An Exploratory Study of Local Emergency Managers' Views of Military Assistance/Defense Support to Civil Authorities (MACA/DSCA)
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John Milliman
The Defense Support to Civil Authorities (DSCA) (formerly titled Military Assistance to Civil Authorities or MACA) process is intended to provide local and State civil authorities with access to Federal military assets in response to major terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Effective coordination between the military and local civilian emergency managers (EMs) is one essential requirement for successful DSCA engagements.This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of local EMs’ understanding of the DSCA process, their ability to trigger support under DSCA and their views of how well they expect to collaborate with the military. The survey research results indicate that a majority of EMs believe that they do have the authority to initiate the DSCA process and have the ability to tell military authorities the type of assistance they require. However, our research suggests that a majority of the EMs do not have a strong understanding of the various aspects of the DSCA process, do not believe that DSCA will be implemented effectively in the future, and have a number of concerns about how the military support would be provided. We conclude with implications for future research directions on DSCA.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Article
- The Core Competencies Required of Executive Level Business Crisis and Continuity Managers -- The Results
- An Exploratory Study of Local Emergency Managers' Views of Military Assistance/Defense Support to Civil Authorities (MACA/DSCA)
- Terror, Adaptation and Preparedness: A Trilogy for Survival
- An Integrating Framework for Modeling and Simulation for Incident Management
- Meeting the Challenge of Facility Protection for Homeland Security
- Communication/News
- Free Online Courses Available from PERI
- Assessing the Foreign Language Needs of the Department of Homeland Security
- The Swedish Port Security Network - An Illusion or a Fact?
- Book Review
- The McGraw-Hill Homeland Security Handbook
- Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions
- Related Research Article
- Related Research in Other Publications
