“All of us were born kicking and fighting to live, but we have become used to the soft life…. What happens when we are faced with a survival situation with its stresses, inconveniences, and discomforts?”
That question is posed in a 2002 U.S. Army Field Manual (large pdf) on survival strategies and techniques in emergency situations.
Almost all of the contents will be familiar to students of wilderness medicine and first aid. (Except maybe “Prepare yourself to survive in a nuclear environment.”) Nevertheless, U.S. Army web sites do not permit public access to the document, which says that distribution is limited to government agencies and contractors. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.
See “Survival,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-05.70, May 2002 (676 pages in a large 20 MB PDF file).
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.