There is a particular comfort in buying things. A pump arrives on a flatbed. A fire engine gleams on handover day. A container is photographed, inventoried, and given a serial number that will still exist long after the minister who cut the ribbon has moved on. Procurement systems, quite rationally, have evolved to reward this sort of comfort: objects are legible to auditors, they fit neatly into budget lines, and they create the reassuring impression that risk has been “addressed”.
Civil defence, unfortunately, is not impressed by impressions.
When major incidents overwhelm local conditions—industrial fires, port events, wildland–urban interface outbreaks, floods—failure rarely presents as a lack of bravery or even a lack of kit. It presents as a capability gap: an inability to compose resources into a coherent operational system under stress. The distinction matters, because most procurement regimes still behave as if resilience is a shopping list. It is not. Resilience is a designed capability—built from interoperable components, governed by doctrine, sustained by maintenance and training, and validated through realistic exercises rather than optimistic assumptions.
This is politically safe to say because it is not an attack on procurement officers. It is, rather, an observation about how modern procurement systems are structured. They are designed to minimise process risk—compliance breaches, irregular awards, headline scandals. They are not designed to maximise operational outcomes under time pressure. The two objectives can align, but often they do not. The result is a familiar pattern: warehouses fill, response performance remains variable, and after-action reviews speak politely about “coordination challenges” while quietly acknowledging that the underlying system was never engineered to function as a system.
The economic context is not subtle. Global disaster losses—whether from weather events, floods, wildfires, or earthquakes—remain large and recurrent, and insurers routinely observe that a significant share of losses is uninsured, particularly in emerging markets, which means public balance sheets and local economies carry the remainder. Munich Re’s published figures for 2023 put overall losses at roughly US$250bn with insured losses around US$95bn, and their January 2026 update cites 2025 losses of roughly US$224bn with insured losses around US$108bn. This is not a plea for theatrics; it is a reminder that the financing of risk is increasingly material, and that response capacity is part of national economic continuity, not merely a line item for “emergency services”.
The more important point is structural. Modern incidents increasingly occur in systems-of-systems: logistics corridors, ports, tank farms, data centres, airports, and high-density peri-urban belts where one failure mode cascades into another. In such environments, “more equipment” does not automatically translate into “more control”. The limiting factor is often throughput—especially water throughput—together with deployment speed, sustained pressure, and distribution over distance. If you cannot move water fast enough, far enough, and predictably enough, you do not possess a firefighting capability at scale; you possess a set of tools that will perform well only when the environment is kind.
Procurement authorities usually understand this privately. They have seen expensive assets immobilised by minor constraints: couplings that do not match, hoses that cannot be laid quickly over distance, pumps that perform on paper but cannot reliably draw from available water sources, vehicles whose operating complexity outstrips the training reality, or systems that require spare parts and servicing regimes that were never funded beyond the warranty period. The procurement process may have been flawless; the operational outcome is still fragile.
This is why civil defence procurement keeps “missing the point”: it confuses procurement success with capability delivery.
Capability begins with composition. Composition is the deliberate arrangement of components—hardware, people, doctrine, logistics, and governance—into an operational system that behaves predictably under stress. Equipment is merely one input. A pump is not a capability. A water relay system is a capability. A monitor is not a capability. A properly supplied, controlled, and sustained high-flow application strategy is a capability. In procurement terms, capability is awkward because it is less photogenic: it depends on interfaces, training, maintenance, operating rhythms, and realistic scenario design. Yet it is precisely what survives contact with reality.
This is where the conversation must become more adult: civil defence needs capability-based procurement, not equipment-based procurement.
Consider what “capability” actually implies. It implies that the authority can describe—in measurable terms—the outcome it must reliably produce. Not “we need pumps”, but “we must be able to sustain X litres per minute at Y pressure for Z hours, over N kilometres, with M crews, from open water, with defined redundancy, across day/night operations, in defined environmental conditions, under a command structure that can integrate mutual aid.” Once you speak this way, procurement stops being the art of buying objects and becomes the discipline of engineering outcomes.
The procurement world, to be fair, has been moving in this direction—just not fast enough in civil defence. The OECD increasingly emphasises performance measurement, strategic KPIs, and outcomes, precisely because process compliance alone does not guarantee public value. The World Bank’s procurement reform agenda similarly reflects a shift away from one-size-fits-all rules towards “fit-for-purpose” approaches that aim at better development outcomes rather than merely clean paperwork. These are not niche ideas. They are mainstream governance logic. Civil defence procurement, however, often remains trapped in an older paradigm: buy assets, distribute them, hope that doctrine and coordination will somehow “emerge”.
