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The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) form recognizable foundations for international law. Discuss why the United States is not a state party to the ICC or a signatory to UNCLOS.Select either the ICC or the UNCLOSWhat are the pros of the United States not being part of the ICC or the UNCLOSWhat are the cons of the United States not being part of the ICC or the UNCLOSIf an advisor to the president of the United States, what advice would you give the president on joining the ICC or the UNCLOS
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Weekly Discussion Forum
Participate in the discussion forum as follows:
Your first requirement is to answer the discussion item/question. The objective of the weekly
discussion forums is to develop a “discussion thread” that stimulates critical thinking and indepth dialogue. The second requirement is to reply to at least two other student postings.
Again, professionalism and common courtesy are expected during the weekly dialogues.
Why are the lessons from so many disasters so hard to learn? Why do all levels of
government, public and private sector organizations, agencies, and a myriad of stakeholders
have such difficulty devising and implementing corrective actions once lessons are identified?
Student 1
Lesson Four Discussion
The reasoning is walked behind why so many disasters are hard to learn is that the
United States by its democratic foundation is in a continual flux of leadership changes which
leads not learning from failures. When leadership changes in many ways managing crisis
situations change as well. Throughout all the levels of government, each time a new leader is
elected one is resetting the management of emergencies. Learning from disasters is hard in the
United States because of our democratic process.
There are many reasons why the various organization’s agencies and levels
governments have difficulty devising and implementing corrective actions. One of the biggest
issues is uncoordinated leadership. (Tuohy, 2006) Uncoordinated leadership can cause a
domino effect in resource constraints as well as weak planning. (Block, 2006; Tuohy, 2006) To
elaborate leadership is even more important in disasters among all levels of government, public
and private sector organizations because leadership provides direction or focus. By not having a
direction or focus well-established individual stakeholders will often resort to their leadership
structures which can often be counterproductive in disaster situations because of the
differences of goals. (Block, 2006) As an example in Hurricane Katrina’s Louisiana’s governor
was left without coordinated federal leadership, this resulted in the all levels of government as
well as the public and private sector organizations to follow their direction which concluded in a
mismanagement of the entire disaster situation. (Townsend, 2006) Hurricane Katrina was not
the first storm to hit the state of Louisiana, and previous incidences weren’t learned because
research and analysis weren’t provided. (Tuohy, 2006) No individual governmental leader was
to blame for Hurricane Katrina the blame sits at all levels of government in that situation as well
as stakeholders. In an emergency, situation leadership needs to be definitive to provide a
coordinated effort.
Resource constraints is another problem to everyone because no one has vast sums of
money to spend on situations that arise erratically. Resources are limited, and in the event of
disasters, resource constraints can be interpreted as a leadership issue. Resources are limited,
and leadership apportions where the resources go in a given situation. (Tuohy, 2006;
Townsend, 2006) At the government levels resources are allocated with the mindset of applying
resources to the most people as the best-desired outcome. Individual stakeholders have far
fewer resources than the government, so resource constraints are even more profound with
them. Resource constraints are endemic to every level of government and different agencies,
and the best policy is to establish better leadership protocols to deal with limited resources.
Weak planning with individual stakeholders is a problem. They have little incentive
into providing detailed planning because there is the little immediate positive outcome. (Tuohy,
2006) The federal and state levels have detailed plans in the event of a disaster. However, the
local levels have programs that are weaker, and individual organizations have even fewer plans
developed. (Block, 2006) This leadership weakness can be interpreted as another
uncoordinated leadership problem that extends to the highest levels of government because
the President and Congress provide the ways, ends, and means to give individual stakeholders
the financial direction towards better planning for contingency operations.
Leadership is critical in disasters both before and after because it provides the
direction of travel in those stressful situations. If leadership is uncoordinated, then the effort
will become haphazard and wasteful given weak planning and resource constraints. In the end,
leadership is the crucial problem in both learning from disasters and being ready for the next
catastrophe. Uncoordinated leadership is the biggest deficit and presents a cascade of issues as
a result.
References
Block, C. C. (2006). Disaster. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Townsend, F. F. (2006, February). The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina Lessons Learned.
