“It’s more fun to be ready.” In this video, Bill Alderson shares a first-hand account of being called by a Pentagon general after 9/11 and leading a team to restore critical communications inside the Pentagon. You’ll see how disciplined disaster recovery, network forensics, and leadership under pressure turn chaos into rapid, measurable recovery.
What you’ll learn
How to respond when disaster strikes—and why attitude + readiness matter
Practical lessons learned you can apply to cyber incidents and outages
Why documentation, redundancy, and visualization beat guesswork
How to structure a tiger team/CPR team for zero-day problem solving
Executive insights on working with your CISO and aligning the board
Highlights & chapters
00:00 Intro — “More fun to be ready” mindset
02:02 The call from a Pentagon general & rapid mobilization
05:40 On the ground: smoldering building, missing links, missing docs
10:12 Forensic approach: test points, throughput, CRC errors, “peeling the onion”
16:25 Single points of failure, redundancy, and real resilience
21:00 Leadership moment: Col. David Wills (CENTCOM, Joint Staff, STRATCOM)
27:10 Board/C-suite alignment: Gary Hayslip on the Executive Primer
33:15 Why diagrams win: VLANs, routing, spanning tree, and clear dependencies
39:00 Prioritizing alerts & signal over noise during crisis
44:10 Best-practice amplification: turn lessons into culture
47:30 Takeaways & call to action
Who should watch
Executives, CISOs, network/security engineers, incident responders, resilience leaders—anyone who owns uptime, data, or business continuity.
Call to action
If you’ve led or supported a significant recovery, I’d love to tell your story and extract the lessons so others can be ready. Connect with me and the Disaster Stream community.