Government Executive reports that “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced a new research initiative into the ways important things can break at once. Called the Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment, or CASCADE, the project is meant to help planners make cities, towns, bases, power grids, etc. less vulnerable to devastation.”  

“’It is difficult to model and currently impossible to systematically design such complex systems using state of the art tools, leading to inferior performance, unexpected problems, and weak resilience,’ the agency wrote in a release.”  

“Resilience is the key part. You can prevent terror attacks and you can prevent some disasters, but you can’t prevent all of them. However, if you can decrease the cost of the disaster in terms of lives disrupted, time lost, pain or the level inconvenience imposed on citizens, then disasters become less … disastrous. That’s what’s called building in resilience.”