Peace, social serenity and security are the founding values of civil society. The geopolitics of security rests its studies on many sectors, but that of disasters is by choice. Only by mitigating the effects of disasters are those of national security mitigated. So said the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force in a statement, Pasquale Preziosa, today, university professor and president ofEurispes Security Observatory.
The current pandemic, Precious points out, represents a potential disaster for all the affected countries, in at least four respects: Social, Health, Economic, Industrial, Financial.
The analysis of natural disasters requires knowledge of many elements such as: the frequency of events, the preparation of the areas concerned, the nodes of the supply chain of goods and services, the location of the infrastructures that could cause the interruption of the logistic flow , the level of institutional stability of the affected country, the level of social and institutional preparation to face possible events, to then identify the country's security risks. History has always shown us that short-term disasters have a great impact on national security levels, but national destinies do not change, unless other factors are at stake. Natural disasters only accelerate trends, if pre-existing, in a particular country (Stratfor).
The power of nature is such that both the cause and the effects of natural disasters cannot be ignored by geopolitics.
The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD made two cities disappear, the pandemic of smallpox in 1520 caused 56 million deaths, the eruption (VEI-7) of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815, for example, had global disastrous impacts on the climate both in Europe and in North America.
There were ten earthquakes in the world in the period 1900 - 2014 of magnitude ranging from 8.6 to 9.5 on the Richter scale (the magnitude 9.5 compared to 8.6 is 10 times larger.)
In the past, examples of major natural disasters have been numerous and frequent.
In the health field, the pandemic in progress should be the twentieth "after Christ".
The forms of protection from natural disasters must be studied and the results must be applied to mitigate the impacts of the next events which will occur in uncertain times. The number of deaths from earthquakes in the world has decreased, thanks to the anti-seismic regulations issued in the various countries: it is one of the forms of resilience developed in the most advanced countries. The uncertainty is in the times of the event not in the events that are already specified in the sector literature.
The antidote to emergencies is represented by the pre-planning of actions to deal with catastrophic events, through a decision-making process that confers response and resilience to the system.
Plans must follow a method, the so-called "Long Term Planning"Which alone is not enough, it must be accompanied by a system that can validate the plan itself in the absence of the concrete event: this is called"Modeling and Simulation" those who have these two skills have the tools to plan emergencies too.
When the emergency starts, the first period is chaos in all sectors: the application of what has already been studied with a cold mind and validated by the validation tool represents the antidote.
Italy has, in its institutional structure, all these capabilities, even the Italian "Modeling and Simulation" belonging to the Defense department has been certified by NATO as a "Center of excellence" for all the other countries of the Alliance.
The institutional world can and must use all the intellectual and material resources of the country to manage disasters in order to increase the system's resilience, also because the fourth mission of the Defense Department concerns support for Public Calamities, which also includes the Health Emergency.
In emergencies the project wins, because it represents the antidote against the chaotic manifestations of the moment characterized that appear irrational, ambiguous, uncertain, uncontrollable, vulnerable, in continuous change (VOCA for analysts).
Without a project, the more or less enlightened decision of the moment continues, which can lose sight of the system's resilience.
After the SARS, EBOLA, ZIKA events, some countries had taken the problem of pandemics seriously and followed the indications of the World Health Organization contained in the "Global Preparedness Monitoring Board"Where on p. 26 and especially 27 warned about the severity of high-risk respiratory diseases, which would have assumed a pandemic character, with devastating socio-economic impacts.
In the international field, in 2017, the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency"(DARPA) launched the Program"Pandemic Prevention Platform"(P3) with the aim of creating new drugs to treat a known infection threat within 60 days."
La DARPA, had realized that with the experiences it had with Ebola and Zika, the USA was not prepared to deal with viral pandemics.
The project now plans to provide appropriate medical treatment to US patients of COVID-19 over the next four months through the AbCellera-Eli Lilly companies that are part of the project.
Pending the results announced by DARPA, the US mobilized the military sector that opened the depots to provide civilian hospitals with supplementary means and personnel for intensive care.
Anticipating nightmares helps solve the big problems that can arise.
In this sense it is time to start planning other pandemic scenarios with cybernetic viruses in this case whose consequences may not be very dissimilar from today's scenarios.
The two pillars for the defense of the country: civil and military must always be able to operate in compliance with their duties, but in synergy to give resilience to the Italian system.
The institutional synergy will allow the military one to be supplementary to the civil one in case of need.