Once again, we experience that Norway must be in the middle of a crisis before we prepare for it – Dagsavisen
Contingency planning has been an important and central topic in political debate in Norway for over ten years. Erna Solberg just made preparedness an important issue when she campaigned in 2013. The dark backdrop was the total failure in the police response during the terrorist attack on July 22, 2011, where 77 people lost their lives and even more were injured, many of them very serious.
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Later crises have taught us that everything talked about preparedness was more words than action. The Office of the Auditor General slaughtered the Government Solberg’s lack of efforts with object security, and the attempts to obscure the debate gradually became very embarrassing.
When the pandemic hit us in 2020, we were also ill-prepared. Contingency stocks of completely basic equipment were scarce, despite the fact that a pandemic had been identified as the most probable crisis scenario. The intensive care capacity was not in any way dimensioned for the wave of infection that swept us.
An eternal trap in emergency preparedness thinking is that one is constantly preparing for the previous crisis, and not for the next.
Norway is now facing new crises. The war in Ukraine has shaken us awake. There will be extra grants for the Armed Forces, and a new understanding of what a deficient defense capability may mean will spread at record speed in the political environment. SV has started a NATO discussion. But the war creates crises other than the increased danger of armed conflict and cyber warfare. When Russia and Ukraine no longer export grain and other food in the scope of care, it creates discussions about our own deficient tools in this area as well. We have greatly reduced grain stocks over the past 20 years.
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An eternal trap in emergency preparedness thinking is that one is constantly preparing for the previous crisis, and not for the next. We humans have a tendency to think about history repeating itself, but in recent years we should have learned that even the hallmark of a crisis is that one does not know how it will behave in advance. Therefore, we must be prepared for a myriad of different crises and disasters.
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