Core Capabilities

This page contains the 32 core capabilities identified in the National Preparedness Goal and is intended to assist everyone who has a role in achieving all of the elements in the Goal.

These capabilities are referenced in many national preparedness efforts, including the National Planning Frameworks. The Goal grouped the capabilities into five mission areas, based on where they most logically fit. Some fall into only one mission area, while some others apply to several mission areas.

• Mission Areas: All
• Description: Conduct a systematic process engaging the whole community as appropriate in the development of executable strategic, operational, and/or tactical-level approaches to meet defined objectives.

• Mission Areas: All
• Description: Deliver coordinated, prompt, reliable, and actionable information to the whole community through the use of clear, consistent, accessible, and culturally and linguistically appropriate methods to effectively relay information regarding any threat or hazard, as well as the actions being taken and the assistance being made available, as appropriate.

• Mission Areas: All
• Description: Establish and maintain a unified and coordinated operational structure and process that appropriately integrates all critical stakeholders and supports the execution of core capabilities.

• Mission Area: Prevention
• Description: Conduct forensic analysis and attribute terrorist acts (including the means and methods of terrorism) to their source, to include forensic analysis as well as attribution for an attack and for the preparation for an attack in an effort to prevent initial or follow-on acts and/or swiftly develop counter-options.

• Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
• Description: Provide timely, accurate, and actionable information resulting from the planning, direction, collection, exploitation, processing, analysis, production, dissemination, evaluation, and feedback of available information concerning physical and cyber threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests; the development, proliferation, or use of WMDs; or any other matter bearing on U.S. national or homeland security by local, state, tribal, territorial, Federal, and other stakeholders. Information sharing is the ability to exchange intelligence, information, data, or knowledge among government or private sector entities, as appropriate.

• Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
• Description: Delay, divert, intercept, halt, apprehend, or secure threats and/or hazards.

• Mission Areas: Prevention, Protection
• Description: Identify, discover, or locate threats and/or hazards through active and passive surveillance and search procedures. This may include the use of systematic examinations and assessments, biosurveillance, sensor technologies, or physical investigation and intelligence.

• Mission Area: Protection
• Description: Apply and support necessary physical, technological, and cyber measures to control admittance to critical locations and systems.

• Mission Area: Protection
• Description: Protect (and if needed, restore) electronic communications systems, information, and services from damage, unauthorized use, and exploitation.

• Mission Area: Protection
• Description: Implement and maintain risk-informed countermeasures, and policies protecting people, borders, structures, materials, products, and systems associated with key operational activities and critical infrastructure sectors.

• Mission Area: Protection
• Description: Identify, assess, and prioritize risks to inform Protection activities, countermeasures, and investments.

• Mission Area: Protection
• Description: Strengthen the security and resilience of the supply chain.

• Mission Area: Mitigation
• Description: Enable the recognition, understanding, communication of, and planning for risk and empower individuals and communities to make informed risk management decisions necessary to adapt to, withstand, and quickly recover from future incidents.

• Mission Area: Mitigation
• Description: Build and sustain resilient systems, communities, and critical infrastructure and key resources lifelines so as to reduce their vulnerability to natural, technological, and human-caused threats and hazards by lessening the likelihood, severity, and duration of the adverse consequences.

• Mission Area: Mitigation
• Description: Assess risk and disaster resilience so that decision makers, responders, and community members can take informed action to reduce their entity's risk and increase their resilience.

• Mission Area: Mitigation
• Description: Identify the threats and hazards that occur in the geographic area; determine the frequency and magnitude; and incorporate this into analysis and planning processes so as to clearly understand the needs of a community or entity.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Provide transportation (including infrastructure access and accessible transportation services) for response priority objectives, including the evacuation of people and animals, and the delivery of vital response personnel, equipment, and services into the affected areas.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Conduct appropriate measures to ensure the protection of the health and safety of the public and workers, as well as the environment, from all-hazards  in support of responder operations and the affected communities.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Provide fatality management services, including decedent remains recovery and victim identification, working with local, state, tribal, territorial, insular area, and Federal authorities to provide mortuary processes, temporary storage or permanent internment solutions, sharing information with mass care services for the purpose of reunifying family members and caregivers with missing persons/remains, and providing counseling to the bereaved.

Fire Management and Suppression

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Provide structural, wildland, and specialized firefighting capabilities to manage and suppress fires of all types, kinds, and complexities while protecting the lives, property, and the environment in the affected area.

• Mission Area: Response, Recovery
• Description: Stabilize critical infrastructure functions, minimize health and safety threats, and efficiently restore and revitalize systems and services to support a viable, resilient community.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Provide life-sustaining and human services to the affected population, to include hydration, feeding, sheltering, temporary housing, evacuee support, reunification, and distribution of emergency supplies.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Deliver traditional and atypical search and rescue capabilities, including personnel, services, animals, and assets to survivors in need, with the goal of saving the greatest number of endangered lives in the shortest time possible.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Ensure a safe and secure environment through law enforcement and related security and protection operations for people and communities located within affected areas and also for response personnel engaged in lifesaving and life-sustaining operations.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Ensure the capacity for timely communications in support of security, situational awareness, and operations by any and all means available, among and between affected communities in the impact area and all response forces.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description:  Provide lifesaving medical treatment via Emergency Medical Services and related operations and avoid additional disease and injury by providing targeted public health, medical, and behavioral health support, and products to all affected populations.

• Mission Area: Response
• Description: Provide all decision makers with decision-relevant information regarding the nature and extent of the hazard, any cascading effects, and the status of the response.

• Mission Area: Recovery
• Description: Return economic and business activities (including food and agriculture) to a healthy state and develop new business and employment opportunities that result in an economically viable community.

• Mission Area: Recovery
• Description: Restore and improve health and social services capabilities and networks to promote the resilience, independence, health (including behavioral health), and well-being of the whole community.

• Mission Area: Recovery
• Description: Implement housing solutions that effectively support the needs of the whole community and contribute to its sustainability and resilience.

• Mission Area: Recovery
• Description: Protect natural and cultural resources and historic properties through appropriate planning, mitigation, response, and recovery actions to preserve, conserve, rehabilitate, and restore them consistent with post-disaster community priorities and best practices and in compliance with applicable environmental and historic preservation laws and executive orders.