19 crisis.

This article examines the Trump Administration's inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID-19 outbreak, despite ample warning. Through an empirical exploration guided by three explanatory perspectives—psychological, bureau-organizational, and agenda-political—developed from the strategic surprise, public administration, and crisis management literature, the authors seek to shed light on the mechanisms that contributed to the underestimation of the coronavirus threat by the Trump Administration and the slow and mismanaged federal response. The analysis highlights the extent to which the factors identified by previous studies of policy surprise and failure in other security domains are relevant for health security. The paper concludes by addressing the crucial role of executive leadership as an underlying factor in all three perspectives and discussing why the US president is ultimately responsible for ensuring a healthy policy process to guard against the pathologies implicated in the federal government's sub-optimal response to the COVID-19 crisis.

This article examines the Trump Administration's inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID‐19 outbreak, despite ample warning. Through an empirical exploration guided by three explanatory perspectives—psychological, bureau‐organizational, and agenda‐political—developed from the strategic surprise, public administration, and crisis management literature, the authors seek to shed light on the mechanisms that contributed to the underestimation of the coronavirus threat by the Trump Administration and the slow and mismanaged federal response. The analysis highlights the extent to which the factors identified by previous studies of policy surprise and failure in other security domains are relevant for health security. The paper concludes by addressing the crucial role of executive leadership as an underlying factor in all three perspectives and discussing why the US president is ultimately responsible for ensuring a healthy policy process to guard against the pathologies implicated in the federal government's sub‐optimal response to the COVID‐19 crisis.

When making (foreign)policy, presidents must navigate between twin dangers: excessive conformity and destructive conflict among the policy advocates. The notions of devil's and multiple advocacy are reexamined in light of three decades of research in political science and psychology as coping strategies for dealing with these dangers. Devil's advocacy is of some help in promoting diversisity and mitgating tendencirs toward conformity, despite serious implementation difficulties. A substantial body of conceptual and empirical work bearing on the assessment of the more comprehensive multiple advocacy work has accumulated since its formulation in 1972. The main findings are (I) that practices associated with multiple advocacy have indeed contributed to improving and uncovering avoidable errors, (2) that the implementation of multiple advocacy has been uneven (which makes evaluation difficult), and (3) a number of suggestions for fine‐tuning the prescriptive model and specfing conditions conducive to its effective application.

The devastating terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have often been characterized as a "bolt from the blue." Drawing inspiration from the political psychological literature on strategic surprise, this article poses the deceptively simple question of why so many U.S. policymakers were caught so woefully off guard last year. Through a preliminary empirical exploration of three broad explanatory "cuts" derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature—psychological, bureau–organizational, and agenda–political—the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that may have contributed to 9/11 and point to promising avenues of investigation for future research as the available empirical record becomes more complete.