They do not emerge. They must be designed.
To understand why the equipment mindset persists, it helps to be honest about incentives. Objects are easy to specify. Capability is harder to specify because it forces accountability for system performance. It also forces cross-departmental cooperation: procurement cannot deliver capability alone, because capability requires operations, training, maintenance, budgeting for lifecycle costs, logistics, and command integration. In institutional terms, capability-based procurement is a governance project. It asks awkward questions: Who owns the operational outcome? Who is responsible for readiness? Who funds spares and training beyond year one? Who validates performance through exercises? Who has authority to impose interoperability standards across agencies that may not naturally enjoy being standardised?
If you want a simple explanation for why equipment procurement dominates, it is this: equipment procurement is a single-agency activity; capability procurement is a multi-agency contract with reality.
This is also why the “politically safe” version of procurement reform—more transparency, tighter controls, additional compliance checks—can sometimes worsen the capability problem. Every additional procedural layer tends to push decisions towards what is easiest to defend on paper. A technically optimal solution that depends on integration and operational doctrine can appear “risky” to a system designed to fear procurement challenge rather than operational failure. The paradox is painful: the more a procurement system is optimised for process safety, the more it can drift away from outcome certainty.
So what does capability thinking look like in practice?
It looks like designing a water logistics architecture rather than buying pumps. It looks like treating high-volume water transport as a modular network, not as a heroic effort by individual appliances. And it looks like investing in interoperability—because interoperability is what converts multiple assets into a single capability.
A useful illustration comes from a specific class of equipment that is often misread as “just another pump” but is better understood as a capability node: the Hytrans HydroSub 1400.
On paper, the HydroSub 1400 is described as a mobile pumping unit capable of up to 45,000 litres per minute at 12 bar, using three portable hydraulically driven submersible pumps feeding a main-boost pump housed in a container. It is powered by a marine diesel engine and uses a heat exchanger system that eliminates the need for a radiator and cooling fan, reducing operational noise and saving space. It includes control instrumentation where vital parameters are monitored and logged, with alarms if parameters move outside settings, and it offers optional automatic water pressure regulation. It also offers an integrated foam premixing option (in a variant described with PowerFoam) allowing selectable foam percentages within defined operating constraints.
Those details matter, but the more important point is what they imply: the unit is not merely producing flow; it is producing predictable, controllable, sustained output in a form that is designed to be deployed, monitored, and integrated into a broader water transport and application system. The design includes an explicit “reach into reality” feature: a hydraulic hose length that supports access to open water sources at a combined distance up to 60 metres and/or 10–15 metres vertically, which is the sort of mundane constraint that often defeats beautifully specified equipment in real incidents.
In other words, the HydroSub 1400 is best understood as a node in a modular water-relay network: it ingests water from available sources, pushes high-volume flow into a distribution architecture, and does so with instrumentation that makes the output governable under stress. When procurement authorities buy it as “a pump”, they under-buy the capability. The pump alone does not create resilience. The pump, integrated into a complete relay and distribution system with hose deployment and recovery, aboveground network hardware, pressure boosting where needed, and appropriate monitors/nozzles, begins to look like a capability.
Hytrans’ own product ecosystem makes this systems logic explicit. The company describes its offering as a “water transport system” comprising pumps, hose handling, hoses, hardware, monitors, and foam injection—essentially, the components needed to build a reliable system rather than a collection of standalone items. This matters from a procurement standpoint because it shifts the conceptual unit of purchase from “assets” to “architecture”.
Take hose handling. In major incidents, hoses are not a detail; they are the bloodstream of the operation. If hoses cannot be deployed quickly over long distances, your pump capacity becomes theoretical. Hytrans describes truck-mounted hose containers that can deploy hoses at speeds up to 40 km/h—an operationally meaningful feature because it compresses the time between water source access and water delivery at the point of need. The same system logic appears in recovery: Hose Recovery Units are described as retrieving hoses—including couplings—in a continuous operation, using sensors to manage couplings through the retrieval mechanism. Again, the procurement significance is not “a nice-to-have gadget”. It is readiness economics: faster recovery and orderly storage directly affect how quickly the system can be redeployed, how labour-intensive the operation is, and how fatigued teams become after long incidents.
