Late one summer, a man vanished in the US mid-Atlantic wilderness. His disappearance went unreported for a week, and the initial police searches found nothing. When my volunteer search and rescue (SAR) team mobilised, most of us expected to be recovering a body. By late afternoon of our search, we found the man – dehydrated, weak, but alive after seven days surviving on stream water.
In the United States, volunteer SAR teams train extensively in navigation, search tactics, first aid, and communications. Missions can also draw on assets such as search dogs, tracking specialists, and aerial drones. At their best, these capabilities operate as an integrated whole – a fusion of skills and mandates that mirrors approaches to national security, where coordination under pressure matters more than any single capability.
From my own experience, SAR offers lessons that reach beyond the backcountry. These lessons include managing uncertainty, aligning organisations, and sustaining leadership when friction sets in. They apply just as much in national security as in rescue work.
In SAR, the last known position can be an unreliable data point. Subjects move, and witnesses can mislead. The danger is fixation – once a dot is placed on the map, thinking becomes anchored to it.
This fixation can distort situational awareness. In SAR, locking onto an initial search area can cause teams to overlook where the missing person went. By the time the mistake is recognised, valuable hours or days may have been lost – and with them, some of the survivor’s odds.
In strategy, the risk is similar: anchoring to one scenario creates blind spots, especially when adversaries exploit gaps between deterring war and countering coercion.
In the Indo-Pacific, this dynamic is already visible. The United States is emphasising deterring a full-scale PLA invasion of Taiwan while giving less attention to the steady coercive grey-zone tactics that fall short of war. That focus strengthens deterrence against high-end conflict and conserves resources but leaves unresolved the steady challenge Washington will face. For Taiwan, these tactics are already visible in near-daily air and maritime patrols, economic pressure, and disinformation from China – measures that chip away at resilience without crossing the threshold that traditional deterrence is built to address.
History shows great powers frequently prepare for imagined wars, while the conflicts that erupt take different forms and catch them off guard.
SAR teams feel intense pressure to act immediately. Daylight fades, weather shifts, and lives hang in balance. Speed without direction, however, wastes resources and exhausts teams. The discipline is to gather just enough information to proceed deliberately, then pause and reassess. I’ve seen the cost of skipping that step. Under pressure to show progress, authorities folded untrained volunteers into a hastily assembled group I joined. In the confusion, we overlooked a deceased subject near the start of our search area.
National security work demands the same balance. In high-stakes moments – whether an incident in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea – there is pressure to “do something” or label events as crises when they shouldn’t be. While agencies do need to prepare for uncertainty, leaders must be judicious in how they expend limited resources. Overreacting creates unsustainable expectations and eventual burnout. For US allies, constant shifts between alarm and neglect undermine confidence in American reliability.
The best SAR teams know when to pause, run an initial search, and re-evaluate before launching the next phase. In strategy, that pause is often the hardest leadership choice. In both fields, patience is not passivity – it is precision.
Sometimes progress comes not from expanding options but from ruling them out.
SAR missions rarely unfold as planned. Maps fail. Terrain turns ugly. Leadership then is less about issuing orders than holding the team together through friction.
Strategic leadership is no different. Plans falter, allies hedge, adversaries surprise. In those moments, what the team remembers isn’t the slick PowerPoint slide from the morning briefing – it’s whether the leader was able to maintain cohesion when things got tough.
SAR isn’t war, yet both are contests against time, uncertainty, and human limits. In each, decision-makers must weigh imperfect information, balance speed with deliberation, and lead through friction. SAR teaches that the map will never match reality – progress depends on adjusting as you go.
The Pacific security community echoes this principle. In a vast theatre with dispersed forces, commanders must act on mission orders and local intelligence without waiting for approval from afar. US doctrine emphasises decentralised execution, a contrast with the PLA. Chinese sources themselves cite the problem of the “Five Incapables” – commanders who cannot judge situations, grasp intent, make decisions, deploy troops, or handle the unexpected. Empowering the front line in this way not only accelerates decisions but also builds confidence across the organisation. For the PLA, centralised political control still discourages initiative, a structural weakness that hampers flexibility in fast-moving crises.
In the Indo-Pacific, where miscalculation could spark conflict between nuclear powers, the SAR mindset is invaluable. Sometimes progress comes not from expanding options but from ruling them out. The same discipline applies in strategy, where closing a line of effort can be as important as opening one. Leadership under stress depends far less on dramatic gestures than on steadiness and restraint. In strategy, as in rescue, that is how you get people home.
