AMERICA THE VULNERABLE

America the Vulnerable

America the Vulnerable

Introduction

System under stress is written by Dr. Donald F. Kettle. This book describes the current state of America's security and the current state of the American politics. According to Dr. Kettle, the current state of America is compared to myocardial infarction. In his second edition, Dr. Kettle's first book highlights the response to American federalist and that has been continued to the second edition. In the second edition, Dr. Kettle expands the same idea but explains the governments measures taken to analyze the improvements made after twin tower experience and Katrina. Dr. Kettle evaluates the current policy design and its implementation.

Dr. Kettle questions the current state of America in two ways. Firstly, why the nation is not prepared for the bad times and secondly, why does the government fail to deal with the situation every time. Dr. Kettle analyzed the questions and came up with 2 issues that America has. First being that the failure rate is intolerable in any circumstance. This issue questions the intelligence, information leak outs and the level of preparedness. Second being, the tools and mechanism utilized for the security of America are the same as natural disaster.

According to Dr. Kettle, America is squandering it's opportunities for defense. The main criticism is the weak inter-governmental coordination. Dr. Kettle emphasizes the need of effective, coordinated efforts at each hierarchy of the government. In order analyze how this is done, Dr. Kettle conducts a dissection of government response to the singular failure that eventually lead to system failure. He identifies the loopholes in the twin tower attack which were intricacy, communication and coordination, bureaucratic power, lack of mission clarity, differences in culture and large gaps in technology, congressional jurisdictions', the weak structure government and network threats. These ideas also describe the ...