Extreme emergencies

In a disaster the military doesn't necessarily know what it is doing, and neither do the city fathers and the commercial leaders, many of whom likely achieved positions of authority for the wrong reasons. 

Institutional instincts tend not to work well because in a disaster institutional leadership cannot think flexibly enough to deal with the problems on the street. Instead, institutional leadership turns reflexively to shoring up its own power first, which is the wrong thing to do in extreme emergencies. Disasters are not the time for institution-building. In the end, it's just people tackling situations for which they are, in all probability and at best, ill-prepared.