This essay describes the emergence and extension of “preparedness” as a form of rationality for approaching questions of domestic security in the United States. Preparedness provides security experts with a way of grasping uncertain future events and bringing them into a space of present intervention. An analysis of this form of rationality helps to address a puzzling aspect of statebased security practices in the contemporary United States: how a series of seemingly disparate types of events—ranging from terrorist attacks, to hurricanes and earthquakes, to epidemics—have been brought into the same framework of “security threats.” More broadly, such an analysis allows us to address the question, what is the logic through which potential dangers to collective life are being taken up as political problems?

In order to show what is distinctive about preparedness, this essay begins by comparing it to a different form of security rationality: insurance. Preparedness becomes an especially salient approach to perceived threats when they reach the limits of a rationality of insurance. These are threats that are not manageable through techniques of probabilistic calculation: preparedness typically approaches events whose probability is not calculable but whose consequences could be catastrophic. The essay then traces the history of preparedness as a rationality of domestic security, beginning in the early period of the Cold War and following it to its current articulation in the Department of Homeland Security. The analysis is framed by a discussion of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which revealed both the centrality of preparedness to the contemporary politics of security and its limitations as an approach to catastrophic threats.

We Are Not Prepared

One evening the week after Hurricane Katrina struck, the intrepid news anchor Anderson Cooper was featured on the Charlie Rose Show. Cooper was still on the scene in New Orleans, the inundated city in the background and a look of harried concern on his face. He told Rose that he had no intention of returning to his comfortable life in New York City any time soon. Cooper had been among the reporters to challenge official accounts that hurricane relief operations were functioning smoothly, based on the stark contradiction between disturbing images on the ground and governmental claims of a competent response effort. He seemed shocked and dismayed by what he had seen in New Orleans, but was also moved, even transformed, by his role as witness to domestic catastrophe. He had covered disasters in Somalia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, he said, but never expected to see images like these in the United States: widespread looting, hungry refugees, corpses left on the street to decompose. Toward the end of the interview, Rose asked him what he had learned from the event. Cooper paused, reflected for a moment, and then answered: “We are not as ready as we can be.”

Insofar as the hurricane and its aftermath could be said to have had a shared lesson, it was this: we are not prepared — whether for another major natural disaster, a chemical or biological attack, an epidemic, or some other type of emergency. This lesson has structured political response to the hurricane in terms of certain kinds of discussions and not others. This is one reason why Katrina has arguably failed to be a politically transformative event, despite widespread expressions of outrage at the role of structural inequality in making certain citizens vulnerable to catastrophe. Instead, the event has intensified and redirected processes that were already under way. To see this, it is necessary to analyze the development of preparedness as a guiding logic for domestic security in the United States. Preparedness provides a way of understanding and intervening in an uncertain, potentially catastrophic future.¹ Unlike other issues that were initially raised by the hurricane and its aftermath, such as racial inequality, concentrated urban poverty, the social isolation of the elderly, or the short-sightedness of environmental planning, the demand for preparedness is a matter that enjoys widespread political agreement on the necessity of governmental intervention. In other words, in the norm of preparedness, we find a shared sense of what collective security problems involve today. The need to be prepared is not in question; what can be a source of dispute is, rather, how to prepare and what we need to prepare for.

In the aftermath of Katrina, it was common to see comparisons made between the failed governmental response to the hurricane and the more successful response to the attacks of September 11. To an observer a decade before, it might have been surprising that a natural disaster and a terrorist attack would be considered part of the same problematic. And the image, three weeks after Katrina struck, of George W. Bush flying to the headquarters of USNORTHCOM—a military installation designed for use in national security crises—to follow the progress of Hurricane Rita as it hurtled toward Texas might have been even more perplexing. The aftermath of Katrina also pointed forward to other possible emergencies, such as a novel and deadly infectious disease. In announcing its $7.1 billion pandemic preparedness program the following month, the Bush administration declared avian flu an urgent matter of national security.² This grouping of various types of possible catastrophe under a shared rubric of “security threats” is exemplary of the rationality of preparedness. Preparedness marks out a limited but agreed-upon terrain for the management of collective life. Its techniques focus on a certain set of possible events, operating to bring them into the present as potential future catastrophes that point to current vulnerabilities.