The Director’s Letter
Col. Joseph Martin, USAF
Just over a year ago a devastating earthquake struck the country of Nepal, with major aftershocks in the ensuing weeks. The international community responded across a wide range of capabilities and in many cases remains engaged today in recovery and reconstruction. This edition of the Liaison Journal is specifically set aside to capture a range of lessons learned, with each providing the unique perspective of the supporting organization and author.
Nepal saved Nepal, and the Nepalese can be justly proud of their ability to respond and recover. They can be equally satisfied knowing that the international community wanted to – and was allowed to – assist by bringing to bear a wide range of capabilities that helped to save lives.
However, each participant’s perspective of success must be viewed through the lens by which they assisted. If the reader takes each of these articles from that perspective, it becomes clear that the larger international community did make a difference, and the lessons they learned are very much worth sharing.
We attempted in this addition to bring together that range of views, but are fully aware that Nepal generated a wide range of reports and potentially conflicting lessons learned; we simply cannot include them all. In other cases, such as the U.S. Pacific Command Joint After Action Report, the report in its entirety is limited in its distribution to only those with access to “For Official Use Only” systems, while other organizations also restrict distribution as part of their policy. Regardless, this venue provides a chance to see into how others sometimes see themselves, while providing invaluable lessons when catastrophe strikes again.
The unrestricted executive summary of the U.S. Pacific Command Joint After Action Report can be found on our website at https://www.cfe-dmha.org/. For those with a U.S. Common Access Card, you can ac- cess the full report and support documents at https://intelshare.intelink.gov/sites/cfe-dmha/.
My team and I will continue to provide this broad range of perspectives from the disaster management community to engage you, our read- ers, in a dialog on how we are stronger together, and how each of our organizations can contribute to the great foundation of knowledge that makes us better equipped to prepare and respond to disasters when they occur.