A new type of internal crisis has appeared, and we have to recognise our inability to prepare for and deal with such crises.

The beginning of the twenty-first century has tragically illustrated, both in France and internationally, the difficulty of preparing for the unthinkable when serious internal crises occur. Even without going into detail on the cases of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the double attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or the explosion at the AZF factory in Toulouse, we can clearly see the risk incurred in having on one’s territory critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to military or terrorist action, or natural catastrophe. Against this, the forest fires in Greece this summer, whose management was seen by the population as appalling, underline just how far we have yet to go in terms of internal security posture. The privatisation of critical infrastructure and its associated services, especially in the United States and concerning particularly providers of water, energy and telecommunications, is growing inexorably. This and the pressure from both governments and insurers to guarantee continuity of service are among the factors that have created a pressing need to plan for the management of what might be called ‘hypercrises’, to paraphrase the term ‘hyperterrorism’, coined by François Heisbourg.

As a result, public and private operators, local authorities and industrial concerns have now to provide services and functions for which they are not prepared and yet which require perfect organisation and complete and faultless mastery of relevant procedures. In turn, because of this, the traditional role-plays used in major interministerial exercises are now reaching their limits, in that they only allow for what had previously been foreseen.⁽¹⁾