A new U.S. Army Field Manual presents an introduction for soldiers to “the warrior ethos” (large pdf).
“Modern combat is chaotic, intense, and shockingly destructive,” the document states. “In your first battle, you will experience the confusing and often terrifying sights, sounds, smells, and dangers of the battlefield–but you must learn to survive and win despite them.”
“The Warrior Culture, a shared set of important beliefs, values, and assumptions, is crucial and perishable. Therefore, the Army must continually affirm, develop, and sustain it, as it maintains the nation’s existence.”
The warrior ethos (or any other) is not instilled simply by reading about it. But the new Army publication provides a common vocabulary and framework of reference for the aspiring warrior, along with basic survival and combat techniques.
See “The Warrior Ethos and Soldier Combat Skills,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-21.75, January 2008 (316 pages in a very large 28 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.