Retrieved from United States Government Publishing Office:
https://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps67263/katrina-lessons-learned.pdf
Tuohy, A. D. (2006, July). Lessons We Don’t Learn: A Study of the Lessons of Disasters, Why We
Repeat Them, and How We Can Learn Them. Retrieved from Homeland Security Affairs:
https://www.hsaj.org/articles/167
Student 2 Response
Student 1,
I appreciate your point of view on the continual flux of leadership causing the lead to
learn from our failures during disasters. While I agree with you that learning from
disasters is hard, I would not necessarily associate it because of our democratic process.
Understandably, when we elect for instance a new president, changes are going to
occur in every administration. However, I don’t think that necessarily excludes us from
learning from our past incidents and making changes to manage crises.
Understandably it is reported at incidents there can be unclear, multiple, conflicting,
uncooperative, and isolated command structures and these have led to or caused
failures at major incidents, but can anyone report if that NIMS structure under a single
incident command structure or unified command was followed. Just like this week’s
article by Donahue & Tuohy outlines, the Joint Field Office staff and other deployed
personnel often lacked a working knowledge of NIMS or even a basic understanding of
ICS principles. If the failure is caused by a lack of competency that can be learned
through training, exercises, and experience, assisting to correct the issue. I believe that
we operate in a system of learned experiences and that with adequate planning we can
learn from our past experiences to manage future crises.
On another note, you pointed out resource constraints. Resource acquisition and
management are a major function of incident management. The ongoing issues dealt
with at a large-scale, long duration incidents are the demand of more resources personnel, equipment, supplies, commodities, specialized capabilities that any agency
or government can keep on hand (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006). As the incident develops,
resources become even scarcer which put significant strains on operations. Altogether
this leads to a failure in operation to mitigate an incident.
Great Post. Enjoyed reading your discussion.
-Student 2
Reference:
Donahue, A. K., & Tuohy, R. V. (2006, July). Lessons We Don’t Learn: A Study of the
Lessons of Disasters, Why We Repeat Them, and How We Can Learn Them. VOL. II, NO.
2. Retrieved from Homeland Security Affiars: https://www.hsaj.org/articles/167
Student 1 – Response
Student 2:
Thank you for replying to my discussion you gave me reinforcement to my
argument about the conflicts in leadership as well as resource acquisition and
management. To provide a military aspect to the discussion why lessons aren’t learned
after disasters. I will present you this military leadership phrase “lead, follow, or get out
of the way” which I believe will help aid in the understanding of the problems in learning
from disasters. Throughout my military career, I heard that phrase many of times. To
elaborate that phrase “lead” means that in any situation if you’re the appointed leader
you should lead the effort. The next part of the phrase “follow” if you are the
established as a teammate in the effort it is your responsibility to follow your leader’s
instructions unless they are counterproductive than a follower has a responsibility to
seek redressment of efforts. The term “get out a way” is an implied to be a negative
concept, in fact, the meaning here is that if a person in a position of leadership is
incapable through lack of skill or knowledge to lead, they must recuse themselves and
become a follower instead. By applying that military concept, and learning from
disasters, the country will have a greater ability to adapt.
Thank you again,
Student 1
Ygnacio Flores – Response
ALCON:
Many managers leave for promotion or work in systems that move managers around as
part of their culture. See the Harvard Business Review article on how long CEO tenure
can hurt an organization.
BR – nash
https://hbr.org/2013/03/long-ceo-tenure-can-hurt-performance
Student 3 – Response
Student 1,
Great post! You claim uncoordinated leadership is the greatest root cause. What
recommendations do you have to specifically fix these types of leadership problems?
–
Student 3
Student 2 – Response
Professor Flores presents an interesting article on changes in leadership within an
organization. In this article it presents how a CEO’s tenure affects performance through
its impact on two groups, employee and customers. It outlines that the longer a
CEO remains in position, the more the employee dynamic improves. However, on the
other hand at first there are strength in customer ties, but over time these relationships
weaken causing for diminish in a company’s performance.
Our week’s readings identified problems such as leadership within command and
control are all too often occurring during emergency disasters. Also identified was the
lack of communications. It is very likely that the same issues presented by (Luo, Kanuri,
& Andrews, 2013) are those seen during emergency disasters. However, in our field of
work it’s much about the customers, so this raises the questions does a frequent change
in our leadership really have anything to do with the handling of a disasters or should
we ensure that we have a standardized command structure and that its structure is
being held to the standard it was set forth to provide?
