Emergency Management on Defense, Homeland Security on Offense

This article is presented as a counterpoint to “A Sixth Framework? Civil Defense and the Future of Emergency Management”
by George M. Schwartz, published on August 27, 2025.

The potential application of emergency management (missions, personnel, logistics, etc.) toward what would be modern civil defense is ill-advised. The country has come a long way from the great international wars of the early and mid-1900s, when the nation-based physical threat to the U.S. homeland was occurring both overtly (attack on Pearl Harbor) and covertly (Eastern Seaboard attacks by submarine).

The nation is currently under attack every hour of every day via cyberthreats. Effectively, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency is building a whole-community, whole-of-government civil defense umbrella for cyberthreats and cyberattacks, which includes public and private sectors, from the top of the White House all the way down to personal residences. Everyone has a role in this model of civil defense.

However, actual physical attacks—acts of war—on the homeland (leaving aside swatting by foreign terrorist organizations and rogue nations) are different. Wars and armed conflicts with enemy combatants are at an incident level or type much greater than what standardized U.S. emergency management is prepared to manage, and one which this author believes emergency managers should stay far away from: Type 0 extinction level events. Here are three points for consideration.

LIPER Is the Key to Emergency Management

Military objectives have a very different set of commander’s-intent mission priorities than does emergency management. The same is true for the wartime civil defense model of the 1940s, with its military uniforms and many insignia (see Figure 1). Mission objectives then included defeating the enemy while protecting the homeland. It is that offense posture that differentiates the emergency manager of today from the civil defender of yesterday: Emergency managers do not hunt down the enemy, do not prosecute, and do not persecute. These actions are someone else’s job or role.

Many military groups use Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound (S.M.A.R.T.) goals for leadership training, career advancement, and even steady-state operations, missions, or tasks. However, their work is quite different for warfighting missions. When the U.S. military prioritizes achieving missions over individual soldier safety, it is part of a calculated approach based on operational necessity and acceptable risk in pursuit of mission accomplishment. The priority of mission over safety in specific, high-risk situations is an ingrained part of military doctrine.

Emergency management’s S.M.A.R.T. goals for an area of responsibility for a disaster follow the Life Safety/Incident/Property, or LIP, priorities and then add two more on the back end: Economic/environmental restoration and Recovery. Those two mission priorities can sometimes be found in military missions but are rarely part of civil defense. Currently, civilian incident commanders do not consider it “acceptable losses” to sacrifice any of those elements—especially workforce members—as may be expected in military combat. That might change for a militarized civil defense element.

The use of the LIPER in an incident with military support of civilian authorities is highlighted in the response to the Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2024. Following that incident, civilian and military groups worked collaboratively and in coordination under a unified command with unity of effort—with the LIPER priorities top of mind. Life safety measures—such as protecting undersea divers—were prioritized above clearing the port for commercial traffic, for example. Removal of bridge parts was temporarily suspended while the human remains recovery was conducted. Combined military and civilian defense operations may not necessarily prioritize life safety—even of their own workforce—above all else.

Even in a potential terror attack on U.S. soil, emergency management priorities are evacuation, search and rescue, fire suppression, and other elements that prioritize LIPER missions. Civil defense and homeland security might be tasked and focused elsewhere, disrupting the unity of effort for large-scale incidents. Consider chronic or systemic disasters occurring in the homeland, and then apply the concept of “war” and civil defense. Should one single team do it all?

Emergency management should never concentrate on non-LIPER priorities such as determining culpability. Aspects of disruption, counterintelligence, and interdiction should not be in the ethos of an emergency manager, even if they are part of emergency management’s unified command structure. It is very much like switching from defense to offense on a football team. The mission objectives are very different.

Every War Has Rules

War has very different rules from daily homeland security. Emergency management today, including what is already built into national core capabilities related to homeland security (such as protection and prevention), should have no role in wars, international armed conflicts, and even non-international armed conflicts (there are differences among all three). Here is a summary of how perplexing this has become:

The United States co-signed (1949) and ratified the four Geneva Conventions in 1955. The U.S. is a party to the Third Additional Protocol (Protocol III adopted in 2005), which relates to an additional distinctive emblem, but it is not a party to the 1977 Additional Protocols (Protocol I and Protocol II). While the U.S. signed Protocols I and II in 1977, it has not ratified them, though it has expressed a commitment to adhering to the principles of Article 75 of Protocol I as a matter of legal obligation.

If that sounds like something that requires artificial intelligence to comprehend during normal operations, imagine how complex it would be to explain those differences to someone in high-stress civil defense mode under attack. It takes years of study for a military officer to learn the complexities of international humanitarian law. The minute someone starts talking about enemy combatants—especially within the United States—it is time to start planning for the elements of war: military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and limiting unnecessary suffering—which are the four main principles of international humanitarian law. This is also when civil defense will no longer be considered performed by civilians, but by the military. When defending their country—through offensive methods and the tradecraft of war—the military must follow these international humanitarian law rules.

The U.S. Is Not Ready for This Now

The concept of “mission creep” for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has become a national debate, highlighting the agency’s role in emergency management and what it does or does not do, compared to the expectations of the public and politicians. The public’s level of trust that emergency management will be there to help them in their worst moments of a disaster is waning.

This opinion of the profession also works its way down to the states, territories, tribal nations, and local governments’ emergency managers. Non-federal governments in the United States—as well as many U.S. federal departments and entities that support national emergency management—are grappling with massive cuts in federal funding across the board, including in the five mission areas of the National Preparedness Goal, not just declared emergency and disaster response and recovery funding. Who will fund civil defense in the homeland? And if it is left up to each state, tribe, and territory, is there not a risk that there will be a gap somewhere for enemies to exploit?

There Is a Solution: It is Just Not Emergency Management

Civil defense today is already established separately into (1) state (and territory) National Guard, (2) homeland security groups, both nationally and locally, and (3) law enforcement. The nation has matured from the “everyone who doesn’t look like us must be the enemy” perspective, to one where those groups are now protecting the nation from other threats and hazards, while U.S. troops (mostly Title 10, but occasionally Title 32) were overseas fighting for the nation’s freedom. This separation helped preserve the constitutional rights of American citizens in the homeland. Even with a declared War, the Posse Comitatus Act is still in effect.

Any resurgence of a national level of civil defense is certainly warranted if the intelligence community determines that the nation-state physical threats that Dr. Schwartz describes in his article are at the nation’s doorstep. However, this responsibility belongs to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—as well as each state’s Office of Homeland Security—and is completely separate from professional emergency management departments and entities.

There is a bill in Congress now (FEMA Independence Act of 2025) that would elevate FEMA to a cabinet position. The separation of federal emergency management away from homeland security is something that the International Association of Emergency Managers–USA is also endorsing. Even former FEMA administrator Brock Long has publicly indicated his preference for an independent federal emergency management entity. This would then designate homeland security as offense, leaving emergency management to continue to play all-hazards and all-threats in a defense-only role.

As warfare methods and tradecraft since World War II have changed dramatically, the nation must defend itself on many fronts, even now in space. This is the agile job of national defense and homeland security, not emergency management. When a war happens once again in the U.S.—when a continuous national defense element on the home front supersedes the powers and authority of local law enforcement—if emergency management is involved, the public trust in emergency management will disappear.