From defense supply chain disruptions to wildfires, hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters, the United States government is continually in crisis response mode on domestic soil and abroad.

What’s more, the growing frequency of these crises, along with the fact that many federal agencies are operating leaner, are complicating the government’s response, relief and rebuild efforts when the stakes are especially high.

How can the federal government overcome these challenges to improve its crisis responsiveness? How can federal agencies and their partners ensure they have the wherewithal to provide timely, coordinated cross-agency support when and where it’s needed? And how can these entities better collaborate to creatively leverage one another’s resources in a pinch?

Intelligent logistics capabilities across supply chain, procurement, transportation, distribution, and communications can play a huge role in enabling a robust, rapid and coordinated response in these situations, as agencies spanning the defense and civilian sectors are discovering.

The foundation for coordinated response

Depending on the type and a scope of a crisis, an “all hazards, all agencies” approach — one that involves not only government agencies at the federal, state and local levels but also non-government organizations (NGOs), emergency services organizations, private infrastructure operators, community groups and private service providers — canolster the timeliness, reach and overall effectiveness of a response.

The first step in making coordinated joint emergency response efforts viable is to establish a digitally connected network through which all these stakeholders can securely share trusted, up-to-date information about planning, preparation, response and recovery.

This network provides the foundation for communication among stakeholders and to the public, coordinated mitigation and preventive measures, action plan development, multiagency interoperability and resource allocation during a crisis, and coordinated recovery efforts. They also can serve as a hub for volunteer recruitment and management, with contact data, qualifications, training, availability and medical history, and for scheduling people for deployment.

The network can also provide the framework for:

• Predefining material needs through an automated contract process whereby dedicated vendors can be mobilized during an emergency response;
• Managing assets like equipment and vehicles;
• Matching victims to appropriate medical facilities or shelters;
• Managing grants to support families and businesses during the recovery; and,
• Enlisting private sector participation.

Because disaster response does indeed take a village.

Intelligent capabilities to support resilience, relief

With a connected network in place, now agencies have a common framework to explore a range of intelligent logistics opportunities to improve planning and response jointly and unilaterally. Here’s a look at several examples:

• Earlier warnings and faster coordinated disaster responses by harnessing data and AI.

The more advance warning government agencies get of a potential natural disaster, the more time they have to alert people and prepare in order to minimize the damage and coordinate a relief effort. Now governments have access to systems like EDiSON, a powerful advanced disaster risk management platform developed by a joint public-private consortium in Japan (of which SAP Japan was a member) and poised for deployment in other parts of the world.

Used by organizations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the Solomon Islands, EDiSON gathers and analyzes real-time, visual meteorological data, historical data records and other static and real-time dynamic data from government, municipal and private-sector sources to give authorities predictive insights about natural disasters. The system can forecast terrain damage, dispatch emergency services to affected areas, and support decision-making in issuing evacuation advisories.

EDiSON is a prime example of how intelligent technology can democratize disaster resilience and support the Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, Recovery/Prevention, Preparedness, Response, Recovery (MPRR/PPRR) best-practice model for disaster and emergency management. The vision is to adapt EDiSON more broadly to predict and coordinate responses to various types of natural (and, potentially, chemical) disasters in places like North America and the European Union. Such a system could support governments, communities and private companies in their disaster preparedness. It also could prove valuable in the context of a program like Horizon Europe, which focuses on wildfire preparedness.

• Creative transportation capacity utilization. A disaster can grind even the most time-tested, reliable transportation modes to a halt. What if, using the aforementioned network construct, government agencies and relief groups could gain real-time insight into potential excess capacity available from commercial transport and logistics providers, then use it to get vital supplies to a crisis-impacted location? An AI agent could analyze data from these providers and suggest alternative delivery pathways when others in the transportation network can’t deliver. The World Economic Forum’s Logistics Emergency Team (LET) has proven the viability of this approach over the past 20 years, deploying EDUARDO, the Emergency Dashboard Utility for Airfreight Resource and Delivery Options, for example, to identify available cargo capacity for humanitarian operations. EDUARDO was critical to the Turkey-Syria earthquake response effort in 2023.
• Countering contested military logistics by modernizing and streamlining warehouse operations. As the Defense Department’s primary combat support agency for logistics, the Defense Logistics Agency often has to deal with contested logistics: delivering needed supplies like fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts and medical supplies to military forces in environments where adversaries actively disrupt supply chains. To gain the agility and predictive insights required to anticipate threats and execute when logistics are contested, the DLA modernized its warehouse management system with intelligent tools. Now the DLA staff who collectively manage the more than five million items that reside in agency warehouses have full end-to-end supply chain traceability to improve timely decision-making, accuracy and productivity, along with predictive insights to increase responsiveness, strengthen planning, proactively avoid disruptions, and ensure forces in contested environments are well-equipped.

As disasters and crises increase in frequency, the onus is on federal agencies and their partners to get creative with planning, preparation, response and recovery. By tapping into a new generation of intelligent logistics strategies and approaches, they can maximize their resources and impact in helping local communities and the nation to anticipate, respond to, and recover from crises on domestic soil and abroad.

Lynn Scheinman is a technology consultant specializing in defense, security and applied data science at SAP in Walldorf, Germany. His defense experience comes from 10 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret.

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