Or take the hose layer container itself. Hytrans describes units that can store up to 3,000 metres or 4,000 metres of 6-inch hoses depending on container size, with the ability to deploy two hoses simultaneously due to a divided compartment. This is not trivia. It is an expression of capability at distance: water transport over kilometres is not achieved by wishing harder; it is achieved by physically laying and managing large-diameter hose at scale, safely, rapidly, and repeatedly.
Then there is hardware—often the quiet casualty of equipment-led procurement. Pumps and hoses are procured; the connecting logic is assumed. Yet in reality, distribution is where operations either gain control or descend into improvisation. Hytrans describes portable water supply hardware—manifold dividers, Y-pieces, gate valves, non-return valves—designed for high-volume flows, supporting hose diameters up to 12 inches, with design features intended to reduce issues such as water hammer, and coupling compatibility options. Hardware is how you turn “water in a hose” into a temporary aboveground hydrant network: the difference between a single jet and a managed distribution architecture that can support multiple attack lines, cooling lines, and redundancy.
Pressure boosting is another neglected piece of the composition puzzle. Long-distance transport demands pressure management. Hytrans’ AutoBoost units are presented as a way to extend the distance of a supply line without additional pump units, or to connect into existing hydrant networks to boost pressure for firefighting and long-distance transport. They include control systems designed to maintain preset outlet pressures within specified flows, and the range is positioned as modular with multiple models. Again, the procurement lesson is not brand-specific. It is conceptual: in a capability architecture, pressure boosting is a designed function, not an ad hoc improvisation.
Finally, consider monitors—the point where transported water becomes applied water. Hytrans describes trailer-mounted and portable monitors designed for large throw ranges, with nozzle options including variable flow adjustment and foam integration. In industrial firefighting, application dynamics—reach, flow stability, foam integration, control—matter enormously. If water logistics is the supply chain, monitors are the delivery mechanism. Weakness at that end wastes strength upstream.
All of this leads to an uncomfortable but necessary point: a modern civil defence water capability is not any single item. It is a composed, governed system. If procurement treats the system as a series of unrelated purchases, the result is predictable: technical excellence in parts, fragility in whole.
The “Tankfire South Korea” reference provides a compact illustration of what composed capability can change—not as marketing theatre, but as operational economics.
Hytrans’ deployment reference describes a major oil tank fire at United Terminal Korea in Ulsan on 11 February 2025, where a HydroSub 1400F with integrated foam system supplied a monitor with a continuous flow stated as 45,000 litres per minute, achieving a vertical reach stated as up to 130 metres, with the system installed within 15 minutes. The fire was reportedly brought under control in two hours, with full extinguishment after three hours. The reference contrasts this with a 2018 incident said to have taken 17 hours to contain using traditional means, and notes that instead of 26 conventional fire engines, one high-capacity unit and a powerful monitor could perform the role, saving time, manpower, and water while limiting damage.
Whether one treats such accounts as strictly comparable is less important than the structural insight: when water supply becomes distance-agnostic and rapidly deployable, the incident economics change. Time-to-control changes. Manpower allocation changes. The number of vehicles required at the hot zone changes. Critically, the system becomes governable: you can plan around it, rather than improvising around constraints.
This is precisely what capability procurement should aim to buy: a predictable response function that can be composed rapidly, sustained reliably, and integrated across agencies.
Yet procurement regimes often fail to buy capability because they do not specify it. They specify features. They specify compliance standards. They specify unit prices. They specify delivery schedules. They often do not specify the operational outcome in measurable terms, nor the integration requirements that would make the outcome achievable.
There is a reason this happens. Capability language forces choices. If you state that you must deliver a sustained 45,000 lpm at 12 bar at a defined distance, you must then confront the implications: large-diameter hose inventory; coupling standardisation; hose handling; safe road crossings; distribution hardware; pressure boosting; monitors/nozzles; fuel logistics; spares; maintenance regimes; operator training; command protocols; mutual aid integration; and exercise validation. Suddenly, the procurement is not a purchase. It is a programme.
Programmes are harder to approve than purchases, because programmes expose trade-offs. They also expose institutional seams: who pays for training, who owns maintenance budgets, which agency has authority to impose standards across other agencies, and how readiness is measured. These are governance questions, and governance questions are often more politically delicate than technical ones.