-Student 2
Reference:
Luo, X., Kanuri, V. K., & Andrews, M. (2013, March). Long CEO Tenure Can Hurt
Performance. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2013/03/longceo-tenure-can-hurt-performance
Ygnacio Flores – Response
A good leader must know when it is time to move on; of course, with a solid succession
plan in place. the military does well at this.
BR – nash
Student 4 – Response
Hi Student 1,
Great detailed response to this week’s question. I also remarked on resource constraints
as one of the many reasons why various organization’s agencies and decision makers at
all levels governments have difficulty devising and implementing corrective actions. I
would like to add of your great explanation of resource constraints in the area of
mismanaged funds. In this week’s readings, Block and Cooper recounted on a prehurricane Katrina environment where many states might have utilized federal funding to
purchase items and fund programs in such a fashion that fears began to arise that the
federal disaster assistance program might become a sort of cash cow, and effectively
discouraging state officials from properly addressing local risks (2006). There is also a
common issue among private owners who may desire to spend their funds on other
things in contrast to disaster preparedness. Believing that a disaster could never happen
can lead to complacency and mismanaged funds. Your assessment that Individual
stakeholders have far fewer resources than the government is correct. Individual
stakeholders who rely on the government for 100% of their preparedness efforts is a
grave mistake.
Kind regards,
Student 4
Reference
Block, R., & Cooper, C. (2006). A Mountain of Failure. In Disaster Hurricane Katrina and
the Failure of Homeland Security (pp. 45–66). New York: Henry Holt and Company
Student 2 – Response
As emergency responders, managers, homeland security professionals we know that
there are problems with every disaster response, As this week’s module addressed,
“problems recur because they are inherently very difficult to solve. If solutions were
evident, emergency response professionals would have adopted them long ago” (XXXModules – Lesson 4 Planning). Our ability to predict the problems is often based on past
experiences from other major incidents or personal experience in the field. Problems
such as leadership; command and control; communications; lack of resources, resources
slow to arrive on-scene, and resource management in general; mental health; planning;
public relations; operations; and training and exercises are all too often occurring. The
five main areas incident managers singled out as important and recurring are command,
communications, planning, resource management, and public relations (Donahue &
Tuohy, 2006).
Problems that are encountered repeatedly are reported as being solved over each time,
suggesting that it is possible to teach improvements across time and agencies. However,
some problems should be solved once and for all, rather than time and time again after
each disaster. It is outlined that some of the challenges are caused by motivation for
change, review and reporting process, learning and teaching, exercising, and resource
constraints (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).
All parties have such difficulty planning and implementing corrective actions once
identified because most believe that institutionalizing a new process requires long term
commitment and organization discipline to solve recurring problems. Additionally, the
report outlines that problems are rarely noticed until another event occurs because
follow-up is inadequate.
One report identifies that it is difficult for organizations to notice that they have really
learned until the next incident hits. A question raised is how do we know if the changes
solved the problem even if we could identify lessons, identify corrective actions,
implement them, train them, and exercise them. The respond is that if lessons are not
clearly linked to corrective actions, then to training objectives, then to performance
metrics, it is difficult for organizations to notice that they have not really learned until
the next incident hits and they get surprised (Donahue & Tuohy, 2006).
Organizational change is especially difficult, but particular challenges require change in
the emergency response field. One challenge is political traction. However, political
support is too temporary as other, more evident concerns divert resources from long
term preparedness activities. Agencies and organizations are to easily distracted by their
daily missions. There are too many short-term distracters that make the learning
process weak. Such as, political priorities, sensational concerns like terrorism, workforce
turnover, other concurrent organizational change efforts, and daily missions all combine
to disrupt organizational transition. Essentially, as the article outlines, the main
problem with lesson learning can be seen through a lack of will and commitment, rather
than a lack of ability. Ultimately, agencies are restrained about committing time and
effort needed to really understand, develop, and implement corrective actions that
would improve their performance levels.
References:
Donahue, A. K., & Tuohy, R. V. (2006, July). Lessons We Don’t Learn: A Study of the
Lessons of Disasters, Why We Repeat Them, and How We Can Learn Them. VOL. II, NO.
2. Retrieved from Homeland Security Affiars: https://www.hsaj.org/articles/167
XXXXX – Modules – Lesson 4 Planning.
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