The Commons · Community Readiness
A community should not wait for a terrorism incident to discover that its radios do not connect, its hospitals have never exercised together, or nobody knows who can make a decision when the first reports are incomplete.
Adapted from the 2025 paper “Recommendations: Enhancing Counterterrorism Capabilities at the State and Local Level.”
Ten priorities to put in place before an attack.
- Interoperable communication. Police, sheriff, fire, EMS, emergency management, hospitals, and neighboring jurisdictions need a tested way to communicate in real time.
- Decision-making close to the scene. Plans should define commander’s intent and delegation so field leaders can act when waiting for a distant approval would cost time.
- Mass-casualty medical capability. Expand CPR, bleeding-control, TECC, casualty collection, triage, and hospital-surge training across the region.
- HAZMAT and CBRN readiness. Keep detection, protective equipment, decontamination, and public-health coordination current even when no recent incident has forced the issue.
- A real tip-and-follow-up process. The community needs a way to receive concerning information, document it, route it, and ensure someone is responsible for the next step.
- Hospital resilience. Exercise what happens if the nearest trauma center is overloaded, inaccessible, or itself affected. Include smaller medical facilities in surge planning.
- Digital resilience. Protect responder identities, maintain backup communications, and plan for cyber disruption or misinformation during a physical attack.
- Community expertise. Know the veterans, retired public-safety personnel, language specialists, cultural advisors, medical professionals, and other residents who can contribute useful capability.
- Private-sector relationships. Venues, utilities, communications providers, transportation companies, hospitals, and businesses often control resources the response will need.
- Exercise and improve. Conduct regular tabletop and full-scale exercises, document what failed, assign corrective actions, and come back to test them again.
The standard is not perfection.
The goal is to make sure the first real incident is not also the first time the people in the room have met, compared plans, or discovered which assumptions do not survive contact with reality.
Readiness now has to live at the community level.