Nevertheless, the governance shift is the entire point. If civil defence procurement is to stop missing the point, it must be aligned with a capability governance model.
What might that look like?
First, procurement should begin with a small number of operational scenarios that reflect real national risk: ports and tank farms; industrial corridors; high-density peri-urban belts; flood-prone catchments; and any unique local infrastructure exposures. Scenario selection is not a consultant exercise; it is a capital logic exercise. It determines where downtime costs cluster, where cascading failure is most likely, and where response time has outsized economic leverage. UNDRR’s Global Assessment Report framing—explicitly linking losses to economic exposure and GDP share—supports the argument that disaster risk is not merely “damage”, but macro-relevant economic impact depending on where and how losses occur.
Second, each scenario should be translated into measurable capability requirements. The language must be physical, not aspirational: flow, pressure, duration, distance, redundancy, time-to-deploy, crew requirements, and interoperability constraints. This is where procurement authorities gain power: measurable requirements reduce ambiguity, reduce vendor-driven specification drift, and make performance validation possible.
Third, procurement must treat interoperability as a first-order requirement, not a post-award problem. Hose diameters, coupling types, distribution hardware interfaces, command communications protocols, and maintenance regimes are not “nice-to-haves”. They are the architecture. If agencies cannot connect, they cannot compose capability. The result is not just inefficiency; it is failure under stress.
Fourth, procurement must be lifecycle-governed. Civil defence assets are not static. Readiness decays without maintenance, spares, fuel logistics, and training rhythms. A procurement that delivers equipment without a funded readiness model delivers a temporary illusion of capability. This is where outcome-based performance measurement—of the kind the OECD discusses in the context of procurement performance frameworks—becomes directly relevant: performance must be measured as delivered outcomes over time, not as assets acquired.
Fifth, validation must be designed into the programme through realistic exercises, including multi-agency integration and night operations. Capability is what survives stress, not what performs in a demonstration. Exercise design is where procurement meets truth: if deployment time, hose handling speed, coupling interoperability, and command control do not hold under realistic conditions, the system has not been bought; it has been imagined.
None of this requires extravagant spending. It requires spending differently. A small number of high-leverage capability architectures—properly composed—can outperform a far larger inventory of disconnected equipment. The Ulsan reference is instructive precisely because it frames the point as substitution: one composed high-capacity system replacing many conventional engines for a specific operational function. That is capability thinking: not “more”, but “better composed”.
There is also a subtle behavioural point that procurement professionals will recognise: equipment procurement is vulnerable to what might be called “catalogue bias”. If the procurement starts with a list of objects, the solution will remain object-shaped. Vendors will optimise to that shape. Evaluation committees will compare feature lists. The winner will be the best storyteller within that frame. Capability procurement breaks that cycle by forcing the conversation upstream: what outcome must be reliably produced, in what time, under what constraints?
In practice, this also changes how procurement authorities engage politically. Capability procurement is easier to defend because it is anchored in measurable public value. It speaks to continuity of trade, protection of critical infrastructure, and limitation of national loss magnitude. It aligns naturally with finance ministries, insurers, port authorities, and industrial regulators because it translates emergency response into economic continuity. In that sense, capability procurement is not “technical reform”. It is fiscal prudence.
The final point is institutional. A civil defence authority that can procure capability rather than equipment is an authority that can issue sharper mandates. It can define interfaces, insist on standardisation, and hold operational leaders to readiness metrics. That is not authoritarian; it is simply what competence looks like in a systems era.
Procurement will always need to buy objects. The mistake is to stop there.
The HydroSub 1400 is a useful illustration precisely because it is easy to misunderstand. In isolation, it is “a powerful pump unit”. In composition, it becomes a capability node—one that integrates into a broader relay architecture, benefits from modular hose handling, relies on distribution hardware to create an aboveground network, and pairs with monitors to convert flow into controlled application. The silent message is not promotional; it is structural: when you buy capability, you buy a system that survives stress. When you buy equipment, you buy something that can fill warehouses.
If civil defence procurement is to stop missing the point, the reform agenda is not complicated, but it is demanding. Define outcomes. Engineer composition. Standardise interfaces. Fund readiness. Validate through realistic exercises. Measure performance over time. Align governance so that someone is accountable for the capability, not merely the purchase.
That, ultimately, is what modern resilience looks like: not a catalogue of assets, but an institutional capacity to deliver predictable outcomes when the environment is least cooperative.
