A very timely reminder about emergencies

 

The former Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Robertson of Britain, is not complacent about the danger of war in Europe.  He warns that Britain, and by extension every other country in NATO, needs to better prepare its citizens for what might happen.

Robertson has a torch [flashlight] on his key ring, in case the lights go out, and some spare money, in case the ATMs stop working in London.

“We are under attack,” Robertson, 79, said. He is now a Labour peer and has met Putin nine times.

“He (Putin) is a very different individual to the one that I did business with.”

. . .

“I think we are being tested. They’re going to the edge of what they think is acceptable. They won’t go across that line, at this point,” Robertson said of Russia.

Targeted assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation campaigns are all examples of Moscow’s so-called grey zone activities.

“That’s the way in which you undermine western societies. There is no doubt at all, there is a challenge to the West,” he added.

. . .

“With our adversaries becoming bolder and our critical national infrastructure becoming more fragile and much more on a knife edge, we need to be much much better prepared than we are today,” he said “It won’t be enough to wait to until the lights go out and the hospitals shut and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone out and the traffic lights have stopped and the ATMs don’t work anymore.

“At that point, people will expect government to have done something,” he said.

. . .

Robertson was as “ready as I could be”, with torches [flashlights] in every room, a battery-powered radio and a stockpile of food and water.

He said it was also the case in the UK that the public needed to have “resilience” in case there were civil emergencies or financial disasters.

Following Knighton’s speech at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) this week, he suggested the government could start to engage the public by issuing booklets to prepare UK citizens for war, such as Sweden’s recent If Crisis or War Comes.

There's more at the link.

All the risks he highlights are likely to occur in the USA as well.  We've already had concrete evidence of the dangers:

• Known terrorists identified and arrested within our borders, some even legally admitted due to lax background checks;
• Foreign students trying to smuggle dangerous bacteriological material into the USA (and don't tell me it's for "research" - if it was, they could legally obtain all they need within the country, without smuggling.  They can only have been planning to position it to do as much damage as possible if and when released);
• Foreign criminal gangs and drug cartels actively setting up cells and groups in almost every major US city, including smuggling weapons, illegal narcotics and other dangerous substances across our borders.

Such people, and/or those they've influenced, could very easily disrupt a city by the simplest of sabotage activities.  I'm not going to go into details, for obvious reasons, but back in the day, I was a sector officer in civil defense for one of South Africa's largest cities.  I know whereof I speak.  The ease with which ordinary, everyday services and utilities could be disrupted was enough to make for sleepless nights, and now that everything's dependent on computer systems and (increasingly) artificial intelligence, they are even more vulnerable.  That's why China, among others, is trying to deliberately infiltrate as many industrial, commercial and control networks as possible - so that it can disrupt them at the flick of a switch if it should become necessary to them.

I'm not a doom, gloom and disaster merchant.  I don't run around crying "Wolf!"  However, the evidence of these dangers is all around us, and I don't have to make up a thing to justify improving our personal and family preparedness for the sorts of problems and disruptions that may occur.  I daresay most American households could not survive serious shortages or systemic breakdowns for as little as a week;  a month is probably out of the question for most of them - yet I (and many others) regard a month as a minimum period to be able to get by without outside assistance.  Attitudes toward preparedness need to change, and change quickly, if we're to be able to withstand the sort of problems raised by Lord Robertson, the Swedish government, and so many others.

A timely reminder indeed.

Peter